Gendered boundaries in motion: Space and identity on the Sino‐Tibetan frontier

Abstract

In this article I explore the gendered nature of religious revitalization in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in southwest Gansu Province, China. Post‐Mao reforms in China allowed Tibetans to resume religious practices and rebuild Buddhist institutions proscribed during the Cultural Revolution, and by the early 1990s Tibetans in Labrang were rapidly revitalizing the famous monastery that had once ruled this region along the Sino‐Tibetan frontier. I draw on the work of recent theorists of space, place, and identity to analyze the complex identity politics surrounding this project by conceptualizing spatial, ethnic, and national boundaries as emergent intersections of gendered practices among differently positioned actors. I focus on the Tibetan practice of circumambulation as the key activity that reproduced the sacred centricity and power of the monastery. I demonstrate that in contemporary Labrang, women, as principal circumambulators and household laborers, were doubly burdened with shoring up the core of the Tibetan community in the midst of intense assimilation pressures.