Rowdy Women in Fancy Dress
Period dramas in China and South Korea come preinstalled with rigid social hierarchies. No wonder we love to see misfits who break them down.
“Not like other girls.” Did your blood just run cold? A vision might have struck you unbidden of the manic pixie dream girl, whose charming quirks empower a man to reconnect with joy and spontaneity in his life, whether she stays in it or just passes through. Hot on her heels is the princess who hates needlework and will not be married off and who sneaks out in disguise to practice forbidden swordplay. The triumvirate completes itself with a modern kind of cool girl — I guess we’re calling them “pick-me girls” now — who’s so down to chill with the boys; she loves whiskey and football and being effortlessly hot and will never actually need or demand anything.
These characters were built to resist something real and suffocating in the wider world. Today, we recognize how these women can be used as a cudgel, a body of false choices to divide us. We also have to reckon with them, because they did save lives when we met them sometimes. The heroine who binds her breasts and rides out into battle has led countless kids toward gender affirmation and honest reckonings with sexuality. When Natalie Portman found love in Garden State, I wept in 2004, as an unapologetic weird tall Jew who’d never felt desired before.
I’ve found it fascinating to write about masculinity here (see also: Rowoon and Wang Yibo), but femininity is proving trickier to approach. I feel deeply comfortable in my own body and often furious about how society at large treats it. Despite how I love them, I worry that I talk too much about men, when they’re far from all I think about. I refuse to cede all discussions of “womanhood” to hideous transphobes and hidebound conservatives, but I have so little to say about gender, particularly my own — it’s not something I consider much, even as I’m still learning so much from my peers.
I do want to talk about the spectacular women I’ve loved in kdramas and c-ent, though, especially the characters who exist in history or something like it. I set out to write this piece about antiheroes, but the people I kept coming back to weren’t ambiguously heroic; they were simply choosing their own adventure in an otherwise deeply proscribed world. That very social order and all its aesthetics are a big part of what makes period dramas so engaging for me: give us a form and we’ll escape it when we must.
The default existence is existing
To tackle the portrayal and idealization of women in contemporary Chinese and Korean costume dramas, we circle back to your friend and mine: Confucius. The prevailing narrative about Confucianism and its treatment of women is one of suppression, extraction and denegration, all based in the textual inferiority of the passive feminine yin versus the active masculine yang. We must acknowledge the reality of foot-binding, female infanticide and other gender-reactive historical harms. For what it’s worth, however, a number of East Asian and diaspora feminist scholars today argue that misogyny is not inherent in the texts of the Confucian canon; rather, it was introduced as a tool for power through commentaries and political agendas.
This appeal to the purity of the canon may or may not satisfy, but these scholars do ask us in the West to consider our frames of reference as we mull it over. Dr. Li-Hsiang Rosenlee has spent her career considering whether and how a truly Confucian feminism can offer new possibilities for relating to one another. To bring us along, she dismantles the Western preconceptions that get in the way of meeting the text where it is. For instance, she explains:
“Yin and yang exist only in relation to one another internally, as the way warmth-coldness only exist relative to one another. Furthermore, when using yin-yang as an organizational schema, achieving balancing harmony is always the goal, not domination nor subordination of one to the other. And hence yin-yang at its face value cannot even function as a theoretical explanation for gender oppression where women are subordinated to and dominated by men.”
Here, we must consider that “gender” is not a standalone attribute of human individuals, either linguistically or historically. Rather, in Confucian traditions, gender or its analog comes from the role one plays within a family and society — almost literally, where one is responsible for various rituals, either at home or in the wider world. “Gender role differentiation … is marked along the spatial binary of inside-outside (nei-wai 內外),” writes Rosenlee. She quotes the I Ching, or Classic of Changes:
“In the Family (Jiaren 家人) hexagram, a woman’s correct place is in the nei and man in the wai. That men and women occupy their correct places is the great righteousness of Heaven and Earth […] Let the father be the father, the son son, the brothers brothers, the husband husband, the wife wife; then the way of family will be correct. When the family is correct, then the world will be secured.”
It’s in this rigidity that we find hierarchies presenting as facts of the universe, “since the role of a wife is to follow and the husband’s is to lead.” In the Liji, the Book of Rites, the text asserts, “Women are the ones who follow others. When they are young, they follow their fathers and elder brothers; when they are married, they follow their husbands; and when their husbands die, they follow their sons.”
I support women’s wrongs
One of the most straightforward ways of building a character or a relationship out of thin air is creating a contrast with social and/or audience expectations. Against the above ponderous and orderly cosmological outlook, it’s no wonder we love chaotic, rebellious and headstrong protagonists in our c- and kdramas. This is not to disregard the dignified mothers, the traditionally femme, the palace maids, the women who work within the systems they know to survive. These “standard” or “stock” characters are rich and funny and compelling and affecting, and there are simply so many of them to treasure.
We do love our ladies who break the mold in some way, though. Please allow me to introduce you to a selection of my best beloveds!
