on the edge of respectability: sexual politics in china’s tibet

On the Edge of Respectability: Sexual Politics in China’s Tibet

Charlene E. Makley

A Picnic

On a rainy July day in 1995, my husband and I joined a Tibetan villagefamily we knew in the famous Buddhist monastery town of Labrang (nowsouthwest Gansu Province, China) for a picnic in their tent pitched high ona peak above the Sang (ch. Daxia) River valley.1 The white tents dotting thehillsides in the summer were an important index of Tibetanness in this mul-tiethnic and rapidly urbanizing frontier town. Tibetans were increasinglyoutnumbered by Han and Muslim Chinese (ch. Hui) residents who servedas local cadres or engaged in commerce generated in part by the burgeoningtourism industry centered on the revitalizing monastery.2 This was the timeof year, the much-awaited shinglong season, when the Tibetan villages sur-rounding themonastery celebratedhousehold and communityharmonyandprosperity in communal offering rites to village deities at their abodes in themountains, followedby all-day picnicking, songfests, and games. But during

positions 10:3 © 2002 by Duke University Press

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that long, damp day of our visit, I was reminded of how the performance ofsuch a local and Tibetan-marked unity critically relied on the maintenanceof hierarchical differences in gendered sexuality, differences that, in the con-temporary context, could produce seemingly absurd contradictions (to anoutsider) as well as greatly unequal moral and physical burdens for men andwomen.

That day the tent was set up as most Tibetan domestic space is, with thestove and utensils associated with women’s cooking and cleaning on oneside and the ornate cushions, table, and festive foods associated with men’shosting and recreation on the other. Drolma, the family’s daughter-in-lawin her late twenties, had married in from a neighboring region.3 She bustledabout helping her mother-in-law cook and serve refreshments. Meanwhile,her father-in-law, her husband, and her husband’s closest male friend affec-tionately lounged against one another on the cushions, keeping each otherwarm under wool blankets and intermittently napping, telling jokes, andplaying cards.My husband and I, as guests, perched on the cushions oppositethemen. But as the daywore on, we became increasingly uncomfortable, notbecause of any major change in the situation, but because we could not getwarm!To rely, as did themen, on each other’s body heat to do sowould havebeen extremely inappropriate, because in the Labrang region any public be-havior suggesting desirous heterosexual contact was considered improper,especially in the presence of parents.4

When, in desperation, my husband tried to put a blanket across the two ofus, we immediately encountered the standard reprimand: Drolma’s urgentglance in the direction of her sleeping father-in-law and the quick, discreetbrush of her index finger across her cheek. That gesture is widely usedamong Tibetans to remind one of the shameful or “face-warming” (tib. ngotsha) nature of certain behavior. We got the point and quickly, miserably,removed the blanket. In my cold discomfort I bitterly noted the irony that,while such seemingly innocent behavior (to us) was deemed so dangerouslysexual, the cards with which the men casually played were adorned withphotos of Chinese women in tiny string bikinis, posed to display as muchas possible of the material assets offered by modernity: ample breasts, cur-vaceous buttocks, glittering televisions, and motorcycles. In the context ofcontemporary Labrang, where even the prostitutes would not publicly bare

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their ankles, such images of nearly naked female bodies seemed to me strik-ingly obscene, yet they circulated among the men with little notice fromanyone in the tent that day.

The Erotics of the Exotic

Sex sells. So goes the oft-repeated maxim that conveys the inevitability ofboth biological imperatives and capitalist profit motives. But as many so-cial theorists have recently argued, recourse to this seemingly explanatoryphrase elides the historicity of the relationship between sexuality and con-sumption, as well as the particularity of its local operations. To stop therewould be to foreclose an exploration of questions such as, why and whatdoes it sell? how? and with what consequences? Michel Foucault’s ground-breaking work provided the seminal insight that the power of the erotic toattract (and repel) lies not in universally experienced biological drives but inthe uniquely compellingways it links bodily processes with the social withina specific cultural politics.5 This, then, is the starting point for my analysis ofthe shifting cultural politics of sexuality, or beliefs and practices associatedwith erotic desire, pleasure, and prohibition, and their differential impactson Tibetan men and women situated on the Sino-Tibetan cultural frontier.

In this article I focus on sexuality as a way to reveal the vigorous andasymmetric articulations between local and translocal socioeconomic pro-cesses as Tibetans in Labrang coped with the intensifying encroachments ofcompeting outsiders by the turn of the twentieth century. Such a perspectivecan reveal particularly dynamic relationships among sex, gender, ethnic ornational identity, and power because the (dangerous) capacity of sexualityto titillate or even to liberate is premised on the simultaneous constructionand transgression of foundational social and biological differences. In thefollowing paragraphs I draw on recent theories about the “performative”or “dialogic” emergence of sociocultural realities in everyday practices andinteractions to examine how crucial boundaries (that is, those delineatingsexed bodies, gendered spaces, and ethnic identities) emerged in the con-tested performance of locally salient forms of gendered sexual discretion.6

This perspective then directs our attention beyond essentializing discourseslocating sexual impulses in (sexed) bodies and consumptive pleasures and


instead focuses on the historically contingent ways people interactively ne-gotiate access to the sexual within shifting cultural spaces.

In this predominately rural region, the peculiar status of Labrang pastand present, on one hand, as a sacred center whose political and economicpower was premised on the huge monastic fraternity’s claim to lifelongcelibacy and, on the other, as a site of urban, transgressive liminality inthe market town that grew up alongside it, makes it an ideal place to ex-amine the role of sexuality in the construction of key boundaries. This isbecause the situation at Labrang actually epitomized a cultural politics ofthe body that runs throughout Tibetan regions: the (often hidden) symbioticrelationship between asceticism and sexuality.7 What kept that relationshipsafely neutral and socially vital in the past was local adherence to certaingendered proscriptions on public, bodily performance. However, in recentyears in Labrang and elsewhere, the ambiguous nature of traditional Ti-betan authorities under Chinese rule and the demands of competing visionsof modernity have opened possibilities for new types of participation inwork and leisure, reconfiguring gendered spaces and thus rendering newlyproblematic that traditionally close relationship between ritually powerfulasceticism and sexuality.

The most recent context of post-Mao China, ushered in with Deng Xiao-ping’s sweeping economic reforms in the early 1980s, has provided a fascinat-ing test case of postsocialist transition and the introductionof global capitalistforces. Theorists have focused on the restructuring of the economy, the riseof mass media production, and the seeming rush to consumerism among theChinese populace, all processes that elude the pretensions of the CommunistParty (CCP) to regulate them.8 As many have pointed out, the status of thenation-state, which during the Maoist years (1949–1976) was constructed asa totalizing force, is now inquestion. In this context, the state has beendeeplyimplicated in recruiting its multiethnic citizens into the shared dream of anew, modern “socialist” nation built on capitalist foundations.9 In line withtrends noted by observers in other urban centers in the People’s Republic ofChina by the mid-1990s, including in Lhasa, I found in Labrang that a newform of commodified sexuality worked to sell not only bodies and productsbut also visions of capitalism and modernity—promises of sparkling futuresand (ironically) the immediate lure of opportunities to participate in a new


form of private agency, the ability to experience personal power throughconsumption.10

This new “erotics of the exotic” on the Sino-Tibetan frontier drew Ti-betans in through the fantasy appeal of the spectacular sexuality of foreignersand Han Chinese urbanites, even as those very processes objectified Tibetanmen and women as sexualized objects for the consumption of foreign andHan Chinese tourists. Yet in urbanizing locales such as Labrang, the re-sulting contestations over crucial cultural boundaries were occurring alonggendered lines, as the valorization of personal agency associated locally withmaleness and masculinity increasingly polarized ideas of sexed bodies andgendered spaces. The unfortunate consequence forTibetanwomenwas thatstate and local interests converged on containing, regulating, and objectify-ing female sexuality above all.

Sexuality on the Frontier: Boundary/Transgression

Labrang is located in a narrow farming valley at the very edge of the grass-land steppes and just beyond what was the western extent of Chinese set-tlement and control (fig. 1). Since the founding of the famous Geluk sectmonastery of Labrang Tashi Khyil in 1709, the place has developed intoboth a frontier trading town and a powerful regional center controlled bycelibate monastic hierarchs. During its heyday in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, Labrang monastery housed up to four thousand monksand some sixty-eight resident incarnate lamas and administered thousandsof lay households in the region (fig. 2).11 In the market town that grew upalongside it, called Tawa (tib. mTha’ ba; the Edge), all manner of Tibetansand ethnic others met and mingled, including pilgrims, state officials, for-eign travelers, and a sizable population of Muslim Chinese merchants (fig.3). Such a space of close juxtapositions underTibetan rulewas fertile groundfor representations on the part ofHan and foreign visitors ofTibetans’ exoticor chaotic sexual promiscuity.

Since sexuality is so intimately linked to notions of foundational social andbiological differences, constructions of sexual license are common tropes foralluring or threatening otherness.12 Images of the transgressive mingling ofsexed bodies and gendered spaces are perhaps among the most powerful


Figure 1 Location of Labrang in China

metaphors for the danger of social disorder or for the fantasy of individualfreedom, depending on the inclinations of the author. Many theorists haverecently explored these issues in European and U.S. colonial discourses.13

In the Chinese context, for centuries writers have depicted the frontiersof empires as spaces outside the civil propriety of a Chinese cultural orderemanating from imperial courts, as peripheries populated by carnal, bar-barian others and the criminal dregs of Chinese populations. These themesfigured importantly by the early twentieth century as the new Republican(KMT) regime attempted to construct a modern nation and assimilate thefrontiers into a new order based in part on a proper marital sexuality and the


Figure 2 View of Labrang Monastery, 1947. Photo courtesy Wayne Persons

elimination of (a refigured notion of) “prostitution.”14 Thus the increasingnumbers of Chinese state agents who made it to the Labrang region duringthat time, and the foreign travelers and missionaries who came on theircoattails, shared a broad perspective vis-à-vis Tibetans there.

For these writers (the vast majority of whom were men), the large num-ber of Tibetan men in monasteries and Tibetans’ seemingly indiscriminatesexual and marital practices offended their own understandings of propergender practices based on the restriction of women to domestic spaces andmale control of household property through, in the Chinese case, the main-tenance of patrilineal clans.15 Against such ethnocentric gender assump-tions, Tibetan sexuality and religious practices could be seen to be “ab-solutely free” (ch. wanquan ziyou) or grossly debauched and chaotic (ch.hunluan).16 In the 1930s and 1940s, observers such as Li Anzhai and RobertEkvall considered Tibetan celibate monasticism to be extremely abnormal,resulting in such “deviance” as homosexuality and incest. Yet significantly,


Figure 3 View of Labrang Monastery from villages, 1947. American missionary compound in theforeground. Photo courtesy Wayne Persons

these writers tended to focus on Tibetan women’s bodies as markers ofthe peculiar sexual license and therefore the disarray and vulnerability ofTibetan societies vis-à-vis encroaching modernity. For them, the greater vis-ibility and apparent freedom of movement of Tibetan women relative toneighboring Hui or Han communities was striking.17 Chinese and foreignvisitors to Labrang often remarked, with simultaneous disapproval and lust,on the proudbeauty ofLabrangwomenparading their heavily adornedbod-ies during festivals or on the unabashed toplessness of nomad and farmingwomen circumambulating the monastery and in the fields.18

As the contest over shaping a Chinese nation heated up into the 1930s and1940s, notions of feminine respectability became one of themainmeasures ofa strong, civil, and modern nation-state. As Prasenjit Duara has pointed out,KMT nationalists and reformers expanded on the patriarchal legacy of thelateQingemphasis on female virtue and sacrifice, andexpressed “heightenedconcern with preserving female virtues . . . when the increasing integration


of China into global capitalism produced rapid change in gender relationsamong urban families.”19 This was expressed in a proliferation of “virtu-ous and chaste” girls’ schools, the construction of “prostitution” as a socialevil detrimental to social order,20 and the massacre of thousands of womenwhose bobbed hair and public activities marked them as “modern” (andtherefore “Communist”) by KMT troops after Chiang Kai-Shek purged theCommunists and set up his government in Nanjing.21

This context, then, sheds light on theportrayal ofLabrangTibetanwomenin a Tibetan male student’s essay (in Chinese) on local customs written atthe recently opened KMT elementary school in Labrang in the mid-1930s.Duly mimicking the rhetoric of the Nanjing government, he asserts thatthe majority of audaciously bedecked women in Labrang were “prostitutes”(ch. jinu) and that this was an evil practice that must be stopped throughthe reform of ethnic dress and ornaments.22 Here, instead of reading femalenakedness as wanton, the Tibetan student appropriates KMT discourse toread feminine ethnic dress as debauched visibility. The rhetoric he repro-duces here encodes the dreamof assimilation and ethnic homogeneitywithinthe masculine order of a new modern Chinese nation that would encompassand incorporate the defiantly promiscuous frontiers.

Yet, the student’s dutiful echo of KMT disapproval of Tibetan women’sseeming audacity also points to the struggles of KMT officials with thefrustrating capacity of theTibetanmonastic regime inLabrang towithstandencroachments and remain in control, even as foreign firms establishedbranches in town to takeadvantageof theburgeoningwool and leather trade,Hui merchants migrated in from the east to act as brokers, U.S. missionariesbuilt a compound in the valley (fig. 3), and Han KMT and CCP agentsvied for the attention and loyalty of Tibetan lay and monastic authorities.Ma Haotian, the KMT education official who traveled to Labrang in 1936,lamented that the new secular schools he had helped establish a decadeearlier could not attractmore than a very fewTibetan students. All outsidershad to contend with the deep loyalty and religious devotion Labrang’s layand monastic leaders enjoyed from the surrounding village and nomadcommunities.

In this light, we can also appreciate how two Han Chinese men—GuZhizhong and Long Zhi—who passed through Labrang during the same


period eroticized the place itself as a feminine object of (still-thwarted) colo-nial longing. They likened the status of the Labrang region to the inherentvulnerability of a beautiful virgin (ch. hen mei de chunu), who must be veryjudicious in choosing the best among her many suitors—that is, one whowould protect her reputation in a propermarriage and keep her from fallingintootherwise inevitablemoraldebauchery (that is, prostitution),23 AsDuarapoints out, the feminization of land/territory/nation in this way was preva-lent in Chinese nationalist writings during the Japanese invasion especially,and images of a raped woman were used to represent the “defiled purity ofan invaded nation”24—and to simultaneously posit a radically feminine lackof agency defended by a vengeful masculine agency.

