When Tibetan Women Speak, Are We Heard? Challenging Etic Frameworks in Tibetan Gender Studies

There is a growing trend among non-Tibetan scholars—primarily those from Western or Chinese backgrounds—to analyze Tibetan women’s experiences through frameworks focused on gendered roles, marginality, or violence in relation to Tibetan men. I have written about how such analyses often overlook critical and temporal factors, such as intersectionality (Lokyitsang 2015) and the historical and ongoing violence and marginalizing policies imposed by Chinese authorities (Lokyitsang 2017a). Moreover, these scholars rarely interrogate their own etic (outsider) assumptions embedded in their own analytics.

Within these frameworks, Tibetan women’s emic (insider) scholarly perspectives are routinely sidelined—especially when some of us turn the analytical lens back on these scholars to examine the power dynamics of their positionalities, and to critique their uncritical use of categories like “modernity” and “gender empowerment.” These categories, rooted in Western Enlightenment ideals, have already been challenged by Black and Indigenous feminist thinkers as embedded in white supremacist frameworks and serving the interest of imperial projects.

For instance, last year I received a CFP (call for papers) from Chinese women PhDs based in Europe, seeking gender-critical analyses of traditional women’s roles in Tibetan society for a volume to be published by Brill. I proposed an article that used Gyalyum Chenmo (Great Mother) Diki Tsering’s life experiences (Lokyitsang 2017b) to critically engage the assumptions underlying their CFP. Unsurprisingly, my proposal was promptly rejected—precisely because it challenged those assumptions. Interestingly, soon after this rejection, the same organizers issued a new and another CFP that echoed some of the very critiques I had outlined in my earlier submission. More recently, additional calls have circulated, focusing on Tibetan mothers or the mothers of tulkus.

Yet none appear genuinely interested in engaging with existing scholarship by Tibetan women on these topics—even though some of us have actively promoted and emphasized the importance of these perspectives within a decolonizing framework for an anti-colonial understanding of Tibetan women’s agency (Lokyitsang 2023, 2017a, 2017b, 2016, 2015, 2014; Gyaley 2023a, 2023b). I have also experienced and written about how this reflects an ongoing inability among some scholars to prioritize listening over speaking as presumed experts—despite the fact that listening is a core ethnographic sensibility and methodological practice, especially when you want to represent rather than silence the voices of others (Lokyitsang 2024).

What is becoming increasingly clear is this: Tibetan women’s voices—whether oral or written in Tibetan, Chinese, or English—are often welcomed by non-Tibetan scholars in tokenizing ways, primarily when we serve as data providers to validate their etic assumptions or to demonstrate their ‘collaboration’ with their native counterpart. Tibetan scholars are treated as informants, not intellectual peers (Lokyitsang 2022). This not only underscores the marginalization of Tibetan-authored scholarship—particularly within Tibetan Studies as shaped by scholars in religious and literary studies—but also reveals an ongoing tendency to privilege white-centric liberal concepts rooted in Western Enlightenment thought.

Increasingly, these concepts are being co-opted by Chinese women scholars—particularly those from mainland China—who write about Tibetan society in ways that reinforce longstanding biases about Tibetan “barbarity,” aligning with Chinese state narratives that similarly rely on Marxist-Leninist reductionism shaped also by Western Enlightenment thought. This dynamic, as I’ve noted and translated in my own scholarship, has been especially critiqued by Black and Indigenous scholars as rooted in white supremacist—and now Chinese supremacist—tendencies that obscure the biases of those who deploy such frameworks to serve broader imperial and racialized projects.

For scholars who are genuinely interested in engaging my critiques for a framework of Tibetan women’s subjectivities that center them, their history, and their thoughts and theories, you can check my interventions on these issues on Lhakar Diaries. I hope this article, along with my other writings, will not only guide you in how to engage with and cite my scholarship, but also encourage you to reconsider how you may be limiting the worlds, experiences, and intellectual contributions of Tibetan women—past and present. Instead, I advocate for a framework that integrates both emic and etic perspectives, as I have done in my article “Becoming Gyalyum Chenmo (Great Mother),” and other articles profiling Tibetan women on Lhakar Diaries. Such an approach illustrates the potential for frameworks that broaden, rather than constrain, understandings of Tibetan life and agency. Here are a list of work that I refer to in this post that you may draw on:

1. On Being Tibetan and a(n intersectional) Feminist (2015)
2. Decolonizing Ethnographic ‘Responsibility’: Towards a Decolonized Praxis (2016)
3. Decolonizing (Neo)Liberal Feminism: Reflections of Tibetan Feminisms (2017a)
4. Becoming Gyalyum Chenmo: Engaging Diki Tsering & Her Gender Critiques (2017b).
5. Desiring Leadership: Tibetan Women’s Association and Gender Advocacy (2023b). It historicizes exile Tibetan women’s contribution to the Tibetan community and movement, and questions around “empowerment/liberation” as a concept advocated by western feminism vs. Tibetan women practitioners of Buddhism.
   • see the shorter Lhakar Diaries version here: Conflict of Desires: Female Tibetan Leaders and Gender Advocacy (2014). It’s here where I first articulate ethnographically Tibetan women’s labor and agency.
6. Decolonizing Praxis: In Conversation with Tsering Yangzom Lama and Dawa Lokyitsang (Gayley 2023a)
   • see how I discuss healing as a decolonizing praxis and Tibetan women’s roles as Mothers.
7. Decolonizing ‘Tibetan’ Studies: Empire, Ethnicity, and Rethinking Sovereignty lecture at Hamburg University (2022)
8. Intergenerational Trauma and The Oracular Voice in Tsering Yangzom Lama’s Debut Novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (Gayley 2023b)
   • Gayley integrates my work w/ Tsering Lama, focusing on how I discuss Tibetan women’s intergenerational labor and decolonizing methodologies
9. On translation with Janet Gyatso, Dawa Lokyitsang, & Amy Langenberg, and the importance of Listening (2024).