On the edge of respectability: Sexual politics in China's tibet

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Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 575-630

  Makley, Charlene E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347673278     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10-3-575     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. By 1990, in contrast to more rural townships and villages in and around the valley that were predominately Tibetan, Tibetans in town comprised only around 20 percent of some twelve thousand registered residents, with Han and Muslim Chinese making up equal proportions of the rest. See Ma Denghun and Wanma Duoji (Pad-ma rDo-rJe), Gannan Zangzu Buluo Gaihuang [An introduction to the Tibetan tribes of Gannan] (Hezuo: Zhongguo Renmin Zhengxie Shanghui Gannan Zangzu Zizhizhou, 1994).
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978).
3. 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 Judith Butler, has taken inspiration from J. L. Austin's theories of the social construction functions of "performatives" in speech. See Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993);
4. also Rosalind C. Morris, "All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender," Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 567-592.
5. However, I find the most inspirational recent works to be those bringing a wider range of analytic tools to bear in socio- or anthropological-linguistic studies of interlocutors' "dialogic" coproduction of sooocultural 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).
6. See, for example, Michael Dutton, Street-life China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
7. Emily Homgand Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 80s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988);
8. Deborah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, Studies on China, 22 (Berkeley and Dos Angeles: University of California Press, 1999);
9. May fair Mei-Hui Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
10. and Nancy Chen, Constance D. Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Dyn Jeffery, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
11. See, for example, Dutton, Streetlife China;
12. Sandra Teresa Hyde, "Sex Tourism Practices on the Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang," in Chen et al., China Urban, 143-162;
13. Mayfair Yang, "From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women's Public Sphere in China," in Yang, Spaces of Their Own, 35-67;
14. Louisa Schein, "The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China," in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, ed. Roger N, Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 473-486;
15. and Tibet Information Network, "Social Evils: Prostitution and Pornography in Lhasa," Tibet Information Network Briefing Paper 31 (1999).
16. See Pu Wencheng, Gan Qing Zangchuan Fojiao Siywan (Tibetan Buddhist monasteries of Gansu and Qinghai] (Xining: Qinghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1990);
17. and Luo Faxi, Labuleng Si Gaikuang [An introduction to Labrang monastery] (Lanzhou: Gansu Minzu Chubanshe, 1987).
18. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, eds.. Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6.
19. For example, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Maying Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989);
20. Ann McClmtock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
21. and Ann Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990, 13-36.
22. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 9.
23. 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 Thailand held only 1-2 percent of men. The situation at Labrang was the same as that described by Goldstein 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 monastery itself. See Goldstein, "The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery," in Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, ed. Melvyn Goldstein and Matthew Kapstem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 15-52.
24. Based on figures from censuses taken before 1949, monks in the region now roughly equivalent to Gannan prefecture were about 17 percent of the Tibetan male population, while monks in Labrang monastery represented about 15 percent of the Tibetan male population in Xiahe County. See Li Anzhai,"Chuan,Gan ShuXian Bianmm Fenbu Gaikuang, 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.
25. Yu Xiangwen, in his analysis of kinship and marriage among nomads just west of Labrang, found that monks represented 16 percent (21 of 133 men) of the male population there. See "Hequ Zangqu Youmu Zangmin zhi Jiating Zuzhi" (The marriage system among Tibetan nomads in the bend of the Yellow River], Dongfang Zazhi [Oriental magazine] 39, no. 1 (1943): 1-3.
26. See Gu Zhizhong and Long Zhi, Dao Qinghai Qu [En route to Qmghai] (Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshu Guan 1935);
27. Gao Changzhu, "Di 22 Ti: Labuleng: Jinkuang ji qi Kaifa Yijian" [The twenty-second district: Labrang: Some perspectives on its current situation and development], in Bianjiang Wenti Lunwen Ji [Collected works on frontier issues] (Zhengzhong Shuju, 1942), 430-489;
28. Susan Rimhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (Cincinnati: Foreign Christian Missionary Society, 1901);
29. Li Anzhai, "Xikang Dege zhi Lishi yu Renkou" (The history and population of Derge in Xikang], in Li Anzhai Zangxue Wenlun Xuan (1946; rpt., Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe, 1992), 152-217;
30. and Robert Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
31. Eric Teichman, Travels of a Consular Officer in North-West China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921);
32. Frederic Wulsm, an American explorer who traveled to Labrang in 1923, practically drooled over the Tibetan women he saw there, describing them as "pretty girls with magnificent headdresses, often with their gowns dropped down to leave the right shoulder bare" (cited in China's Inner Asian Frontier, ed. Mary Ellen Alonso [Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 19791, 96;
33. Prasenjit Duara, "The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China," History and Theory 37, no. 3 (October 1998): 298.