In Gu and Long’s portrayal, then, a vision of the vulnerability of femininesexuality heightens a sense of urgency in the face of the actual tenacity ofTibetan rule and locates Labrang in the spatiotemporal order of a sought-forChinese nation. The trope of an ideal, civil marriage headed by a responsiblemale serves thus as both explanation and justification for Han expansionistaspirations in competition with other outside interests.

Lamas and Lovers: Gender, Asceticism, and Sexuality in Labrang

One day, during a conversation in my apartment, my friend Drolma citeda well-known proverb that to her summed up the nature of the Labrangregion:

bla brang nga bla ma mjal sa redde zhor gi rogs pa btsal sa red[Labrang is the place to meet and worship lamasin the meantime it is the place to look for lovers].25

This proverb and Drolma’s citation of it express well both the particularlyintense situation at Labrang and the “ironic detachment” that has widelycharacterized the lay relationship tomonasticism inTibetan communities.26

The parallelism here sarcastically recognizes the simultaneity of the sa-cred power of lamas in the monastery, on one hand, and, on the other, therelatively open sexuality in the town. It conveys as well the assumed nor-mality of pursuing both worship and sexual encounters there. However,


contrary to the portrayals of Chinese and foreign observers in Labrang priorto 1949, the juxtaposition of celibate asceticism and sexuality referred toin the proverb did not amount to a ludic or lewd chaos. Instead, just asthe proverb’s structure keeps the two realms of activity separate and grantsprimacy to the worship of lamas,27 so gendered practices vis-à-vis house-holds and the monastery generated hierarchical distinctions among bodiesand spaces, thereby (re)constructing foundational boundaries for the Ti-betan community in the midst of intensifying pressures from competingsocial orders.

What outsiders found so alarmingly chaotic in the Labrang region wasthe relative flexibility in the Tibetan sex-gender system that developed dueto the particularities ofTibetan kinship and religion there. By the nineteenthcentury the main social and property-holding unit (for urbanites, farmers,and nomads) was the household, not the lineage. Thus relative to mostChinese and Hui communities, there was less structural necessity for, ormoral weight on, female chastity as a guarantee of paternity, and a varietyof marital arrangements were possible in order to preserve a household’sholdings across generations. Further, with the expansion of the monastery’sinfluence throughout Tibetan regions and beyond, local men’s movementout ofhouseholds asmonks, officials, and long-distance tradersmadewomenresponsible for the majority of household affairs. Thus, Tibetan women inthe Labrang region generally had a wider range of spatial mobility (that is,outside the actual confines of the family courtyard) than their Han, Hui, oreven foreign missionary counterparts.28

But spatial mobility does not necessarily translate into social mobility. Asmany theorists have recently pointed out, one of the main ways social spacesare gendered is through the differential control of sexualities.29 In androcen-tric societies, where power and resources are dominated by men, domesticspaces often work to enclose “proper” sexuality that serves the ultimate in-terests of male authorities. Female bodies outside those spaces can be themost immediately visible markers of social disorder because their presenceso viscerally disrupts the performative concealment of sexuality, thusdanger-ously sexualizing both women’s bodies and the spaces they inappropriatelytraverse. Despite the horrified disapproval of outsiders at the apparent visi-bility of Tibetan women in the early twentieth century, Tibetans in Labrang


(and elsewhere) were no exception to this. Such observers missed the partic-ular cultural parameters on gendered bodily comportment that maintainedthe boundaries of Tibetan male authority in the region—a basic “set of ori-entations” cutting across elite and popular discourses and contexts, whichposited certain relationships among sexedbodies, spaces, and types of humanand nonhuman agency.30

Weneed to understand, then, the particular performativity of sexuality forTibetans. That is, amidst intersecting discourses on ideal ormoral sexual be-havior and its transgression, whatmattered “on the ground,” in interactions,were specific behaviors that came to index especially dangerous transgres-sion. For Tibetans in contemporary Labrang, that meant behaviors thatshamed oneself and others, engendering public disrespect or disapproval.The term most often used throughout Tibetan regions to express this senseof embarrassment vis-à-vis others, ngo tsha, literally, “warm face,” refers toan involuntary, visceral response and therefore implies the depth of one’s un-conscious knowledge of proper comportment. Shameful actions were thoseseen to threaten key social institutions such as household, monastery, or vil-lage by exposing the irreality of stated ideals. Importantly, which behaviorstook on those meanings depended on historical and interactional contexts.

In other words, the cultural politics of the body operative in Labrangallowed a wide range of sexual behavior, even in that center of celibatemonasticism, if it was kept discreet, that is, socially hidden, in particularlyTibetan ways. Still, a basic sex-gender hierarchy kept the parameters ofsexual discretion narrower for women than for men. Amidst the social fluxand moral ambiguity of life under Chinese rule, the essential terms of thathierarchy have powerfully converged with those promulgated in Chinesestate and global media discourses to narrow those parameters even furtherfor women.

Cultural Logics of Sex Difference

The relative flexibility of Tibetan gender practices in the region played outwithin dynamic articulations of particular socioeconomic adaptations andbasic understandings of the body, a nexus of practices and ideologies that forTibetans I spoke tomapped continuities across the radical disjunctures of the


Maoist years.31 Tibetans across the community, lay and monastic, educatedand illiterate, accepted the possibility for sex transformation (as in femaleto male, male to female, or a mixture of the two), and for liberative gendertransformation (as in monkhood, nunhood, or lamahood). In part, this wasdue towidespreadassumptions that thebiological bodydidnot exist as afixedisolate. Instead, as Toni Huber has put it, Tibetans considered the corporealto be ontologically continuous with particular mental proclivities, spaces,times, and deities.32 From the perspective of this cultural logic, the body isthe temporary, moral outcome of a confluence of human and nonhumanactions, subject to ongoing intervention and thus capable of changing, inall its biological aspects, for better or for worse. Importantly (especially ina region that developed under Geluk sect monastic hegemony), the bodywas seen to be the major hindrance to the higher capacities of the mind (tib.sems) because the gross desires and needs it engenders obscure the uniquelyhuman capacity for clear, well-intentioned, well-directed striving and faithin the efficacy of deities or of various Buddhist liberation paths. Such clear orpure intention is thus crucial for improving one’s biological, social, or karmicstatus.33

Morality, the interplay of good or bad deeds and their consequences, wasessentially embodied for Tibetans. Understandings of ritual-social propri-ety were most generally expressed, across discourses and contexts, in anidiom of corporeal cleanliness and filth (tib. gtsang ma, mi gtsang ma). Or-dinary folks, both lay and monastic, tended to conceive of all practices forself-improvement in terms of bodily (and therefore mental) purification—whether they were directed at one’s karmic status for future lifetimes (tib.tshe phyi ma) or one’s social status in this lifetime (tib. tshe ’di).34 Thus ritualand everyday efforts to control dangerously contagious corporeal pollutionindexed the sacred and social boundaries of the community. Not surpris-ingly, the most potent substances, the most potentially offensive to deitiesand other humans, were the effluvia associated with the lowest, grossestbodily functions: urine, feces, saliva, bad breath, menstrual blood, and se-men.

For Tibetans the body was inherently unclean, and both men and womencould be polluted and polluting through inappropriate or bad deeds, con-tagion, or even descent (in the case of unclean lineages into which no one


from a “clean” lineage would marry).35 In theory, as variously positionedlocals insisted to me, the relative propriety or purity of a person’s public andprivate comportmentwithin these universally applicable causative principleswas up to the individual, conditioned, that is, by his or her karmic legacy(tib. bsod nams) and worldly luck (tib. rlung rta). I would argue, however,that the very possibility for ritual and social efficacy throughout the com-munity, from the most elite tantric meditation practices to the functioningof monastic authority to the mundane struggles of everyday life, criticallydepended on a fundamental polarity of hierarchically arranged sexed bodies(tib. pho mo gnyis; lit., the two, males and females) and an assumption ofthe natural, compulsive sexual attraction between them. Local understand-ings of the workings of sexuality, as expressed in lay rituals, folklore, lovesongs, and drama, found strong parallels in those exported to Tibet in Indictantric andmonastic cults. That is, they converged on a notion of compulsiveheterosexuality from a masculine point of view: the primary sex act wasintercourse, the primary sexual agent or subject was male, and his essentialobject was female.36 The various possibilities for sex and gender transfor-mation in Tibetan cultures were all posited and performed in relation to thishierarchy.

As the active sexual agent, male lust was seen to be most physically com-pulsive, a key source of vitality that needed (proper) outlets for physical andmental well-being; hence the great ritual and moral power associated withdenyingor controlling it. Importantly, the relatively impure female bodywasnecessary as the stimulating source of this “natural energy”—as an aid (intantric yoga) or as a constant threat (in celibate asceticism). As sexual object,ideal female sexuality was analogous to the assumed physiological role ofthe vagina in intercourse: relatively passive or compliant, not compulsivelydesirous but requiring males for arousal. Without this gendered economy ofheterosexual compulsion, there would be no particular virtue in a male (vs.a female) asserting his will over the body’s treacherous attraction and needfor the other.

This construct underlay the great prestige and power of celibate monk-hood (vs. nunhood) as a superiormasculine gender status.37 Amonk’s shavedhead and maroon robes did not mark the desexing of his body (he was notthereby “neutered” or “feminized”), but they most essentially marked the


ideal desexualization of his body, that is, his claim to a steadfast intentionto be purified of the greatest pollution or hindrance to male subjectivity andstriving: the female body.38 As many theorists have pointed out for a varietyof Buddhist cultures, and as I found in Labrang, the most salient aspectof Buddhist monasticism in the monastic codes of conduct (Vinaya) and inpopular consciousness, that which most basically distinguished a monk (tib.akhu, grwa pa) from a layman (tib. khyim pa, rgan po), was the performativeclaim to heterosexual celibacy and thus bodily purity.39

From this angle we can appreciate how enabling a basic polarity ofsexed bodies was for Tibetans in the Labrang region in the heyday of themonastery’s power. Intentionality, desire, and the possibility for social andkarmic mobility or transcendence were associated with the masculine.40

Meanwhile, the feminine was associated with that which is immanent to thebody, to place, to households, and to the mundane. Contrasted to the malestandard, the adult female body was ironically more corporeal and thusmore impure precisely because of its “extra” physiological features indexingsexuality: vagina, breasts, menstruation, and pregnancy.41 In the Buddhistidiom often invoked by Labrang men and women in our conversations, themale body is inherently more morally pure and thus karmically auspicious(tib. bsod nams che gi), while the female body is morally impure and thus aninferior rebirth (tib. skye dman).42

Celibate asceticism was intimately bound up with manliness; through it, apractitioner demonstrated the strength of his will to control heterosexualityand to keep potential feminization at bay. In this sense, despite centuries oftensionbetween theminTibet (especially since the riseof the reformistGeluksect in the seventeenth century), tantric sexual yoga and celibatemonasticismwere not that far apart. Both traditions of liberative practice were based onthe manly control of compulsive heterosexual attraction and thus providedmales with techniques to avoid the draining effects of intercourse with afemale body and to gain ritual efficacy and power from it instead.43

By the first half of the twentieth century, the intertextual nature of thisgendered discourse on sexuality was perhaps best expressed in the workof the famous iconoclast scholar Gedun Chöpel (a former monk banishedfrom Labrang monastery in 1927 for his irreverent ways). He asserts in his


1938 Treatise on Passion, appropriating themes circulating in Indian and Ti-betan tantric and medical discourses for centuries, that frequent copulationconsumes the male body, while it does no harm to a female. Early sexualintercourse, around age sixteen, matures a female body while it wears outmales, who should more properly wait until age twenty-four.44 Despite hisantinomian feminist leanings as expressed in this work, I would argue thatGendun Chopel’s assertion here is less about condoning female sexual desireand more about justifying the widespread male desire for young, that is,relatively pure, female bodies. This concern is reflected past and present inthe great ritual significance in Tibetan lay and tantric ritual of premenstrualvirgins, that is, girls whose sexual virtue and relative corporeal purity canbe socially guaranteed. In the context of otherwise exclusively male ritualperformances, they have been the most desirable consorts and stand-ins fordakinis to make offerings to yogins and local deities.

Spatialized Gender Polarities: Enclosing Female Sexuality

Tibetans in theLabrang regiondidhave cultural practices,whichhave takenon heightened rhetorical value in recent years, for the relative enclosureand control of female corporeality and sexuality. This was most generallyplayed out (across farming and nomad regions) in the widespread insistenceon a particular spatialized gender polarity: associating women with themundane life of the body inside the household domain (tib. nang) and menwith prestigious affairs of the mind outside it (tib. phyi). Tibetan sexualdiscretion focused on maintaining the ongoing appearance of this distinctionat junctures that were particularly salient for locals, thereby protecting thegrounds of male ritual and social authority. Negotiations and judgmentsof behavior occurred with reference to prescriptions for ideally genderedbodily performance so that public judgment of illicit or lewd behavior (tib.‘dod log or log g’yem) couldbe avoidedordulybrought tobear. In that context,the most important grounds for sexual discretion were the everyday bodilydisciplines of monasticism and marriage under public scrutiny and gossip inthe narrow valley, not frequent punishment or complete confinement.


As Melvyn Goldstein has pointed out, the ethic of “mass monasticism” inregions supporting huge Geluk establishments meant that only a small mi-nority of monks approximated the monkly ideal.45 Only the most advancedscholar-monks (tib. dpe cha pa) could gain initiation into secret lineages ofyoga tantra.46 The system actually allowed for a wide range of masculineproclivities as long as they appeared to serve the order and did not emergepublicly to threaten its sacred prestige. Thus monks and lamas did havesecret liaisons with women; some returned to lay life and married; manyhad close, homoerotic friendships not marked as “sexual”; and private ho-mosexual practices among monks were tolerated in part because they wereviewedas a release formonksof lesser ability for their frustratedheterosexualdrives.47

In lay life as well, practices of bodily and linguistic avoidance focused onmaintaining the invisibility of inappropriate heterosexuality; keeping malesand females at a certain physical distance in public, especially those of thesame generation or of improper kinship relation;48 and proscribing explicittalk about sexualitywithmembers of the opposite sex.Close, public affectionand touching and private, frank talk about sexuality was reserved for same-sex age-mates and not marked as problematically sexual.