Pure comedy, pure heart
To be genuinely funny is to commit to your choices as a performer without fear. We are so lucky to be alive at the same time as Jin Jing and Cha Chung-hwa. As Gong Zishang in My Journey to You, Jin never falters. No flavor is too strong for the Eldest Young Miss of the Gong family, as she lusts after her favorite personal guard, as she squabbles with her favorite brother, as she sneaks out of the compound for a semblance of independence, as she builds horrific weapons for the sect when she should be sleeping. At first, she strikes a dissonant note amid all the spycraft, double-crossing and psychological warfare. You come to realize that Gong Zishang is just as trapped by this story as the rest of her family, and her brand of coping is no less distorting for all its vivacity.
As for Cha, her put-upon Court Lady Choi in Mr. Queen is a masterclass in straight-manning. Tasked with reining in a determinedly shocking charge in male chef–turned–Joseon queen Jang Bong-hwan/Kim So-yong (Shin Hye-sun, truly brilliant in everything she touches), Court Lady Choi is the Ginger Rogers of a phenomenal ensemble. She effortlessly embodies the institution against which our hero/ine rebels (see “Etiquette Lessons” above), right up until she hurries away from court to discover, on her own and in quick succession, primal scream therapy and pornography.
(On a related note, while I have not yet seen her in a period drama, I sit straight up every time Seo Hye-won enters a scene. Her small roles in both Lovely Runner and especially Business Proposal make me scream about her genius to anyone who’s listening — my dog, my upstairs neighbors, whoever’s passing by on the street.)
Bad at patriarchy
There’s something spicy about a heroine who chooses to go against the grain… and there’s something even spicier about one who doesn’t give a damn about grain in the first place. Bai Lu does an exceptional job of this in Till the End of the Moon (Li Susu/Ye Xiwu/others) and The Story of Kunning Palace (Jiang Xuening). She chooses parts that allow her to be spiky, frustrated, grieving, vindictive, secretly big-hearted and quick on her feet. Both of these shows are actually about women who have a chance to redo a timeline that ended badly, although one is nearly cosmic in scale and the other is “merely” personal.
If you enjoy My Fair Lady, you will love Gae Ddong (Gong Seung-yeon) in Flower Crew: Joseon Marriage Agency. Transposing this story into the Joseon era intensifies the stakes — our brash, foul-smelling, mannerless street rat, whose name literally means “dog shit,” is trying to earn money to find her lost brother and buy out his slave contract. If she is discovered after presenting herself as a noblewoman, she and the three matchmakers who take on her case may be put to death by the king or his many enemies. Gong is an incredibly versatile actor, as adept at breaking social expectations as cracking with deep vulnerability when she needs a break from being strong. And of course, as Gae Ddong seeks to imitate the nobility, she’s best positioned to critique it.
Speaking of matchmakers, I have nothing but hearts and stars in my eyes for Maeng Sam-soon (Jung Bo-min), the youngest of three “old maid” sisters at the heart of The Matchmakers. While her older sisters are in no hurry to wed, Sam-soon is so desperate to be someone’s everything. She disguises herself as a man in order to publish the capital’s frothiest romance novels. She is eager to the point of derangement to learn how to flirt properly, but cannot seem to nail a single move. Happily, she does get what she wants by being utterly herself. I adore her, and the actress is also an absolute genius.
Competence queens
I love a horrendous woman; when they’re given room to be complicated, they’re some of the most riveting storytellers in the game. Those who know the rules inside out can break them in the most devastating and self-serving ways. This is the arc for Chen Duling’s Ye Bingchang (Till the End of the Moon), a virtuous if passive older sister, until she realizes that she can only depend on herself for survival amid political tumult. After that, she’s all in for murder, betrayal and looking out for No. 1, no matter who gets hurt. It’s an incredible portrait of using what oppresses you to seek out power, liberation and safety, however illusory.
Not all of these women are villains, but you won’t like them if you cross them. Special mention has to go to kdrama kisaengs, the highly trained performers, courtesans and businesswomen who provided services including dance, music, information trade and, yes, warm bodies. They exist outside the mother/wife/child framework, both disdained and precious, the mirror of the chaste court lady who also traffics in secrets. It’s hard to make them boring, and at the very least, they’re often delightfully saucy. Kisaengs play major supporting or ambiguously antagonizing roles in shows like Moonshine, Lovers of the Red Sky, Secret Romantic Guesthouse and The Scholar Who Walks the Night (Soo-hyang, who loved one vampire and tricked the other, a tertiary player but the most interesting woman in that cast!).
“Nothing is more threatening to modern culture than the debate over gender equality,” wrote Koreanist Eunkang Koh in 2008. “Gender equality is directly related to human rights and is one of the fundamental ideas on which democracy is based. Equally, Confucianism, an integral aspect of Korean culture, cannot survive if it is not compatible with gender equality.”
Not everyone likes to look for the architecture in stories, but I always enjoy thinking about why storytellers adapt what they do. The realities of audience tastes and wider climate motivate producers just as much as whatever counts as intrinsic story value. With historical dramas especially, we can’t help but train our narratives on contemporary expectations. There is merit in visiting the past–as–another country, but there’s a lot more money in selling ads against hard numbers. Still, we recognize when we’re being pandered to in an uncaring way and choose with our time accordingly. Our screens are also mirrors, and however we understand them, everyone loves stories about ourselves. ✶
Who are your favorite rule-breaking women in period dramas? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
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