34. He rshatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 260.
35. Duara, "Regime of Authenticity," 300.
36. Ma Haotian, Gan Qing Zang Bianqu Kaocha Ji, 38.
37. The entire passage reads, "Labuleng hao bi shi yi ge hen rnei 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. If this virgin cannot become diligent and establish herself, then she will inevitably degenerate (duoluo)]. The term duoluo has connotations of moral corruption. Duoluo fengchen means to be driven to prostitution (see Gu and Long, Dao Qinghai Qu, 79).
38. The use of a sexualized analogy 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 similar images to describe a Tibet debauched by its encounter with modernity: "But now .. . the fairy Prince 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 and its idolised Grand Lama, shorn of his sham nimbus, have yielded up their secrets and he disenchanted before our Western eyes" (Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism: With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism, and Mythology [1895; rpt., New York: Dover, 1972], 1-2).
39. David Lichter and Lawrence Epstein, "Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life," in Karma; An Anthropological Inquiry, ed. Charles Keyes and Valentine Daniel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 249.
40. Also, Beatrice Miller says that when World War II trade brought Tibetan women traders down to India, Indian women were horrified by their seeming spatial freedoms and assumed all Tibetan women, including those from the higher social classes, were sexually promiscuous. See Miller, "Views of Women's Roles in Buddhist Tibet," in Studies in the History of Buddhism, ed. A. K. Narain (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1980), 155-165.
41. See Beatriz Colomma, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton: Princeton University School of Architecture, 1992);
42. Nancy Duncan, "Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Public and Private Spaces," in Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996), 127-145;
43. and Daphne Spam, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
44. Tom Huber, The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain: Popular Pilgrimage and Visionary Landscape in Southeast Tibet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11.
45. Huber, Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain.
46. Also see Vincanne Adams, "The Production of Self and Body in Sherpa-Tibetan Society," in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnomedicine, ed. Mark Nichter (Montreux, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1992),
47. and Adams, Equity of the Ineffable: Cultural and Political Constraints on Ethnomedicine As a Health Problem in Contemporary Tibet (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, 1999).
48. David Lichter and Lawrence Epstein heuristically distinguish between lay Tibetan notions of pollution (tib.grib) acquired by offending worldly gods through inappropriate actions or bodily 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 from rebirth, on the other. See Lichter and Epstein, "Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life," 223-254.
49. I follow Tom Huber in the view that ordinary Tibetans, lay and monastic, do not necessarily 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 Back into Gnas-skor: Rethinking Tibetan Buddhist Pilgrimage Practice," Tibet Journal 19, no. 2 (summer 1994): 23-60.
50. 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, such as passing gas in a temple. Such explanations also make sense of the widespread leprosy that plagued sedentary populations in northeastern Tibetan regions in the early twentieth century. According to Robert Ekvall, locals attributed the disease to the wrath of offended earth 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 the origin of some unclean lineages. The resulting pollution was then passed down to all children, regardless of whether the offending agent was the mother or father. People most generally said one can tell a member of an unclean lineage by their offensive body odor (tib. ser ru bro gi). One should not eat their food, and matchmakers would advise families not to marry their children to them. However, I never met someone who was identified as such a person.
51. In Judith Campbell's words, then, the male yogin was the "Buddha-subject," and his essential other, the consort, was female; see Campbell, Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism (New York: George Braziller, 1996).
52. See Charlene Makley, "Embodying the Sacred: Gender and Monastic Revitahzation in Ghina's Tibet" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), for an analysis of the ways nuns were constructed as inherently inferior vis-à-vis monks in Labrang.