Importantly, the enclosure of female sexuality occurred through prac-tices that rejected, in certain ways, female intrusion into male domains ofintentionality outside the household. This meant excluding female bodiesfrom monastic spaces and lay offering rites to mountain gods. It also meantcurbing the public performance of female sexual desire independent of thehousehold. For example, men had much more leeway for the appropriateexpression of heterosexual desire in public. They could tease one anotherand women friends using sexual euphemisms and innuendo, while womenwere expected to be much more circumspect, displaying their shyness andembarrassment even as they laughed at men’s jibes.49 This basic differencecan also be seen in the widespread avoidance behaviors associated with theperformance of traditional Tibetan love songs (tib. la gzhas). These songstell stories of ideal romances between brave, stalwart warriors and beauti-ful, loyal women. In village and nomad communities, they were most oftenperformed at particular courtship gatherings in alternating male-femalepaired-response form. They could produce the greatest embarrassment in


women, especially if they were caught singing them outside those ritualizedcontexts by male friends or relatives, by parents, or within earshot of themonastery.50

Women whose public comportment was deemed too independently de-sirous or instrumental risked being associated with negative agencies bythe community: bad mothers, unclean housekeepers, witches, gossips, andwhores—that is, womenwho embodied the draining effects of female desireout of control and thereby gave vent to the impure and socially destructiveagencies of demons.51 In theLabrang region themost important practices forenclosing female agency were the coming-of-age and marriage rites aimedat publicly appropriating a woman’s sexuality to the interests of the (ideally)male-headed household.52 Despite the diversity that scandalized outside ob-servers, Tibetan androcentrism meant that the ideal forms of inheritanceand marriage were not that far from local Chinese practices.53 Tibetanswidely preferred sons and arranged patrilocal, monogamous marriages thatkept the household patrimony intact and established beneficial alliances bybringing in a daughter-in-law.54 The common practice in the valley of Let-ting Down the Hair (tib. skra phab), in which girls between sixteen andseventeen years old donned the bejeweled headdress and ornaments of adultlaywomen, publicly asserted a daughter’s sexual maturity and her status asa good prospect for a patrilocal marriage (fig. 4). Her body displaying thewealth of her natal family, she visited village households with a younger fe-male escort and collected gifts toward the dowry (tib. rdzongs ba) she wouldeventually take to marriage.

A marriage was paradigmatically accomplished through the rites of ne-gotiation and feasting that brought the bride into the purview of her newhusband’s home and legitimized their sexual relations and subsequent chil-dren as belonging to that household. In contemporary Labrang the phrasesgnas la ’gro (lit., to go home) and stonmo byed (lit., to throw a feast party)werewidely used to refer to marriage in general, yet they specifically connotedthis type of union. In this light, we can better assess what foreign mission-aries disapprovingly called the “sexual hospitality” of Tibetans in borderregions.55 In a community structured through the movements of men andtheir hosting activities that cemented and maintained alliances, the coming-of-age rite authorized the (discreet) sexual activity of unmarried daughters


Figure 4 Tibetan village girl with regalia and headdress of LettingDown the Hair, Labrang,1966

as under the auspices of their natal households. In some cases a father couldgrant a male guest sexual access to a daughter, a liaison in which she may ormay not have already willingly participated.56

We can also appreciate how other marital practices in the region operatedinpart as strategies, in the face of a shortageofmarriageablemen, tomaintainthe performative hierarchy between virtuous, relatively pure women inside


the household domain and improperly sexualized, impure women outsideit. In actuality there was a gradient of more or less ideal marriages thatnonetheless in practice did very similar things for women. Drawing onthe symbolic resources of the paradigmatic marriage rite, these practices,from “taking in a son-in-law” (tib. magpa ‘jog) to arranging a “temporary”(tib. gnas skabs) marriage to “marrying a daughter to heaven,” all in factmarried a daughter into her natal household, thereby publicly legitimizingher sexuality and claiming her children as heirs.

These practices allowed women and their families to assert the gender-appropriateness of their own or their daughters’ activities that seemed to becarried out independently ofmen in this center ofmonasticism and itineranttrade. The reality was that monasticism and long-distance trade took menout of local households for long periods. ZhangQiyun, in his gazetteer aboutXiahe County in the mid-1930s, notes that the majority of (albeit low-paid)wage laborers in Labrang town were women.57 Chinese social scientists LiShijin and Li Anzhai, who separately conducted research among Tibetansin the 1930s and 1940s, expressed surprise and concern at the relatively highpercentage of women-headed households in both farming and nomad com-munities in the Labrang region.58 Finally, alternative marriage practicesallowed Labrang locals to distinguish between the relative purity and virtueof female sexual behavior that brought offspring and income to the house-hold from that of prostitutes (tib. smad ’tshong ma),59 that is, “unmarried,”unattachedwomenwho “sold” sexual intercourse for personal gain and lust.

As numerous oral histories and travel accounts I collected attest, Labrangwas renowned among male travelers throughout Tibetan regions for thebeautiful, sexually available women of Tawa town (tib. mtha’ ba mdza’ ma,bla brangmtha’ mo). But suchwomen did not necessarily think of themselvesas prostitutes. Instead, in many cases they competed for lovers and calledtheir unions temporary marriages, living all the while in their natal house-holds and contributing the monetary or in-kind “gifts” of their lovers tothe household’s income.60 Thus such women could be locally powerful andproud; they were real locals, after all, surrounded by friends and relativesin their villages, versus the nama or daughters-in-law (tib. mna’ ma) whohad more ideally married in. Having undergone the Letting Down the Hairrite, their bodies were adorned as adult laywomen and thus displayed their


association with a household. They went about the usual daily activities ofmarried women, tending the household’s fields and livestock and worship-ing appropriately at and supporting the monastery. In this way they werenot dangerously different from nama because they were still discreet by Ti-betan standards, that is, they did not performatively disrupt key genderedboundaries by making inappropriate heterosexuality socially visible.

In a region where the moral purity and manly strength of will assertedin celibate asceticism underwrote Tibetan hegemony, the maintenance andnegotiation of differential prescriptions on gendered sexual discretion keptthe encroachments of both female sexuality and colonizing modernities atbay. In such a context, compulsive heterosexuality, not homosexuality, wasculturallymarked asmost problematic, something to bekept invisible. Itwasideally contained in the patrilocal marriages negotiated among upstandingLabrang families that channeled the sexuality of daughters to the interestsof their natal and then affinal households. The ritual and social propriety orcleanliness (tib. gtsang ma) of such women could then be contrasted with therelatively chaotic and morally impure sexuality of unattached women seento be taking multiple lovers for money. This, as many elders told me, wasassociated not with their own community but with the liminal times andspaces of the great monastic festivals, when the town’s population swelledseveralfoldwith the influx ofmen andwomen pilgrims fromnomad regionsespecially.61

Contempory Contests: A Sexual Misrecognition

Drolma, my friend from the picnic, was not an ideal nama, or daughter-in-law. In fact, she had eloped with her husband, the eldest son of that promi-nent Labrang village family. The two had met in college in the provincialcapital, and Drolma often nostalgically told me how she had been swayedby his romantic persistence in courting her. At the time she was convincedof the “modern” virtue of choosing her own mate based on mutual “love”or “feelings” (tib. brtse dung), a word that among the educated more oftenthan not cropped up in otherwise Tibetan conversation as a Chinese term,ganqing, or aiqing. Drolma persevered against her own prominent family’s


pressure tomarry a localman and stay in her home region, forgoing a properwedding feast and moving to Labrang to live with her new husband.

In the early days of our friendship, she would compare her own rela-tionship favorably with the ideal modern marriage she felt my husbandand I embodied. In one early conversation she asserted that the traditionalTibetan terms for husband and wife (i.e., nag mo or mag pa) did not ap-ply to them because they had an independent relationship. But in Labrang,Drolma actually had to negotiate a delicate balance between her husband’snatal household and the one she and her husband had set up separately intown. Her life there was a hectic round of running between her duties as alow-level, underpaid cadre in her work unit, as a wife and mother in herapartment, and as a nama in her in-laws’ village household.

A story Drolma once recounted further illustrated the continued salienceof traditional Tibetan boundaries on female sexuality. In the course oflamenting the increasingly immoral sexuality she saw among young peo-ple in the valley, Drolma told me of the afternoon she had been walkingdown the main street in Labrang. A young Tibetan man she did not rec-ognize approached her, grabbed her arm, and entreated her to stop, tellingher, “Girl, I’ll pay whatever you ask!” (tib. byi mo khyod sgormo du ster dgosna nga ster ra). Throughout her long and emphatically repeated narrative,Drolma was increasingly adamant that I see, in her tone, expression, andgestures, her righteous indignation at the man’s presumption—even thoughher initial embarrassed laughs did not completely conceal her pride at beingdeemed so desirable.

Significantly, her first move was to insist, to the man in the story and tome as listener, on the man’s misrecognition of her as a prostitute (a groupof women in town she had just labeled using the Chinese word jinu). De-spite her ambiguous status as a daughter who had defied the obligations ofarranged, patrilocal marriage, Drolma did this by repeatedly telling him, “Iam a daughter-in-law!” (tib. nga mna’ ma zig yin). This, she explained, washer way of telling him that she had married out (tib. gnas song sdod gi) andthus that she was not the kind of person who did that (tib. nga da demo debyed go no mi ma red).

Perhaps her increasingly vehement indignation and almost obsessive rep-etition of her responses to him in her narration of the story for me was


compensation for the fact that that assertion was not enough to safely distin-guish herself from a woman whose body was for sale. According to her, onthat and another occasion in which she ran into him outside a pool hall, heignored her and continued to pull her arm and ask her price. She said onlywhen she recognized him as the married son of a local family and scoldedhim for running around on his poor wife did his face warm with embar-rassment, and he tried to appease her by saying, “No harm done! That’s justhow young guys are nowadays!” (tib. da dering nang kha gsar bu cho red mo).

New Sexual Regimes

As this interaction and Drolma’s framing of it indicate, the transformedsocial context under Chinese rule had greatly altered the grounds for theperformance of sexual discretion in Labrang. Thus the meanings attachedto sexedbodies andgendered spaces haddangerously shifted, thereby threat-ening the enclosure of female sexuality that underwrote Tibetan culture andpower in the region. Recent commentary in international news media andpro-Tibet activist writings tends to depict these developments throughoutTibetan regions as emanating exclusively from the outside in. Such writingsportray the apparent breakdown of sexual morality among Tibetans as thedirect result of Chinese colonization efforts, the intentional “sexual degra-dation” of the people in order to demoralize and thus better control them.62

Significantly, thesewritings focus on the increasing numbers of “prostitutes”as the main indicators of these “social evils,” enumerating them and debat-ing their motivations, methods, and places of origin (many argue they aremostly Han Chinese migrants).63 As one exiled Tibetan interviewed for the1999 Tibet Information Network briefing paper on prostitution in Lhasaput it, “Earlier our society was a conservative society, with a lot of influencefrom traditional values. Earlier therewas no space for pre-marital and extra-marital sex. But now society has changed. I think it is largely because of thebad influence that the Chinese have brought. . . . Now sex is relatively openin our society in Lhasa.”64

As I found in my fieldwork, such portrayals could resonate strongly withlocal Tibetans’ views about the spatial and temporal structure of change.In Labrang the rapid and ultimately violent way the Chinese Communists


finally overthrew monastic authorities in 1958 seemed for Tibetans to haveabruptly sealed an idealized Tibetan society in the past (tib. ‘jig rten rnyingpa). Within the culture of nostalgia and resistance that emerged aroundlocal historical memories of that radical disjuncture, Tibetans were hardpressed to view themselves as anything but the victims of outside forcesand agents of change. This sentiment was epitomized especially in everydayconversations by the widespread use of the epithet Father State (tib./ch. ApaGongjia) as a singular, paternal, and pervasively powerful agent.65 But suchconstructions of self and other canhamper anunderstanding of the vigorous,yet ambivalent agencies of differently positioned Tibetans past and presentas they negotiated modernities on their own terms—negotiations that havehad differential effects for men and women.

As I mentioned above, these processes were already in motion before theCommunist People’s Liberation Army marched into Labrang in the fallof 1949. As Chinese state agents began to press in on Labrang with thefounding of the KMT county of Xiahe there in 1928, the negotiation ofsexualities became a key site of contending identities and interests. WhileKMTreformersassociatedbedeckedyoungTibetanwomenwithprostitutesand advocated desexualizing them by encouraging their adoption of Hanstyle pants, local Tibetans and monastic officials associated women in pantswithdangerously independent, “modern” femaleagency—andperhapswithfemale bodies that would thereby be more revealed when freed from longrobes.

