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

A Picnic

On a rainy July day in 1995, my husband and I joined a Tibetan village family we knew in the famous Buddhist monastery town of Labrang (now southwest Gansu Province, China) for a picnic in their tent pitched high on a peak above the Sang (ch. Daxia) River valley.¹ The white tents dotting the hillsides in the summer were an important index of Tibetanness in this multiethnic and rapidly urbanizing frontier town. Tibetans were increasingly outnumbered by Han and Muslim Chinese (ch. Hui) residents who served as local cadres or engaged in commerce generated in part by the burgeoning tourism industry centered on the revitalizing monastery.2 This was the time of year, the much-awaited shinglong season, when the Tibetan villages surrounding the monastery celebrated household and community harmony and prosperity in communal offering rites to village deities at their abodes in the mountains, followed by all-day picnicking, songfests, and games. But during that long, damp day of our visit, I was reminded of how the performance of such a local and Tibetan-marked unity critically relied on the maintenance of hierarchical differences in gendered sexuality, differences that, in the contemporary context, could produce seemingly absurd contradictions (to an outsider) as well as greatly unequal moral and physical burdens for men and women.

That day the tent was set up as most Tibetan domestic space is, with the stove and utensils associated with women's cooking and cleaning on one side and the ornate cushions, table, and festive foods associated with men's hosting and recreation on the other. Drolma, the family's daughter-in-law in her late twenties, had married in from a neighboring region.

3 She bustled about helping her mother-in-law cook and serve refreshments. Meanwhile, her father-in-law, her husband, and her husband's closest male friend affectionately lounged against one another on the cushions, keeping each other warm under wool blankets and intermittently napping, telling jokes, and playing cards. My husband and I, as guests, perched on the cushions opposite the men. But as the day wore on, we became increasingly uncomfortable, not because of any major change in the situation, but because we could not get warm! To rely, as did the men, on each other's body heat to do so would have been extremely inappropriate, because in the Labrang region any public behavior 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 of us, we immediately encountered the standard reprimand: Drolma's urgent glance in the direction of her sleeping father-in-law and the quick, discreet brush of her index finger across her cheek. That gesture is widely used among Tibetans to remind one of the shameful or “face-warming” (tib. ngo tsha) 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 dangerously sexual, the cards with which the men casually played were adorned with photos of Chinese women in tiny string bikinis, posed to display as much as possible of the material assets offered by modernity: ample breasts, curvaceous buttocks, glittering televisions, and motorcycles. In the context of contemporary Labrang, where even the prostitutes would not publicly bare their ankles, such images of nearly naked female bodies seemed to me strikingly obscene, yet they circulated among the men with little notice from anyone in the tent that day.

The Erotics of the Exotic

Sex sells. So goes the oft-repeated maxim that conveys the inevitability of both biological imperatives and capitalist profit motives. But as many social theorists have recently argued, recourse to this seemingly explanatory phrase elides the historicity of the relationship...