53. See Charles Keyes, "Ambiguous Gender: Male Initiation in a Northern Thai Buddhist Society," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline W. Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richrnan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 66-89,
54. and Leonard Zwilling, "Buddhism and Homosexuality As Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts," in Buddhism, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. José Cabezón (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
55. The famous iconoclast scholar from Amdo, Gedun Chöpel, in his 1938 Treatise on Passion ['Dod pa'i bs Tan bCos], argues against this widespread view of the female body and says such a notion is not Buddhist. He insists, not unlike recent Western feminist Buddhists, that a real Buddhist view is that all humans are equally unclean because the body of flesh is unclean. However, quite typically of Tibetan androcentrisrn, he redefines the female body against a male standard: she has everything he does, only inside. See Gedun Chöpel, Tibetan Arts of hove: Sex, Orgasm, and Spiritual Healing, trans. Jeffrey Hopkins (New York: Snow Lion, 1992).
56. also cf. Sarah Pinto "Pregnancy and Childbirth in Tibetan Culture," in Buddhist Women across Cultures: Realizations, ed. Karma Lekshe Tsomo (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 159-168.
57. Charlotte Furth's work on fang shu practices of sexual "arts" in Ming China is interesting here. She documents in a very different cultural milieu strikingly similar constructions of masculinity and the liberative effects of manly self-control in sexual intercourse with compliant female bodies. See Furth, "Rethinking Van Gulik: Sexuality and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine," in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Christina Gilrnartm, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
58. Gedun Chöpel, Tibetan Arts of Love, 158.
59. Goldstein, "Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery," 15.
60. See Melvyn Goldstein, "A Study of the Ldab Ldop," Central Asiatic Journal 9 (1964): 125-141.
61. To date, there is very little information on homosexual practice in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, but some scholars assert that traditional monastic codes singled out heterosexual activity as the paradigmatic form of sexual transgression. For example, Leonard Zwilling argues that the Vinaya (books of monastic discipline) punishes all intentional sexual misconduct with a hierarchy of punishments for monks and nuns, but homosexual practices were considered less grave offenses. See Zwilling, "Buddhism As Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts," 209.
62. Wives were widely considered to be responsible for the propitiation of household deities or "stove gods" (tib. thab lha). Any behavior not in line with ritual-social propriety was potentially "unclean" (tib. migtsang ma) and offensive to the stove gods and thus could bring harm to the whole household. In addition, the embodiment of destructive gossip in some Tibetan communities was a demoness called the Gossip Girl (tib. mi kha hu mo). She was targeted in exorcism rites aimed at eradicating her negative social effects. See Lichter and Epstein, "Irony in Tibetan Notions of the Good Life," and Matthew Kapstem, "Turning Back Gossip," in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 527-537.
63. John Ardussi and Lawrence Epstein describe how women who were seen to be too publicly pious were called witches (tib. phra men ma) and blamed for various negative effects on the community and individuals; see Ardussi and Epstein, "The Saintly Madman in Tibet," in Himalayan Anthropology: The Indo-Tibetan Interface, ed. James Fisher (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Also, in my conversations with Labrang villagers, I noted a definite tendency to attribute to young widows or girlfriends an innate, corporeal impurity that had somehow brought about the untimely demise of their husbands or boyfriends. An unlucky woman who lost more than one husband or lover was likely to be deemed unclean and unmarnageable for the rest of her life.
64. See Robert Ekvall, "The Tibetan Self-image," Pacific Affairs 33 (1960): 369,
65. and J. H. Edgar, "Geographical Control and Human Reactions in Tibet," Journal of the West China Border Research Society (1924): 14-16.
66. See Li Anzhai, "The Tibetan Family in Relation to Religion " Asian Horizon 2 (summer 1949): 25-36,
67. and Matthias Hermanns, "The Status of Women in Tibet," Anthropological Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1953).
68. Zhang Qiyun, Xiahe Xian Zhi [Xiahe County gazetteer] (rpt, Taibei: Zhongguo Fangzhi Yeshu, 1969).
69. Li Anzhai, "Chuan, Gan Shu Xian Rianmm Fenbu Gaikuang";
70. Li Shijin, "Labuleng zhi Renkou" [The population of Labrang], Bianjiang Tongxun [Frontier news] 5, no. 2 (1948).
71. Jamyang Norbu, Rangzen Charter: The Case for Tibetan Independence (published on-line on World Tibet Network News, 27 April 1999), 4.