As one former monk who had been a small boy on the eve of the Com-munist takeover told me, women then would never wear pants or be seen inrestaurants. If theydid, he insisted, brushinghis cheekwithhis finger, peoplewould talk and theywould be very embarrassed (tib. ngo res tsha rgyu red). Insuch a context the report of LiAnzhai, theHan anthropologist and social re-former who lived in Labrang between 1938 and 1941, that monastic officialsfined several Tibetan women for “imitating” Chinese and donning pantsreveals the importance to conservative monastic authorities of maintainingTibetan limits on female bodily comportment. This was, not surprisingly,precisely the time when some progressive lay Tibetans were collaboratingwith KMT reformers to establish secular schools in town separate frommonastic authority, including a first-ever school for girls.66


Not until the Communists’ violent overthrow of the monastery in 1958,however, were Chinese state agents able to eradicate forcibly the genderedspatial practices that had kept the crucial symbiotic relationship betweenTibetan celibate asceticism and sexuality socially invisible. CCP officialsclosed the monastery, returned monks to lay life, organized villages andencampments into communes, and mandated a state-arbitrated “modern”marriage and family life. In this way they effectively assimilated Labranginto the state and imposed a new regime of sexual discretion posited on anideal of the near-complete visibility and service of the biological body to thepublic body politic (ch. gong). The new socialist morality to which Tibetanswere now widely subject placed the highest value on the “liberating” act ofexposing the illusory social constructions underlying the exploitative powerof the upper classes—laying them bare in order to eradicate the illusionsof false pleasures. In practice, by the height of the Cultural Revolution,this meant near-total adherence to public bodily performance that indexeda Communist sexual puritanism, that is, the wearing of the (supposedly)gender-neutral drab pants and shirts indicating one’s renunciation of allthe bourgeois, private distractions of ethnic pride, personal pleasure, anderotic desire; the consignment of sexuality to the “scientific” context of state-regulated reproduction within monogamous marriage; and the dedicationof all householdmembers, includingwomen, to “productive labor” onbehalfof the collective.67

Zealous Chinese and Tibetan officials then drew on the righteousnessof this “true” renunciation to reject the cultural provisions that had keptTibetan monastic renunciation prestigious and powerful, attempting to de-sacralize it by casting once-discreet sexual practices as perverse sexual crimes.As one ex-monk argued in a now-infamous article written several monthsafter the crackdown at Labrang, “[Monks and lamas are] more ferociousthan wild animals. There is not one who has not violated a woman and notone who has not violated the young monks. They are all like beasts.”68 Stateofficials also attempted to desacralize monasticism by “liberating” Tibetanwomen now labeled prostitutes and encouraging them to accuse monks andlamas of sexual exploitation at public struggle sessions.69 It took the bruteimposition of an unprecedented state-sponsored feminism to get Tibetanwomen into pants—to dispense with some of the Tibetan limits on their


social mobility and promote the virtue of their taking leadership roles ascitizens of a modern Chinese nation. Tibetan women in the Labrang regiondid take roles as (small-time) party and government officials, especially after1958, when most adult men were imprisoned or at war.70 Some of the mostzealous activists (tib.hurbtsonpa; ch. jijifenzi) during theCulturalRevolutionwere young Tibetan women.71

Yet as many recent theorists have argued, there is much to suggest thatthis Communist regime of sexual discretion based on an ideal of a gender-egalitarian sexual purity never eradicated deeply held assumptions inChinese society, codified in the scientific sexology of the KMT era, thatassociated normal sexuality with “naturally compulsive” male desire for fe-male objects.72 In fact, the new regime merely substituted different bodilypractices for maintaining the invisibility of sexuality, while retaining theclose link between male sociopolitical power and the ability to choose multi-ple female sex partners. The ongoing exploitation of women in this way wasone of the main ways Han state officials allied with local and non-Han men,drawing on compelling points of overlap in different androcentric systems tomake social reforms more palatable by allowing local men to exercise powerat certain junctures.73

This was the source of much disgust and shock among Tibetans andChinese who witnessed the disparity between the moral ideal and actual be-havior of state officials. As Zhang Qingyou reports, CCP officials in Linxia(just east of Labrang) attempted to appease Tibetans protesting the Com-munist occupation of Labrang in the early 1950s by punishing scores ofHan cadres, who had been sent there to set up the government, for flagrant“corruption” and “whoring” (ch. suji piaochang) with local Tibetan women.The cadres protested they were merely respecting local customs as they hadbeen instructed to do and that refusing Tibetans’ “gifts” would have beeninsulting.74 ThePanchenLama, inhis courageous 1962petition to the centralauthorities lamenting the state of affairs in Amdo, disgustedly reports thatTibetan monastic officials appointed to the new Democratic ManagementCommittees were openly wearing lay clothes, seeking prostitutes (ch. suji),and having sex with women on monastic grounds (ch. sinei jielian funu).75

Effectively, then, the forced assimilation of Tibetans to a new moral orderunder Communist rule was accomplished through the radical collapse of


those gendered proscriptions on corporeal discretion that had kept Tibetancelibate asceticism and sexuality socially separate and mutually beneficial.The remarkable regulatory power of the so-called modern socialist moralitythus opened unprecedented spaces for some Tibetans to experience liberat-ing agency. Yet at the same time its relentless promulgation in state discourseunderscored the obscenity of state officials’ attacks on Tibetan gender prac-tices.

Converging Gazes and Disproportionate Burdens

Thus, when the death of Mao and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms allowed Ti-betans inLabrang to revitalize their community beginning in themid-1980s,they did so within a fundamentally altered social field that was increasinglymediated by state and global interests and agents. This process producedthe everyday dilemmas facing young Tibetans, especially young women,who were caught between urgent conservative pressures and passionate as-pirations for modernity. Again, the state accomplished the transition byco-opting Tibetan androcentrism to its purposes, allowing Tibetan men totake leadership roles in monastic and secular government and maintainingthe patriarchal bias of marriage and property law. Locals’ initially urgentdesire to reestablish Labrang monastery as a central and vital field of meritstrongly coincided with state officials’ plans to develop it as a tourist site andas a national symbol of enlightened “minorities” policy. Yet the grassrootsimpulse among ordinaryTibetans to return to a formof “massmonasticism”ran counter to Tibetan and Chinese officials’ desire to contain monasticismby limiting admission to the most virtuous, scholarly elite (tib. dpe cha pa; ch.shan sheng).

In the 1980s and 1990s, nostalgic efforts throughout the Tibetan com-munity to rebuild the monastery exactly as it was (tib. a na ma na red) andthereby protect the virtue and ritual power of male celibacy ultimately heldmonks to a higher standard for bodily performance than before. As manyTibetans told me, nowadays shameful behavior on the part of Tibetans wasnot just amatter of individual sin orweakness. Instead, as one young laymanput it, it brought disgrace on the whole ethnic group (tib. mi rigs gi zhabs‘den),76 a pan-regional community now defined in contradistinction to the


audience of modern others descending on the town in increasing numbers:the foreign and Han Chinese tourists who came informed by their own ro-mantic assumptions about the ideal sexualmorality of “real” Tibetanmonksin contradistinction to the relatively unfettered sexuality of the lay Tibetanfolk.

But Tibetans’ defensive conservatism in the reform period could not miti-gate the transformed parameters for sexual discretion.Most importantly, theerosion of the ritual infrastructure of themonastery and state limits onmonkadmissions to assemblies drastically reduced thepowerof theTibetan leader-ship to regulatemonastic and lay bodies.Hundreds of young robedmen thuslived outsidemonastic structures individually seeking teachings, contacts, ormodern formsofmasculine leisure.The impositionof state-arbitrated spacesand times had desacralized much of the space within monastic grounds andbrought in laypeople and non-Tibetans, including women, as state officials,tourists, and vendors at all times of the ritual year.

As I foundduringmyfieldwork, localTibetans’ efforts to control sexualityin this transformed context and thus reestablish powerfulTibetan differenceironically brought them onto shared ground with the Chinese state andpopular media. This is so because the weight of public scrutiny and negativesocial consequences camedownnot on transgressingmales (robed ornot) buton publicly visible female bodies as markers of inappropriate and disruptivesexual agency. In fact, Tibetans’ struggles both to maintain an authenticTibetanness linked to the past and to participate in the juggernaut of globalmodernities were premised on deeply assumed correspondences between,on one hand, their own notions of privileged male sexual agents pursuingfemaleobjects and, on theother, those they saw in theproliferatingdiscoursesof the media.

Thus as young Tibetan men sought ways to stave off the emasculatingeffects of their co-optation by the state and reclaim their traditionalmobility,out of households and across public spaces, youngwomen found theirmove-ments curtailed by increasingdemands that they simultaneously shoreup thehousehold economyand exhibit aTibetan feminine respectability andbodilypurity thatwouldmaintain the sacred inviolability ofmale celibacy.Aspiringwomen such as Drolma were thus pulled between such local demands, theirown newly possible aspirations for social mobility and independent sexual


agency, and the profound sexism of the market and the state that into the1990s increasingly collaborated to commodify women as sexual objects to beconsumed.

For many young women (Chinese and Tibetan) who had grown up sincethe Communist takeover, the radical period had broadened the parametersof public female agency. Yet the state’s feminist criticisms of old, “feudal”controls on female sexuality and the enforced androgyny and sexual pruderyof the Maoist years meant that young women throughout China widelyexperienced the “reform and opening up” period as a time for assertingwhatfelt like a liberating femininedifference and sexualitymodeled after thekindthey associatedwithWesternmodernity.77 In the Labrang region thismeantthat an unprecedented number of young Tibetan women acted on theiraspirations for social mobility and sought higher education, experimentedwith Western fashion and makeup, or left home regions looking for ways toparticipate in the modern forms of work and egalitarian, freely chosen loverelationships widely extolled in state and popular discourses.

By the early 1990s, Labrang, with its unique opportunities for secularand monastic education and for contacts with cosmopolitan others, hadbecomeagatheringplace forunmarried, ambitiousTibetanwomenandmenfrom rural regions. In the midst of this onslaught, local Tibetans across thecommunity often characterized the change to the townas the extraordinarilypromiscuous intermingling of males and females in public spaces. I foundthat they tended to express their anger and disgust in the terms set downin state discourses. Echoing state anxiety about the “spiritual pollution”let into China with the “opening up” process, locals, especially the oldergenerations, were appalled and perplexed by the moral ambiguity and social“chaos” (often expressed using the Chinese loanword luan) they felt came infrom the outside.

As many observers have recently pointed out, despite the relative lenienceof the reform years, Chinese state policy and propaganda continued to em-phasize the evils of premarital sex and the great virtues of sex for repro-duction within a well-regulated monogamous marriage. In fact, for belea-guered state officials confronting the Janus-faced consequences of openingthe country to international trade, sexuality had again become a key barom-eter of enlightened, modern civilization and national health. As Michael


Dutton notes, some of the harshest policing policies of recent years havebeen reserved for individuals involved in prostitution and pornography.78

Ann Anagnost argues that it is precisely the modernist goals of the Chinesestate’s family planning policies (ch. jihua shengyu) that offer the best possi-bilities for “restor[ing] the statist ambitions of the party leadership.”79 Yetfamily planners’ emphasis on latermarriages and the greater openness of thepopular media about sexuality and romance meant that youth sexuality wasboth highly problematized and greatly evident. State prudery had not yetbeen overcome enough to implement widespread sex education programsor to make contraception widely available before marriage.80

Instead, local Tibetan and state gazes converged on “sexually saturated”female bodies as the simultaneous objects of lust and social controls. Chinesediscourses about “scientific” sexuality had for decades focused on “natu-rally” compulsive male sex drives and the need to control “deviant” femalespursuing sexual encounters—for the good of society and of the girl herself.As Harriet Evans argues, in CCP rhetoric the female “third party” (ch. disanzhe) was “constructed as the single most important—and dangerous—threat to marital and familial stability.”81 Thus since the 1980s, “cautionarytales” widely circulated in newspapers, youth magazines, and local rumorsand aimed at curbing extramarital sexuality had different messages for menand women. For men they emphasized the great danger of being duped anddrained (of vital physical energy and money) by wily oversexed women (fig.5). For women, they emphasized their vulnerability to being exploited bymen and discarded, their reputations ruined forever. I found that this gen-dered construction of sexuality resonated stronglywithTibetans inLabrang,who lamented what they saw as young men’s precarious hold on vows ofmarriage or celibacy. The ironic consequence of this was a confluence ofconscious and unconscious responses that together worked to narrow thetraditional parameters of sexual discretion for Tibetan women in town.

By the early 1990s, Tibetans in Labrang had widely accepted the state’sdiscourse on prostitution as a social evil and a crime that gave inappropriatesexual license to unattached women. Thus, indignant men and women inour conversations tended to blame the increasing divorce rate and flaggingmonkly discipline on unmarried women in town they now labeled prosti-tutes (ch. jinu; tib. smad ‘tshong ma). Drolma, switching to Chinese to make


Figure 5 Cautionary tale cartoon in Tibet Daily newspaper, Lhasa, May 1995

the point, even explicitly called them “third parties,” the ones responsible forbreaking up families.

In effect, the presence in Labrang of foreign and urban Han womentourists, as well as of rural Tibetan women, exhibited an unprecedentedtranslocal mobility of female bodies. This had dangerously sexualized anddesacralized public spaces in and outside the monastery. It thus had becomeparamount for localwomen to distinguish themselves from the unrestrained


sexuality associated with tourist women and prostitutes, even though formany young laywomen in town their own aspirations for independentsocial mobility and their desire to postpone the disproportionate burdensof marriage were precisely the motivations that were increasingly leadingyoung women of every stripe to accept money for sex, not only in Labrangbut across the country.82

In the Labrang Tibetan community, this process took the form of anintensifying insistence on the correctness of an ideally Tibetan femininerespectability and the progressive devaluation of forms of marriage otherthan ideally negotiated patrilocal unions. In 1995 upstanding village familieshad revived the Letting Down the Hair coming-of-age rite for teenagedaughters, who now donned the traditional headdress for only a few daysbefore returning to work or school (see fig. 4). In this way, daughters whoseactivities had expanded outside the household could be publicly recognizedas earmarked for a future patrilocalmarriage. Further, as one old laywomancomplained to me, it had become much harder for a household without sonsto find a man willing to marry in and become a son-in-law (tib. mag pa). Icould not count the number of people who expressed embarrassment at theterm temporary wives, equated it with prostitution, and disgustedly echoedthe sentiment that in Labrang, kids did not know their fathers, only theirmothers.

