Feminist Applications of Buddhist Thought

Recent years have seen a number of writers draw upon Buddhist thought in their articulations of feminist epistemology. Koppedrayer examines four such works—Rita Gross's Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism, June Campbell's Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism, Anne Klein's Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self, and Winnie Tomm's Bodied Mindfulness: Women's Spirits, Bodies, and Places—which were published within a span of three years during the mid-1990s and which draw on feminist and Buddhist sources to pursue questions related to the construction of women and women's subjectivity. The essay teases out the underlying issues that inform these studies and considers their implications for both Buddhist and women's studies.