72. 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 rumor mill among Tibetans there, absurdly states that "the Chinese authorities" have been secretly teaching Chinese prostitutes Tibetan and training them to "target" monks in Lhasa. See Jenny Morris, "'China Uses Prostitutes to Bring Shame on Tibetan Monks," Telegraph (London), 10 May 1999.
73. Similarly, see Jasper Becker, "Prostitution Undermining Tibet Culture," South China Morning Post, 12 August 1999.
74. Li Anzhai, Labrang: A Study in the Field (1957; rpt., Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, 1982);
75. Huang Zhengqing, Huang Zhengqing Yu Wushi Jiamayang [Huang Zhengqing and the fifth Jamyang Shepa] (Lanzhou: Gansu Minzu Chubanshe, 1989);
76. ''The Black Wickedness of the Deceiving Reactionaries Belonging to the Religious Establishments Is Quite Intolerable," Minzu Tuanjie (Nationalities unite], 22 November 1958.
77. See Tibet and the Chinese People's Republic: A Report to the International Commission of Jurists (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, 1960).
78. See Dhondup Choedon, Life in the Red Flag People's Commune (Dharamsala: Information Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama, 1978).
79. See, for example, Frank Dikotter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst, 1995);
80. Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997);
81. and Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures.
82. Thus, for example, as several former monks told me, when monks were being forced to marry in Amdo regions, including at Labrang, they were lined up with single lay women in a room with state officials looking on. It was the men, however, who were allowed to choose their wives among the women assembled there. Tn the Communist reckoning of households and 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: Tibet Information Network, 1997), 50.
83. Zhang Qingyou, "Jiefang Chuqi Xiahe Gongwei Fushi yu Fam Fushi Douzheng Shiwei" [A synopsis of corruption within the Xiahe party committee and the struggle against it during the early liberation period in Xiahe], in Xiahe Dangshi Ziliao [Research on Xiahe party affairs],ed. Zhang Qingyou (Lanzhou:Zhonggong Xiahe Xian Wei Dangshi Ziliao Zhengji Bangongshi, 1991), 1:50.
84. Panchen Larna, Poisoned Arrow, 55.
85. Evans, Women and Sexuality in China;
86. and Xiaoping Li, "Fashioning the Body in Post-Mao China," in Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body, ed. Anne Brydon and Sandra Niessen (Oxford: Berg Press, 1998), 71-80.
87. Ann Anagnost, "A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 23
88. See, for example, A mdo't kha shags (Comedic duets from Amdo] (Xming: Qmghai Minzu Chubanshe, 1993).
89. 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 Grammar of Spoken Amdo Tibetan (Chengdu: Sichuan Minzu Chubanshe, 1995). In this way, Drolma emphasizes her reassuringly ongoing state of being correct in marriage.
90. See L. H. M. Lin, "Sex Machine: Global Hypermascuhnity and Images of Asian Women in Modernity,"positions 7 (fall 1999): 277-306.
91. See Catriona Bass, Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).
92. Dutton, Street life China, 4.
93. Schein, "Consumption of Color," 477.
94. See Dru Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Minority/Majority Identities, " Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 92-123.
95. As Stevan Harrell points out, the "Yunnan School" of contemporary painting and the style that emerged in Chengdu in the late 1970s focused on depicting pretty Tibetan girls; see Harrell, "Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them," in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 11.
96. See Tsering Shakya, "The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers: The Development of Tibetan Literature since 1950," Manoa 12, no. 2 (winter 2000): 28-40.
97. During the four-year period I visited Lab rang and other Tibetan regions, I heard many stories of Western men seeking sexual encounters with Tibetan women. I even got to read the dismissive "love letter" sent by an Australian man in response to the pleas of his erstwhile Tibetan woman lover in Labrang for him to return. He told her that what they had had was "special," but right now he was taking a "well-deserved rest" on a beach. The flip side of this eroticization of Tibetans by outsiders is the recent fascination among Chinese men and women with Tibetan masculinity, which they imagine to epitomize virile, brutish sexuality or, in the case of some women writers, virile, yet tender sexuality in contradistinction 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;
98. cf. Kam Louie, "The Macho Eunuch: The Politics of Masculinity in Jla Pingwa's 'Human Extremities,'" Modern China 17, no. 2 (April 1991): 163-182,
99. and Almaz Khan, "Who Are the Mongols? State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the PRC," in Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, ed. Melissa J. Brown (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1996), 125-155.