Theperformativeburdenofbodily shameandritual-social purity thusdis-proportionately fell on young women. Respectably feminine women wereexpected todemonstrate their distance from inappropriate heterosexuality intheir discreet speech, dress, and physical distance from laymen and monasticbodies and spaces. Tibetan language stories, comic routines, and drama ex-tolled the virtues of aTibetanwifewhokept an industrious, clean householdand properly propitiated household deities.83

Amidst the chaotic public behavior of young men and women seen tohave no shame (tib. ngo tsha rgyu med gi), the demure embarrassment ofnaive young girls or wives devoted to the work of their households shoredup the moral superiority of discreet, that is, controlled, sexuality. In every-day conversation the phrase most widely used to characterize the behaviorof brazenly public women was the Tibetan idiom nyag gi nyog gi, whichlocals often interchanged with the Chinese idiom qi da ba da. Both carry


connotations of extraordinary disorder, but the Tibetan adds the sense ofcorporeal filth—due to indiscriminate and polluting intermingling.Drolmaoften used the Tibetan phrase to describe “prostitutes” in town, and in ourtalk she sought my acknowledgment of her difference from them: “We twoare correct, aren’t we?We found husbands and gotmarried!” (tib. da ‘u gnyiska rang gis bza’ tshang zig gi btsal las de byas dang na, nga cho ‘grigs bsdad gi ena?).84

The Aesthetics of Decontextualization: Commodifying Female Corporality

Yet as many of my women friends in Labrang discovered, their efforts tokeep their sexuality appropriately invisible in this way could not preventthe increasing visibleness adhering to all young female bodies concomitantwith their commodification in the globalizingmedia.85 Aswith elsewhere inChina, one of the most compelling attractions of a cosmopolitan modernityfor young Tibetans was the vision of open, erotic heterosexuality premisedon the heightened pleasures of a hyperempowered man possessing a hyper-sexualized woman.86 Since the 1980s, in China the promise of such pleasurehad been coded on the naked or seminaked bodies of Western and, increas-ingly, Chinese or other Asian women models, who were then posed andframed to sell everything from playing cards to state-sponsored scholarlyjournals.

In Labrang,monks and laypeople I spoke to often said it was the naturallyirresistible lure of such exposed female bodies depicted in smuggled videosthat drew the crowds of young men and monks to video halls at night. Inour conversations, young Tibetan men expressed envy and resentment ofthe tall, muscular bodies and aggressive virility of Western men they sawin the media or attributed to male tourists in town.87 Meanwhile, rumorsabounded of the easy sexual availability of Western women in town andelsewhere, and I was asked more than once by Tibetan men and women ifit was true that we Americans could have several spouses, keeping wives orhusbands in all the different places we visited.88

Contrary to concerned pronouncements in recent pro-Tibet activist dis-course about the pervasive and increasing “apathy” and despair of youngTibetan men in China, I found that many young men in the Labrang region


were extraordinarily vigorous in their pursuit of possible “modern” futuresand lifestyles held out for them in the globalizing media. In the contextof the state’s relentless surveillance of and crackdown on any sign of Ti-betan dissident activity and the increasing education gap separating urbanHan youth from minorities,89 the “training in desire” effected in imagesof translocal commodities offered a particularly appealing way for manyyoung, disenfranchised Tibetan men to avoid state violence while shoringup their (Tibetan) masculinities and participating in modernity.90 As L. H.M. Lin and others have argued, the broad restructuring of ideal masculini-ties and femininities occurring in the globalizing media posited an extremepolarization of gender roles biologized in essential sex differences. In muchof the advertising and film reaching Labrang in recent years (both Chineseand foreign), the primary sexual and consuming agent is (hyper)masculine,while his transcendent agency is expressed through his consumption of the(hyper)feminine, that is, utterly passive and available, commodity. Imagesof ideal sexualized others thus offered Tibetan consumers the pleasures andpower of a new form of decontextualized looking, a voyeurism based on arefigured aesthetics of gendered bodies as objects to be desired and envied.

This “culture industry” as it played out in Labrang both participated inand intensified the ongoing reconfiguration of gendered spaces accompa-nying the urbanizing town’s integration into capitalist processes with itsdevelopment as a tourist site and the rise of private enterprises as the back-bone of its economy. In such a locale, the realm of the private became in-creasingly elaborated and valorized, associated with both secret spaces oraspirations for resistance to Chinese state hegemony and for fantasies oftranscendence—of the limitations of the state and the now feminized lo-cal/domestic order. In this context, consumption and voyeurism emerged asthe most accessible expressions of masculine translocal agency, thereby con-structing a bifurcated feminine other that marked the refigured boundarybetween public/translocal and private/local: the female sexual commodityoutside and the respectable feminine (ethnic) reproducer inside.

In Labrang, rumors circulating among men and the consumption of im-ages of undressed Western and Chinese women provided an arena in whichsome young Tibetan men could play out both their fantasies of possessing


utterly available female bodies and their longing to participate in an “imag-ined cosmopolitanism.”91 Meanwhile, they could retain thepropriety of theirTibetan households by insisting on the relative stasis and respectability ofTibetan women. As the wealthy Tibetan businessman who had just propo-sitioned me sheepishly said, when I indignantly asked him about his wife athome, “Tibetan women have it hard. But we Tibetans have too many rulesfor them” (ch. Zangzu funu hen xinku. Women Zangzu guiju tai duo).

In contrast to Chinese urban centers, in Labrang the public exposure ofyoung women’s bodies was still strikingly other, signaling to many localsI spoke with an almost completely unfettered sexuality. Tibetan womennever appeared in public or in images with their bodies bared. In fact, Inever saw a Tibetan woman there wearing a Western-style dress. Instead,the most fashionable young women in town preferred to feminize pants andlong-sleeve shirts by wearing high heels, large earrings, and baseball caps.By contrast, Western and Chinese women tourists who walked throughtown in shorts and sandals sent ripples through Tibetan onlookers, and onetraumatizedChinesewoman in ahalter topwas chaseddown themain streetby a group of Tibetan boys.92

But Tibetan women themselves could not escape the ordering power ofthe new consumerist voyeurism. By the early 1990s in Labrang, female bod-ies in public drew looks, whether to scrutinize them for their opposition tothe undressed commodity or to judge them in terms of the new corporealeroticism. As many observers have noted, since the 1980s the state and Ti-betans themselves had collaborated to commodify Tibetan women as iconsof exotic, ethnicTibetanness.93 Tourism literature aboutLabrang (producedboth locally and elsewhere) features young Tibetan women in tight-fitting“traditional” dress, as dancers and hotel hostesses.

Fully in line with trends in Chinese regions, even the prestigious AmdoTibetan literary journal sBrang Char [Light rain] from the early 1990s onfeatured on its covers, with almost monotonous regularity, young beautifulTibetanwomen in traditionaldress, even thoughthe journal and thewritingsit showcases are produced almost exclusively by men (fig. 6). Yet it is perhapsno coincidence that the journal’s designers shifted to featuring beautiful,ethnically marked Tibetan women on its covers (versus the highly regardedTibetan male poets and writers featured in the 1980s) just after state officials


Figure 6 Shift in gendered aesthetics on the cover of Amdo Tibetan literary journal, sBrang Char[Light rain], 1986–1995. Left: Well-known Tibetan scholar Dorje Gyalpo (1986 cover). Right: Pop-ular Tibetan singer Deji Medok (1995 cover)

in Qinghai and Gansu became concerned about the increasing attentionyoung nationalist Tibetan male writers were garnering among educatedyouth. By the late 1980s, several prominent poets had been arrested inAmdo,and one of the most promising, the much-hailed Dondrup Gyal, committedsuicide in 1985.94

Thus, featuring commodified ethnic women on the cover not only sellsjournals but also signals assent on the part of Tibetan intellectuals to state-sponsored capitalism, thereby diverting attention from the journal’s function


as a major site of Tibetan male cultural production. In these ways the pres-sures of a repressive state and a sexist market drew Tibetans themselvesinto capitalizing on long-standing fantasies among Chinese and Westernersabout the exotic sexuality of Tibetan women. As Gail Hershatter reports,in recent years wealthy Chinese businessmen in the coastal regions werewilling to pay as much as five times more for sex with an exotic “minority”woman than with an urban Chinese woman.95

In places such as Labrang, this new kind of eroticized looking was sopowerfully insidious because it was so eminently gender-appropriate, andtherefore unmarked or invisible. As elsewhere, Tibetanwomenwere drawnin as they identifiedwith the power and pleasure of attracting looks and thusexercising public sexuality. One of the things that most angered Labranglocals was the apparently unabashed pride of a group of young women whotook money for sex in town. These were local village women who identifiedwith the traditional reputation of beautiful Labrang women and as beforelived at home while competing for clients among Tibetan male pilgrimsand traders. As one Tibetan male owner of a guest house explained to me,Labrang still had a reputation throughout Tibetan regions and India forbeautiful, available Tibetan women, and many of his Tibetan businessmenfriendswould book roomswith him for the express purpose of seeking themout. Some, he said, would not return after a few days, staying for the rest oftheir visit with their chosen lover.

For their part, the women considered themselves to be at the pinnacleof a hierarchy of women selling sex in town. They considered their highearnings and ability to purchase consumer goods direct evidence of theirsuperior beauty. As one young woman, who had moved to Labrang from aneighboringnomadregion to earnmoney thisway, proudly toldme,hergoldtooth glinting jauntily, the most successful women could bring in thousandsof yuan a month, especially during festival seasons. This was several timesthe average salary of a government cadre in town, and it provided themwitha large disposable income to buy the accoutrements of modern femininity:makeup, jewelry, and leather jackets. In recent years the intensification oftheir corporeal competition was indexed by the nicknames they acquiredin town that ranked them according to their physical beauty: number onebody, number two body, number three body. . . .


Despite the increasing outrage of some local Tibetans, these women wereelite in some ways, proudly reprising forms of female sexual agency thathad been tolerated in pre-Communist Labrang. Several locals indignantlytold me that these women were so proud of their success that when thepolice raided guest houses for prostitutes one summer and paraded thehandcuffed couples down the street in an effort to humiliate them, thewomen instead arrogantly walked as if it were a badge of honor. Further,many continued to contribute income to their natal households, and it wasrumored that some families even collaborated with daughters to host their“temporary husbands” for a fee. Several I knew were very pious supportersof the monastery, worshiping often and donating labor to its reconstructionor to cook and clean formonks.Meanwhile, at the lower end of the sex-workhierarchywere the poor and sometimes desperate ruralTibetanwomenwhocame to Labrang as pilgrims or wage workers and sold sex for a couple yuana night. Locals still tended to associate the most polluting promiscuity withthem.96

However, the expansion ofTibetanmen’s gender-appropriate agency intoactivities and sexual pursuits associated with prestigious modernity meantthat all Tibetan women had to work harder—in household labor and inprotecting their bodies and reputations. Contrary to state feminist rhetoric,in the Labrang region there were still very few opportunities for women’seducation or participation in market enterprises. Rural families preferredto keep daughters and daughters-in-law at home, where they worked todemonstrate their virtuous devotion to the household. The moral flux ofthe sexist marketplace had diminished the public spaces and times throughwhichyoungwomencouldpasswith their sexualityunmarked, thus remain-ing safe from assumptions of easy availability. Even themost elite prostituteshad to work hard to keep men’s advances in forms and in times and spacesthey agreed to.As Imyselfwitnessed, theywere often subject to the drunkenviolence of young men.

Drolma ruefully explained that it was essential for a respectable youngwoman to keep her sexuality discreet and not to be seen with prostitutes,or else her reputation (ch. mingsheng) would be lost for good, humiliatingher husband and family and exposing her to the advances of strange men.Yet as several of my young unmarried women friends told me, knowledge


of sex and use of contraceptives (something widely assumed to be women’sexclusive responsibility) was associated with prostitutes. Thus unmarriedwomen who indulged in sex with boyfriends (and there were many!) riskedhumiliating pregnancies or subjected themselves to multiple abortions inorder to protect their reputations.97

As Drolma’s narrative about her daytime encounter with the young Ti-betan man in the street illustrates, the great difficulty for young Tibetanwomen was that even the diligent performance of devotion to an idealhousehold was not enough to stave off the insidious reach of the commod-ifying gaze. After all, the ultimate message of Deng Xiaoping’s economicreforms was that anything—or any female body—could be possessed withmoney. Hers was only one of the many stories I was told by Labrang Ti-betan women, ranging in age from teens to mid-fifties, of being accostedon the street and offered money for sex by men young and old. The mostdangerous times and spaces, the ones in which women risked men’s physicalviolence, were those most closely associated with the performance of men’smodern sexual agency: nighttimes and the bars and dance halls (several ofwhich were Tibetan-owned) where Tibetan men and women performedtraditional courtship songs and dances to hook up for the night. Young Ti-betan women on the street at night were fair game, subject to harassmentandphysical advances.98 Iwas told of several such incidents by youngwomenwho had attempted to go out at night on errands. Young nuns in town weresubject to veiled resentment during the day, but if caught out at night, theyrisked overt harassment and violence. A group of young nuns told me of thetime they had had to go out at night to see a nun friend who had gotten ill.They said that they had encountered a group of monks who threw stonesand yelled at them. They all agreed that it was very scary to go out at night.

Such gendered encounters in public spaces illustrated the difficulties forboth Tibetan men and women in negotiating newly demarcated and polar-ized public and private realms, and in achieving or conforming to the idealgender roles associated with them, when so many quotidian challenges tosuch ideals existed. The intensifying cultural politics of gender and sexualityin this still-subordinate Tibetan frontier region under Chinese rule meantthat youngTibetanmen andwomenwere facedwith the painful dilemmaofincreasing state and local demands for idealized Tibetan masculinities and


femininities even as they encountered a diminished capacity or willingnessto perform them. As I found during my fieldwork, this process could placeaspiringmen andwomen at tragic oddswith one another.While youngmensought to shore up masculinities and transcend the local by feminizing it,youngwomen inunprecedentednumbers sought to participate inmodernityby expanding their horizons.

Thus the most public form of legitimized male violence against wives orgirlfriends occurred when a woman asserted herself and participated in themodern fun of going to a dance hall in the evening with friends. Storiesabounded of great public dramas in which husbands and boyfriends in ajealous rage burst in on office parties at restaurants or bars and made ashow of roughing up their women and dragging them home. Drolma’s lifeperhaps epitomized the potentially tragic consequences of such a genderedprocess. Over time, she could do little to keep her husband, an underpaid,low-level cadre, from spiraling down into depression and indolence. Shegave up hopes for the romantic, modern union she had left home for and,instead, found herself more and more limited by his jealous anger. As hisdrinking binges and excursions with male friends increased, so, too, did hisreprimands of her for being out too long, for singing love songs during aparty, or for being at work. No matter how much Drolma fought back—physically, duringhis increasinglyviciousbeatings, and socially, by striving tobe an ever more pious wife and daughter-in-law—she could never convincehim of her wholehearted commitment to him and his household.

Conclusion: Consumption for Power?

I have shown that Labrang on the eve of the Communist victory was notthe debauched and chaotic community of Chinese and foreigners’ colonialfantasies. By looking at sexuality as peoples’ situated negotiations betweenembodied moral ideals and the gendered performance of sexual discre-tion, we can appreciate the complex sociohistorical conditions in which aparticularly Tibetan hierarchy of sexed bodies and purified agencies couldkeep the crucial relationship between celibate asceticism and sexuality inLabrang mutually beneficial and thus ritually powerful. The bodily disci-plines of monasticism and marriage marked inappropriate heterosexuality,


not homosexuality, as the most dangerous of transgressions to Tibetans. Rit-ualized constraints on polluting female sexuality maintained the possibilityfor transcendent male subjectivity. But Tibetans’ forced assimilation into anew socialist moral order and the sudden social flux of the reform years hadprofoundly altered the performative grounds for sexual discretion in town,resulting in the unprecedented intermingling ofmale and female bodies andethnic others in and around monastic spaces.

I have tried to demonstrate in this article the difficult and differential con-sequences for men and women of a new eroticism of the frontier, in whichstate and local gazes converged on Tibetan women’s bodies as commodifiedobjects of both sexual desire and efforts to contain it. In effect, as Tibetanmen’s sexual agency expanded in unmarked ways to meet modernity, Ti-betan women’s sexuality was increasingly marked and curtailed in order tomaintain the integrity of Tibetan households and sacred places.99

This perspective sheds light on the significance of a story circulating inLabrang in 1995 and 1996. I heard several versions of this narrative frommen and women, and it was repeated to me as the oath-swearing truth,always in the context of conversations about chaotic sexuality in town: ATibetan village woman accepted several hundred yuan to have sex with aWestern man (in one version, in a guest house; in another, in an open field;and in a third, in Lhasa). But her client’s huge penis, typical of Western men,punctured her, nearly killing her and scarring her for life. She was forced togo to the state-run hospital, where the doctors refused treatment until sheadmitted what she had done; then they required her to pay an exorbitantfee—much more, emphasized the tellers, than she had earned in her sexualtransaction. She was informed (too late!) by the doctors that it is impossibleforTibetanwomen to have intercoursewithWesternmenbecause suchmenare too big.

We can see this narrative as a local Tibetan version of a cautionary talefor Tibetan women; it singles out Tibetan women as the problematic agentsin the perilous local encounter with the global. And it emphasizes their in-herent, inescapably physical handicap and vulnerability in the face of theoverpowering sexuality of the West. Drawing on the authority of scientificsexuality, the narrative punishes the female protagonist for her greedy, in-dependent, and public intercourse with modernity by condemning her to


permanent damage to her body and reputation. Thus the rumor encapsu-lated in narrative form the increasingly disproportionate burdens on localTibetan women to maintain the moral contours of the community, as theparticipation of young men and monks in the modern marketplace weak-ened their commitments to households and monasteries.

To recall the picnic scene with which I began this discussion, Drolma’squick and silent insistence on reminding my husband and me of a Tibetansense of face-warming shame in that situation illustrates how women inLabrang carried the burden of keeping inappropriate heterosexuality invisi-ble.Meanwhile, Tibetanmen’s expanding participation in the commodifica-tion ofwomen as sex objects could be as unmarked and casual as exchanginggirlie cards in a game among male friends. However, the danger for allTibetans, men and women, was that the erotic appeal of a Han-mediatedmodernity substituted consumption for local autonomy and power and di-verted attention from the ways in which the state appropriated Tibetanandrocentrism to its purposes, thereby facilitating the ongoing assimilationof the frontier into the Chinese nation-state.

Notes

1 I conducted anthropological research during three trips to Labrang over a four-year periodbetween 1992 and 1996.The researchwas sponsored by theCommittee onScholarlyCommu-nication with China, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a Foreign Language and Area Studiesfellowship, aNational ScienceFoundation predissertation grant, the Institute forResearch onWomen and Gender at the University of Michigan, and the University of Michigan RackhamGraduate School fellowships. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Interna-tional Association of Tibetan Studies, in Leiden, the Netherlands, June 2000. I am gratefulfor the comments and suggestions of Toni Huber, Jennifer Robertson, and the anonymousreviewers for the journal.

2 By 1990, in contrast to more rural townships and villages in and around the valley that werepredominately Tibetan, Tibetans in town comprised only around 20 percent of some twelvethousand registered residents, with Han and Muslim Chinese making up equal proportionsof the rest. See Ma Denghun and Wanma Duoji (Pad-ma rDo-rJe), Gannan Zangzu BuluoGaikuang [An introduction to the Tibetan tribes of Gannan] (Hezuo: Zhongguo RenminZhengxie Shanghui Gannan Zangzu Zizhizhou, 1994).

3 All personal names of contemporary people in this article are pseudonyms.


4 This was something I heard expressed in many different contexts as my contrasting assump-tions about the parameters of (hetero)sexual discretion encountered those of my Tibetaninterlocutors. For example, in a conversation I had with a widowed woman in her thirtieswho lived in town and made her living as a local petty trader, I learned that she was embar-rassed by a picture I showed her of my husband and I holding hands. She said that here, wecannot touch each other like that in front of our parents or we would be very embarrassed(tib. ngo res tsha gi).

5 Michel Foucault,TheHistory of Sexuality, vol. 1,An Introduction (NewYork: RandomHouse,1978).

6 There has been a recent convergence of interest in such an approach in a variety of disciplines.Interest in “performativity” in gender studies, epitomized perhaps in the work of JudithButler, has taken inspiration from J. L.Austin’s theories of the social construction functions of“performatives” in speech.SeeButler,BodiesThatMatter:On theDiscursiveLimitations of “Sex”(New York: Routledge, 1993); also Rosalind C. Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theoryand the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995):567–592. However, I find the most inspirational recent works to be those bringing a widerrange of analytic tools to bear in socio- or anthropological-linguistic studies of interlocutors’“dialogic” coproduction of sociocultural realities in particular speech events. See, for example,Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock, eds., The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 1995).

7 Tibetan Buddhism, in its emphasis on tantric forms of yogic practice, which crucially utilizesexualmetaphors for liberation based on a refigured, although not entirely inversed, notion ofmale-female sex-gender polarity, perhaps epitomizes this more than other Buddhist cultures.

8 See, for example, Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998); Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 80s (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1988); Deborah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in UrbanChina, Studies on China, 22 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999);MayfairMei-HuiYang, ed.,Spaces ofTheirOwn:Women’s Public Sphere inTransnationalChina(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Nancy Chen, Constance D. Clark,Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffery, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of ContemporaryCulture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

9 The state regulates ethnicity in fifty-six officially recognized minzu groups, of which theHan minzu are the vast majority at around 92 percent. Tibetans, labeled Zangzu, numberonly about six million, distributed throughout the five provinces of the Tibetan AutonomousRegion, Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai.

10 See, for example, Dutton, Streetlife China; Sandra Teresa Hyde, “Sex Tourism Practices onthe Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang,” in Chen et al.,China Urban, 143–162; Mayfair Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: StateFeminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China,” in Yang, Spaces of


Their Own, 35–67; Louisa Schein, “The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skinin Post-Mao China,” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela diLeonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 473–486; and Tibet Information Network, “SocialEvils: Prostitution and Pornography in Lhasa,” Tibet Information Network Briefing Paper 31(1999).

11 See Pu Wencheng, Gan Qing Zangchuan Fojiao Siyuan [Tibetan Buddhist monasteries ofGansu and Qinghai] (Xining: Qinghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1990); Ma and Wanma, GannanZangzu Buluo Gaikuang; and Luo Faxi, Labuleng Si Gaikuang [An introduction to Labrangmonastery] (Lanzhou: Gansu Minzu Chubanshe, 1987).

12 Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, eds., Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualitiesin Asia and the Pacific (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6.

13 For example, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of In-ternational Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); AnnMcClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:Routledge, 1995); and Ann Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race,and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. Micaela diLeonardo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 13–36.

14 Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shang-hai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 9.

15 Melvyn Goldstein points out that whereas in Tibet, this “mass monasticism” resulted in 10–15 percent of the male population entering monasteries, Buddhist monasteries in Thailandheld only 1–2 percent of men. The situation at Labrang was the same as that described byGoldstein for the huge monastery of Drepung in Lhasa: the size of the monastic community,at more than 3,400 monks by 1949, was considered to indicate the success of the monasteryitself. See Goldstein, “The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery,” in Buddhismin Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, ed. Melvyn Goldstein andMatthew Kapstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 15–52. Based on figures from censuses taken before 1949, monks in the region now roughlyequivalent toGannan prefecturewere about 17 percent of theTibetanmale population,whilemonks inLabrangmonastery represented about 15 percent of theTibetanmale population inXiaheCounty. SeeLiAnzhai, “Chuan,GanShuXianBianminFenbuGaikuang, 1941–1942”[The distribution of frontier peoples in several counties of Gansu and Sichuan Provinces],in Li Anzhai Zangxue Wenlun Xuan [Li Anzhai: Selected writings in Tibetan studies] (1941;rpt., Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe, 1992), 72–107. Yu Xiangwen, in his analysis ofkinship and marriage among nomads just west of Labrang, found that monks represented 16percent (21 of 133 men) of the male population there. See “Hequ Zangqu Youmu Zangminzhi Jiating Zuzhi” [The marriage system among Tibetan nomads in the bend of the YellowRiver], Dongfang Zazhi [Oriental magazine] 39, no. 1 (1943):1–3.


16 See Gu Zhizhong and Long Zhi, Dao Qinghai Qu [Enroute to Qinghai] (Shanghai: ShangwuYinshu Guan 1935); Gao Changzhu, “Di 22 Ti: Labuleng: Jinkuang ji qi Kaifa Yijian” [Thetwenty-seconddistrict:Labrang: Someperspectives on its current situationanddevelopment],in Bianjiang Wenti Lunwen Ji [Collected works on frontier issues] (Zhengzhong Shuju, 1942),430–489; Susan Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (Cincinnati: Foreign ChristianMissionary Society, 1901); Li Anzhai, “Xikang Dege zhi Lishi yu Renkou” [The history andpopulation of Derge in Xikang], in Li Anzhai Zangxue Wenlun Xuan (1946; rpt., Beijing:Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe, 1992), 152–217; and Robert Ekvall, Cultural Relations on theKansu-Tibetan Border (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).

17 Foreign and Chinese travelers to Labrang prior to 1949 invariably remarked on the absenceamong Tibetans of highly visible practices for controlling women’s bodies and sexualities,such as foot-binding and purdah, that could be seen among the Han Chinese and Huicommunities just east of the valley. See Ma Haotian, Gan Qing Zang Bianqu Kaocha Ji [Travelrecord of investigations in the border regions of Gansu, Qinghai, and Tibet], 3 vols. (1936;rpt., Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1942–1947); Eric Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer inNorth-West China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); and Gu and Long, DaoQinghai Qu.

18 Frederic Wulsin, an American explorer who traveled to Labrang in 1923, practically drooledover the Tibetan women he saw there, describing them as “pretty girls with magnificentheaddresses, often with their gowns dropped down to leave the right shoulder bare” (citedin China’s Inner Asian Frontier, ed. Mary Ellen Alonso [Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum,1979], 96; also cf. Ma Haotian, Gan Qing Zang Bianqu Kaocha Ji).

19 Prasenjit Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National Historyin Modern China,” History and Theory 37, no. 3 (October 1998): 298.

20 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 260.21 Duara, “Regime of Authenticity,” 300.22 Ma Haotian, Gan Qing Zang Bianqu Kaocha Ji, 38.23 The entire passage reads, “Labuleng hao bi shi yi ge hen mei de chunu, yijing you ren xiang

ta [fem. pronoun] juezhu le, shangshi zhege chunu, bu neng qinfen zili, ta [fem. pronoun]biding yao duoluo.” [Labrang is like a beautiful virgin; there are already rivals for her. Ifthis virgin cannot become diligent and establish herself, then she will inevitably degenerate(duoluo)]. The term duoluo has connotations of moral corruption. Duoluo fengchen means tobe driven to prostitution (see Gu and Long, Dao Qinghai Qu, 79). The use of a sexualizedanalogy for a longed-for yet vulnerable territory is not unique to Chinese would-be colonists.The orientalist scholar and colonial agent Austine L. Waddell draws on strikingly similarimages to describe aTibet debauched by its encounterwithmodernity: “But now . . . the fairyPrince of Civilization has roused her from her slumbers, her closed doors are broken down,her dark veil of mystery is lifted up and the long sealed shrine with its grotesque cults andits idolised Grand Lama, shorn of his sham nimbus, have yielded up their secrets and lie


disenchanted before our Western eyes” (Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism: With Its Mystic Cults,Symbolism, and Mythology [1895; rpt., New York: Dover, 1972], 1–2).

24 Duara, “Regime of Authenticity,” 297.25 In Labrang, the term rogs pa, literally, “friend,” is often used euphemistically to mean “lover”

of a man or woman outside a marital relationship. Rogs pa btsal, “look for a friend,” is thus alocal way to say, in a discreet, yet sarcastic way, “on the make.”

26 David Lichter and Lawrence Epstein, “Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life,” inKarma: An Anthropological Inquiry, ed. Charles Keyes and Valentine Daniel (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 249.

27 Also note that the adverbial phrase zhor gi inAmdodialects, when expressing the relationshipbetween two actions, connotes conveniently engaging in an additional activity while carryingout a primary one.

28 The wives and daughters of the U.S. and European Christian missionaries who accompaniedtheir husbands and fathers to settle in Labrang and elsewhere along China’s frontier zoneprior to 1949 rarely left theirmission compounds,while themenwent out daily to proselytize,network, and travel. SeeWayne Persons andMinnie Persons, personal communication, 1997;also cf. Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple. Also, Beatrice Miller says that whenWorld War II trade brought Tibetan women traders down to India, Indian women werehorrified by their seeming spatial freedoms and assumed all Tibetan women, including thosefrom the higher social classes, were sexually promiscuous. See Miller, “Views of Women’sRoles in Buddhist Tibet,” in Studies in the History of Buddhism, ed. A. K. Narain (Delhi: BRPublishing, 1980), 155–165.

29 See Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton: Princeton University School of Ar-chitecture, 1992); NancyDuncan, “RenegotiatingGender and Sexuality in Public and PrivateSpaces,” inBodyspace: DestabilizingGeographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Duncan (London:Routledge, 1996), 127–145; and Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1992).

30 Toni Huber, The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain: Popular Pilgrimage and Visionary Landscapein Southeast Tibet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11.

31 Any account of communities subjected to abrupt and imposedhistorical transformations riskssetting up a reified before-and-after scenario that represents all change as occurring from thedisjuncture alone. Such a narrative in this case all too easily coincides with both dominantnarratives: the Western idea of Tibet as a changeless Shangri-la, and Labrang Tibetans’oft-repeated views of themselves as victims, not agents, of change brought solely by theChinese Communists. In providing an analysis of a cultural logic of sex difference operativein the Labrang region, I do not mean to imply this is a static system of meanings sharedby all Tibetans. Here I mean only to sketch some of the important structural relationshipsamongkey categories that shaped theway locals negotiated andparticipated inmajor changesoccurring throughout the twentieth century.


32 Huber,Cult of Pure CrystalMountain. Also seeVincanneAdams, “TheProduction of Self andBody in Sherpa-Tibetan Society,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnomedicine,ed. Mark Nichter (Montreux, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1992),and Adams, Equity of the Ineffable: Cultural and Political Constraints on Ethnomedicine Asa Health Problem in Contemporary Tibet (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Population andDevelopment Studies, 1999).

33 The most commonly used word for the body in Labrang, phung bo, or “heap,” reflects theinfluence of Buddhist karmic morality on popular thinking.

34 David Lichter and Lawrence Epstein heuristically distinguish between lay Tibetan notionsof pollution (tib. grib) acquired by offending worldly gods through inappropriate actions orbodily impropriety, on one hand, and Buddhist notions of acquiring karmic pollution (tib.sgrib) by accumulating sin (tib. sdig pa) that obscures the mind in pursuit of liberation fromrebirth, on the other. See Lichter and Epstein, “Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life,”223–254. I follow Toni Huber in the view that ordinary Tibetans, lay and monastic, do notnecessarily distinguish these two; they are instead united in a widespread notion of ritual-social propriety viewed as “cleanliness” (tib. gtsang ma). See Huber, “Putting the Gnas Backinto Gnas-skor: Rethinking Tibetan Buddhist Pilgrimage Practice,” Tibet Journal 19, no. 2(summer 1994): 23–60.

35 I heard various explanations for how an unclean lineage (tib. rgyud pa mi gtsang) originated.Usually, though, it involved a particularly offensive act committed in a sacred place, suchas passing gas in a temple. Such explanations also make sense of the widespread leprosythat plagued sedentary populations in northeastern Tibetan regions in the early twentiethcentury. According to Robert Ekvall, locals attributed the disease to the wrath of offendedearth deities (tib. sa bdag); see Ekvall, Religious Observances in Tibet: Patterns and Function(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 80. The disease is still referred to today as theorigin of some unclean lineages. The resulting pollutionwas then passed down to all children,regardless of whether the offending agent was the mother or father. People most generallysaid one can tell a member of an unclean lineage by their offensive body odor (tib. ser ru brogi). One should not eat their food, and matchmakers would advise families not to marry theirchildren to them. However, I never met someone who was identified as such a person.

36 As JanetGyatsoargues, despite recent attemptsbyWestern feminists to recuperate “feminine”experience in Indian and Tibetan tantric texts, tantric yoga techniques for liberation werestructured on male physiology and sexual experience (i.e., the flow and retention of semen,ejaculation, etc.). SeeGyatso, “Juicing theOther:ComparativeStudyof theRole of theFemalePartner in Tantra” (paper given at University of Michigan Buddhist Studies Conference, the“TantricTurn inBuddhism,” 2000). In JudithCampbell’swords, then, themale yoginwas the“Buddha-subject,” and his essential other, the consort, was female; see Campbell, Traveller inSpace: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism (New York: George Braziller, 1996).From this perspective, Buddhist tantric liberation was premised on a male-female sexual


polarity that the masculine subject must control and transcend by utilizing the female-sexedother as a vessel, aid, and polluting threat and then appropriating her power into his ownbody. See Gyatso’s forthcoming book on the physical aspects of sex and gender in medievalTibetan Buddhist tantric and medical texts.

37 See Charlene Makley, “Embodying the Sacred: Gender and Monastic Revitalization inChina’s Tibet” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), for an analysis of the ways nunswere constructed as inherently inferior vis-à-vis monks in Labrang.

38 It is interesting to note in this light Campbell’s observation that the institution of incarnatelamasamongTibetans couldbe seenas representingadreamofexclusivelymale reproduction,purified of the roles of sex and women’s bodies.

39 See Charles Keyes, “Ambiguous Gender: Male Initiation in a Northern Thai Buddhist So-ciety,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline W. Bynum, StevanHarrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 66–89, and Leonard Zwilling,“Buddhism andHomosexualityAs Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts,” inBuddhism, Gender, andSexuality, ed. José Cabezón (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

40 Note that the notion of desire in Tibetan, dod pa, roughly meaning “lust” or “carnal desire,”also carries connotations of active striving, aspiring, and intending. Gyatso, “Juicing theOther,” in comparing medieval Tibetan medical and tantric texts argues that the phrase dodpa sbyod pa, “to act out desire,” refers exclusively in those contexts to males.

41 The famous iconoclast scholar from Amdo, Gedun Chöpel, in his 1938 Treatise on Passion[‘Dod pa’i bsTan bCos], argues against this widespread view of the female body and says sucha notion is not Buddhist. He insists, not unlike recent Western feminist Buddhists, that a realBuddhist view is that all humans are equally unclean because the body of flesh is unclean.However, quite typically of Tibetan androcentrism, he redefines the female body againsta male standard: she has everything he does, only inside. See Gedun Chöpel, Tibetan Artsof Love: Sex, Orgasm, and Spiritual Healing, trans. Jeffrey Hopkins (New York: Snow Lion,1992).

42 Sherry Ortner argues that among Sherpas, the concept of pollution (tib. grib) is not partic-ularly “sex-linked” because the effluvia of both male and female bodies is considered to bepolluting. By contrast, gamchu, the female power to drain others’ special powers throughtouch, is the only really sex-linked pollution. However, in monastic contexts such as Labrangespecially, female bodily processes associated with sexuality (i.e., menstruation and child-birth) in contradistinction to male asceticism were considered to be more polluting than maleeffluvia. Thus, while monks and laymen could urinate on monastic grounds, menstruatingwomen in that space were considered to be unclean. In addition, Tibetan men across regionswidely avoid birthing women. See Ortner, “The Founding of the First Sherpa Nunnery andthe Problemof ‘Women’As anAnalytic Category,” inFeminist Re-Visions:WhatHas Been andMight Be, ed. V. Patraka and L. Tilly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Women’s StudiesProgram, 1983), 109; also cf. Sarah Pinto “Pregnancy and Childbirth in Tibetan Culture,” in


Buddhist Women across Cultures: Realizations, ed. Karma Lekshe Tsomo (New York: SUNYPress, 1999), 159–168.

43 Charlotte Furth’s work on fang shu practices of sexual “arts” in Ming China is interestinghere. She documents in a very different cultural milieu strikingly similar constructions ofmasculinity and the liberative effects of manly self-control in sexual intercourse with com-pliant female bodies. See Furth, “Rethinking Van Gulik: Sexuality and Reproduction inTraditional Chinese Medicine,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed.Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994).

44 Gedun Chöpel, Tibetan Arts of Love, 158. Jeffrey Hopkins, whose translation of GedunChöpel’s Treatise I rely on here, argues that even though, like the earlier famous Tibetanmonk-scholar Mipam, Gedun Chöpel draws on the centuries-long Indian tradition of expo-sitions on the sexual arts, “Gedun Chöpel did not just translate Indian materials into Tibetan.He used Indian texts as general sources for elaboration from his own creativity” (ibid., 39).

45 Goldstein, “Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery,” 15.46 Even the antinomian “madman” Gedun Chöpel in his Treatise on Passion was careful not to

transgress dictums on secrecy concerning tantric sexual practices; see Gedun Chöpel, TibetanArts of Love, 42.

47 See Melvyn Goldstein, “A Study of the Ldab Ldop,” Central Asiatic Journal 9 (1964): 125–141. To date, there is very little information on homosexual practice in Tibetan Buddhistmonasteries, but some scholars assert that traditionalmonastic codes singled out heterosexualactivity as the paradigmatic form of sexual transgression. For example, Leonard Zwillingargues that the Vinaya (books of monastic discipline) punishes all intentional sexual miscon-duct with a hierarchy of punishments for monks and nuns, but homosexual practices wereconsidered less grave offenses. See Zwilling, “Buddhism As Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts,”209.

48 Tibetan beliefs about incest follow the lines of the kinship system, which counts members ofboth lineages equally and divides them into generations in relation to ego. Thus all relationsof one’s own generation (siblings and cousins) are symbolically equal and thus would beincestuous lovers. All relations of ego’s parents’ generation, including affines, that is, mother-and father-in-law, are symbolically parents and thus would be incestuous lovers.

49 In this light, it is easy to understand why Gedun Chöpel complains he could not get womento give him straight answers to his “research” questions about female sexuality. He says theyonly laughed in embarrassment and shook their fists at him. Fortunately, he did not considersuch research to be vital to his grand exposition on the true nature of sexuality (for men!).

50 One day when I was working with two Tibetan laywomen to write down a common lagzhas sung in nomad regions around Labrang, the two women went to great, shriekinglengths to keep the paper from the eyes of a Tibetan male friend who happened along. Heimmediately surmisedwhat theywere doing andmade a big showof grabbing the paper. The


verses of the song we had written so far said nothing overtly sexual. Instead, they expressedthe courtship hopes of both male and female protagonists for a faithful, honest lover, usingcommon metaphors to swear a strong, unwavering commitment despite the disapproval ofparents. In addition, at the annual summer festival (tib. glu rol) I attended held in a Rebgongvillage just north of Labrang, a standard element of the program is for male, cross-dressedcomedians to sing love songs to the crowd—the humor lying in its inappropriateness for sucha mixed group. The all-women audience in ritual retaliation hold their sun umbrellas upbetween their bodies and the cross-dressed singers and hide behind them or avert their eyesuntil the song is done. Finally, while circumambulating the monastery one day on the peakcircuit, two Tibetan laywomen and I coaxed a young shepherd girl to sing a love song forus. She would not agree to do it until she had moved a careful (symbolic) distance from themonastery and turned her back to it.

51 Wives were widely considered to be responsible for the propitiation of household deitiesor “stove gods” (tib. thab lha). Any behavior not in line with ritual-social propriety waspotentially “unclean” (tib. mi gtsang ma) and offensive to the stove gods and thus could bringharm to the whole household. In addition, the embodiment of destructive gossip in someTibetan communities was a demoness called the Gossip Girl (tib. mi kha bu mo). She wastargeted in exorcism rites aimed at eradicating her negative social effects. See Lichter andEpstein, “Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life,” and Matthew Kapstein, “TurningBack Gossip,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 527–537. John Ardussi and Lawrence Epstein describe how womenwho were seen to be too publicly pious were called witches (tib. phra men ma) and blamed forvarious negative effects on the community and individuals; see Ardussi and Epstein, “TheSaintly Madman in Tibet,” in Himalayan Anthropology: The Indo-Tibetan Interface, ed. JamesFisher (TheHague:Mouton, 1973). Also, inmy conversationswith Labrang villagers, I noteda definite tendency to attribute to young widows or girlfriends an innate, corporeal impuritythat had somehow brought about the untimely demise of their husbands or boyfriends. Anunlucky woman who lost more than one husband or lover was likely to be deemed uncleanand unmarriageable for the rest of her life.

52 Perhaps because, historically, the weight of social controls on sexuality in Buddhism hasfocused on regulating monks, and morality is considered to be largely an individual matter,unlike other religious cultures, direct Buddhist regulation of lay sexuality and householdaffairs is uncommon. For example, traditionally there was little Buddhist presence at thevarious rituals ofmarriage amongTibetans. Affairs internal to tribes, encampments, villages,and households were handled by (male) secular authorities and lay rituals. As Zwilling notes,in Vinaya texts there is little instruction about sexuality aimed at the laity. Yet the importanceof marriage meant that adultery carried a stigma in the lay community, and adultery wasmuch more reprehensible for a woman to be caught at than a man. I heard several storiesin Labrang about adulterous women being justly beaten by their husbands. Interestingly,


Gedun Chöpel, for all his sexual libertinism, argues strongly that adultery for both men andwomen is wrong.

53 My monk friend Konchog explicitly made this analogy in our conversation, and he cited asemphasis the Chinese saying that plays on the different gender connotations of the Chinesehomophones jia 1 and jia 4: nande dang jia, nude gei jia (men bear up the household whilewomen are married into it).

54 In a wedding song reprinted in a 1981 Qinghai Tibetan language magazine, the male singerrepresenting the groom’s family locates the divine/historical precedent for this type of mar-riage in that of the great seventh-century king and founder of the Tibetan Yarlung dynasty,Song tsan gampo, and the Chinese princess who traveled to Tibet to be his bride. Note theassociation of such patrilocal marriage with the proud strength of a unified Tibetan state.

55 See Robert Ekvall, “The Tibetan Self-Image,” Pacific Affairs 33 (1960): 369, and J. H. Edgar,“Geographical Control and Human Reactions in Tibet,” Journal of the West China BorderResearch Society (1924): 14–16.

56 SeeLiAnzhai, “TheTibetanFamily inRelation toReligion,”AsianHorizon 2 (summer 1949):25–36, and Matthias Hermanns, “The Status of Women in Tibet,” Anthropological Quarterly26, no. 3 (1953).

57 Zhang Qiyun, Xiahe Xian Zhi [Xiahe County gazetteer] (rpt., Taibei: Zhongguo FangzhiYeshu, 1969).

58 Li Anzhai, “Chuan, Gan Shu Xian Bianmin Fenbu Gaikuang”; Li Shijin, “Labuleng zhiRenkou” [The population of Labrang], Bianjiang Tongxun [Frontier news] 5, no. 2 (1948).

59 This term, still in use today to gloss the Chinese jinu, literally means “woman who sells thelower (body parts).” Note that in Tibetan regions to sell the body in this way is exclusivelyassociated with women. There is no equivalent word for men.

60 Such liaisons were contracted between Tibetan women and itinerant Han Chinese and Huitraders, aswell asbetweenTibetanwomenandTibetanmen.While someof these“marriages”were love matches that ultimately lasted lifetimes, others represented a man buying exclusiveaccess to a favorite lover for a certain contract period.Travelwriters and other observers attestto these types of practices in most such towns along the Sino-Tibetan frontier.

61 Tibetans, just like Chinese, could attribute civilized sexual respectability to themselves as away to distinguish themselves from regional or ethnic others they considered more primitiveand sexually promiscuous. See Huber, Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain.

62 Jamyang Norbu, Rangzen Charter: The Case for Tibetan Independence (published on-line onWorld Tibet Network News, 27 April 1999), 4.

63 See Tibet Information Network Briefing Paper 31 (1999) for a paradigmatic example of thistype of social analysis. However, a more recent Tibet Information Network (December 2000)publication, reporting the results of interviews with Tibetans in Lhasa on their views of thecontemporary scene there, states that there are more than seven thousand Tibetan prostitutes


in Lhasa, ranging in age from fifteen to forty-five, and that they far outnumber Chineseprostitutes in the city.

64 Tibet Information Network Briefing Paper 31 (1999), 22.65 Hence the spate of accounts in the international news media following the release of the 1999

Tibet Information Network report on prostitution that depict prostitution as a Chinese state“plot” against Tibetans. One such account, probably echoing the politically charged rumormill among Tibetans there, absurdly states that “the Chinese authorities” have been secretlyteachingChinese prostitutesTibetan and training them to “target”monks inLhasa. See JennyMorris, “China Uses Prostitutes to Bring Shame on Tibetan Monks,” Telegraph (London),10 May 1999. Similarly, see Jasper Becker, “Prostitution Undermining Tibet Culture,” SouthChina Morning Post, 12 August 1999.

66 See Ma Haotian, Gan Qing Zang Bianqu Kaocha Ji; Li Anzhai, Labrang: A Study in the Field(1957; rpt., Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, 1982); Huang Zhengqing, Huang ZhengqingYu Wushi Jiamayang [Huang Zhengqing and the fifth Jamyang Shepa] (Lanzhou: GansuMinzu Chubanshe, 1989); and Yu Shiyu, “Jieshao Zangmin Funu” [Introducing Tibetanwomen], in Yu Shiyu Zangqu Kaocha Wenji [Selected writings from Yu Shiyu’s Investigationsin Tibetan regions] (1944; rpt., Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe, 1990), 97–102. Manyof these efforts took shape while the monastery’s head lama, Jamyang Shepa, was absent,undertaking the monastic studies in Lhasa traditional for those who held that position. Hedid not return until the spring of 1940, at which time he moved to consolidate the power ofthe monastery under his office, improve the discipline of monks, and with his power basethus secured, initiate some modernizing reforms on his own. Note that Hopkins, readingGedun Chöpel’s Treatise on Passion, points out that at this same time (1938), Gedun Chöpelechoes Buddhist temporal themes of the continuous degradation of the Dharma and lamentsthat purely intentioned celibate asceticism was increasingly rare. See Gedun Chöpel, TibetanArts of Love, 126.

67 As Zhong Xueping notes, CCP official discourse replaced the terms nanren and nuren for“men” and “women” with nantongzhi and nutongzhi (“male” and “female comrade”) becausethey had fewer sexual connotations and signified the devotion ofmale and female subjects notto one another but to the state. See “Male Suffering and Male Desire: The Politics of ReadingHalf of Man Is Woman, by Zhang Xianliang,” in Gilmartin et al., Engendering China.

68 “The BlackWickedness of theDeceiving Reactionaries Belonging to the Religious Establish-ments Is Quite Intolerable,” Minzu Tuanjie [Nationalities unite], 22 November 1958.

69 See Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic: A Report to the International Commission of Jurists(Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, 1960). Gail Hershatter, in her recent com-prehensive study of prostitution in pre- and postrevolution China, states that Communistdiscourse about prostitution shared with its KMT precedents a belief that it was a great socialevil and sign of national weakness. But CCP reformers broke with earlier discourses thatemphasized the “naturalness” of prostitution as an outcome of compulsive heterosexuality


and argued instead that it was a social product and prostitutes were therefore victims thatshould be rehabilitated. Hershatter tells of the 1950–1951 campaigns to eradicate prostitutionaltogether by detainingwomen in “women’s labor training institutes” to be taught to functionas model socialist citizens. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 322.

70 See Dhondup Choedon, Life in the Red Flag People’s Commune (Dharamsala: InformationOffice of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1978).

71 Including the daughter of Apa Alo (ch. Huang Zhengqing), the older brother of JamyangShepa and, as head of the Labrang Tibetan militia, the most powerful Tibetan lay official inthe region between 1927 and 1949.

72 See, for example, FrankDikotter, Sex, Culture, andModernity inChina:Medical Science and theConstruction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst, 1995); HarrietEvans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gendersince 1949 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); and Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures.

73 Thus, for example, as several former monks told me, when monks were being forced tomarry in Amdo regions, including at Labrang, they were lined up with single laywomen ina room with state officials looking on. It was the men, however, who were allowed to choosetheir wives among the women assembled there. In the Communist reckoning of householdsand distribution of land and goods, males were considered the heads. See Panchen Lama,A Poisoned Arrow: The Secret Report of the Tenth Panchen Lama (1960; rpt., London: TibetInformation Network, 1997), 50.

74 Zhang Qingyou, “Jiefang Chuqi Xiahe Gongwei Fushi yu Fam Fushi Douzheng Shiwei” [Asynopsis of corruptionwithin theXiaheparty committee and the struggle against it during theearly liberation period inXiahe], inXiaheDangshi Ziliao [Research onXiahe party affairs], ed.ZhangQingyou (Lanzhou:ZhonggongXiaheXianWeiDangshiZiliaoZhengjiBangongshi,1991),1:50.

75 Panchen Lama, Poisoned Arrow, 55. As more information about the Maoist period in Chinacomes to light with the publication of memoirs and biographies, historians now state thatcontrary to state propaganda and campaigns, prostitutionwasnever fully eradicated inChina.Instead all kinds of sexual exploitation ofwomen continued at different levels within the newpolitical economy of state-arbited male prestige and relative wealth. Mao Zedong’s owncompulsive pursuit of sexual liaisons with women is a major case in point; cf. Hershatter,Dangerous Pleasures, 332.

76 Note that the phrase zhabs ‘den, “disgrace” or “shame,” connotes bringing harm to one’sreputation in others’ judgment. The Tshig mDzod Chenmo glosses it in Chinese as “to loseface” (diu lian).

77 See Honig and Hershatter, Personal Voices; Evans, Women and Sexuality in China; and Xi-aoping Li, “Fashioning the Body in Post-Mao China,” in Consuming Fashion: Adorning theTransnational Body, ed. Anne Brydon and Sandra Niessen (Oxford: Berg Press, 1998), 71–80.

78 Dutton, Streetlife China, 13.


79 Ann Anagnost, “A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-MaoChina,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. FayeGinsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),23.

80 Some Tibetans I spoke to who had attended Chinese middle schools were exposed to classeson “hygiene” that apparently touched on the topic of sex. Only in the past few years, however,as the incidence of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases rises, have more explicitefforts been undertaken to combat public silence about sex and its consequences. Theseefforts have been focused on peer education programs among university students in largecities like Shanghai.

81 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, 200.82 Observers have noted the great expansion and diversification of markets in sexual services

provided by women throughout China, including poor rural women being kidnapped intosexual slavery, university students making extra money on the side, or high-priced escortsexclusively targeting wealthy businessmen and cadres. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures;Evans, Women and Sexuality in China; and Dutton, Streetlife China.

83 See, for example, A mdo’i kha shags [Comedic duets from Amdo] (Xining: Qinghai MinzuChubanshe, 1993).

84 Note that here Drolma makes recourse to what Wang Qingshan calls the “durative aspect”in Amdo Tibetan verb forms, adding the suffix bsdad gi (past form of the verb ‘dug, to stay)to the past form of the verb ‘grig, to be correct, appropriate. See Wang Qingshan, A Grammarof Spoken Amdo Tibetan (Chengdu: Sichuan Minzu Chubanshe, 1995). In this way, Drolmaemphasizes her reassuringly ongoing state of being correct in marriage.

85 This process was strikingly apparent to me in a 1995 print ad I saw in the in-air magazineof Dragonair, the airline that offered flights from Hong Kong to Lanzhou. The ad wasfor an internet florist company and was dominated by a huge photo of a beautiful Chinesewoman holding flowers. The copy next to her body (not the flowers) read, “accepting ordersworldwide.”

86 See L. H. M. Lin, “Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of Asian Women inModernity,” positions 7 (fall 1999): 277–306.

87 During a party one evening in my room, a well-known Tibetan folksinger who hailed froma nomad region and always emphasized his nomadic masculinity in dress and demeanor gotvery drunk. Inhibitions gone, he expressed his sadness at the fate of Tibetans under Chineserule and in the same breath told me how much he wanted to exchange his five-foot, five-inchbody for that of the more-than-six-foot-tall, blonde, young male German tourist there.

88 This is a construction that has been around since at least the timewhenWesternwomenbeganto travel outside their home countries, accompanying missionary or colonialist husbands or,for the first time, traveling on their own. Gedun Chöpel, writing in 1938, attributes toWestern women bestial, masculinized, yet exciting sexuality that transgresses all local taboos


in contradistinction to the Indian and Tibetan women he catalogs: “In general a girl of theWest is beautiful, splendorous, and more courageous than others. Her behavior is coarse, andher face is like a man’s. There is even hair around her mouth. Fearless and terrifying, she canbe tamed only by passion. Able to suck the phallus at the time of play, the girl of the West isknown to drink the regenerative fluid. She does it even with dogs, bulls, and other animalsandwith father and son, etc. She goeswithout hesitationwithwhoever cangive the enjoymentof sex” (Gedun Chöpel, Tibetan Arts of Love, 163). When I was staying in Chengdu in 1993,an Australian man who had lived there for years, spending his time exclusively with youngTibetan men from the Kham region, told me he was growing weary of their preoccupationwith sexual conquests. He said that rumors were constantly circulating among them aboutthe wild sexual activities of the Western women students in the city.

89 See Catriona Bass, Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950 (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1998).

90 Dutton, Streetlife China, 4.91 Schein, “Consumption of Color,” 477.92 I witnessed this dynamic on several occasions. One afternoon while out shopping, I was

chatting with a local Tibetan village man when a young American girl walked by in theshortest of shorts and sandals. I watched as all conversations among Tibetan men around herstopped and heads followed her. The man I was with caught my eye as she passed and askedme, “Is that how it is where you’re from?” (tib. Khyod tsho sacha na demozig e red?). Brushinghis cheek with his index finger, he said that here if a woman wore that, it would be veryembarrassing (tib. ngatsho demozig gon na ngo res tsha rgyu red).

93 SeeDruGladney, “RepresentingNationality in China: RefiguringMinority/Majority Identi-ties,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 92–123. As Stevan Harrell points out,the “Yunnan School” of contemporary painting and the style that emerged in Chengdu inthe late 1970s focused on depicting pretty Tibetan girls; see Harrell, “Introduction: CivilizingProjects and the Reaction to Them,” in Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed.Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 11.

94 See Tsering Shakya, “The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers: The Development of TibetanLiterature since 1950,” Manoa 12, no. 2 (winter 2000): 28–40.

95 Hershatter,Dangerous Pleasures, 348.During the four-year period I visitedLabrang and otherTibetan regions, I heardmany stories ofWesternmen seeking sexual encounterswithTibetanwomen. I even got to read the dismissive “love letter” sent by an Australian man in responseto the pleas of his erstwhile Tibetan woman lover in Labrang for him to return. He told herthat what they had had was “special,” but right now he was taking a “well-deserved rest” ona beach. The flip side of this eroticization of Tibetans by outsiders is the recent fascinationamong Chinese men and women with Tibetan masculinity, which they imagine to epitomizevirile, brutish sexuality or, in the case of some women writers, virile, yet tender sexuality incontradistinction to uncaring Han men. See Chi Li, “The Heart More Than the Flesh” [“Xin


Bi Shen Xian Lao”], in Chinese Literature (Beijing: Chinese Literature Press, 1999), 11–38;cf. Kam Louie, “The Macho Eunuch: The Politics of Masculinity in Jla Pingwa’s ‘HumanExtremities,’” Modern China 17, no. 2 (April 1991): 163–182, and Almaz Khan, “Who Arethe Mongols? State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the PRC,” in NegotiatingEthnicities in China and Taiwan, ed. Melissa J. Brown (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East AsianStudies, 1996), 125–155.

96 This perhaps explains the fact that the only place I saw posted the advertisements, ubiquitousin Chinese cities, for treatment of sexually transmitted diseases was on the outside posts ofthe prayer wheel buildings along the circumambulation path around the monastery—whereall visiting pilgrims pass.

97 As I mentioned earlier, the state was implicated in this as well, in that state family planningpolicies widely assumed that women alone were responsible for contraception, and theyfocused on making contraception proper and available to married women, not to youngwomen before marriage.

98 Rape did occur in the Labrang region, but it was relatively rare—or else it was rarely reportedto the police.

99 In this light it is interesting to note that observers such as Ekvall reported in the early decadesof the twentieth century that Tibetans in the Labrang region generally agreed with Chineseand foreign assumptions that Tibetans were more sexually open and that Tibetan mentherefore preferred Tibetan women lovers and spouses, while Han-Tibetan intermarriagewas almost invariably between Han men and Tibetan women. This contrasts sharply withrumors amongurbanTibetans nowadays,which emphasize thatTibetanmenpreferChineseand foreign women to Tibetan women because the former are less conservative. Indeed,marriages between urbanized Tibetan men and Han women have increased since reforms,and stories abounded of Tibetan men traveling to urban centers seeking sexual encounterswith Chinese prostitutes.

on the edge of respectability: sexual politics in china’s tibet

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