Credit: Liu Chang

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Guest editors

Liu Chang is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include contemporary Tibetan art in China, visual research methods, and feminist spiritualities in East Asia.

Chen Qiujie received her PhD from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL). Her research focuses on lifestyle migration in contemporary China, with a particular interest in the intersections of migration, gender, and tourism on the Tibetan Plateau.

In recent decades, Tibetologists have increasingly sought to understand women[1]. However, given that religion remains deeply embedded in everyday life in Tibet, academic research on Tibetan women focuses primarily on the religious dimension of their lives, encompassing daily practices, culture, and politics. But what, then, constitutes the secular dimension of their existence—not in the sense of secularisation, but as the everyday cultural and public lives beyond explicitly religious practices? To explore this question, this special issue shifts attention toward a different, and comparatively understudied domain: the secular lives of Tibetan women in contemporary China, particularly those who participate in public cultural life. By focusing on cultural actors such as artists, writers, and internet influencers, we foreground Tibetan women not primarily as religious subjects but as participants in creative and cultural life whose activities unfold across artistic, literary, digital, and professional arenas. Far from being politically neutral, these secular domains constitute sites in which Tibetan women negotiate visibility, belonging, aspiration, and gendered identity under conditions shaped by ethnic governance, cultural politics, and unequal forms of representation within the broader project of Chinese nation-making.

Within contemporary Tibetan societies and the field of Tibetan Studies, dominant narratives of identity and authenticity are produced by both internal and external elites of the community, which continue to shape how Tibet is discussed despite growing recognition of diversity (Norbu 1992; Lopez 1999; Kolås and Thowsen 2005; Jabb 2015; Elliott 2015; Hillman 2018). These narratives often frame Tibetans as being caught in a tension between the preservation of tradition and the imperatives of modernity, a widely circulated binary that not only describes but actively organises how Tibetan social life is represented and understood across scholarly, media, and policy domains.

Within this framing, the tension is often implicitly masculinised, insofar as men’s experiences are positioned as the primary site through which social transformation and historical agency are recognised and represented. It is therefore men’s narratives that are understood as those in which “individual achievements can stand for nation building” (Ebron and Tsing 1995, 396). As a result, even when scholarship focuses on Tibetan women, femininity is often excluded. Along with secularisation, globalisation, and decolonisation, the invisibility of Tibetan women is produced within broader nation–ethnicity discourses that hierarchize what counts as central to Tibet and Tibetan-ness. Tibetan women and their spatialized, embodied experiences are systematically marginalised, rendered as silhouettes within Orientalist imaginaries, reduced to footnotes in majority–minority debates, or simply left behind. In the meantime, despite growing scholarly attention to women’s subjectivities across national, transnational, and diasporic contexts (Makley 1997; Butler 2003; Kaur 2025), as well as broader discussions of misogynistic discourse, nationalist affect, and platform infrastructures, relatively little research has examined these issues in relation to Tibetan women in China.

Artists, writers, internet influencers, and other cultural practitioners are often understood through the framework of creative labour, which highlights the tension between aspirations for creative autonomy and the commercial imperatives of cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011), or through the concept of aspirational labour, which draws attention to the promise of creative fulfilment and professional success and to the gendered and classed inequalities embedded in it (Duffy 2016). These frameworks only partly fit the Tibetan women this issue addresses. Unlike professional creative workers whose primary occupations lie within cultural industries, many Tibetan women pursue artistic, literary, and digital practices alongside stable careers in government institutions and other sectors that provide financial security. Their creativity is therefore not simply labour oriented toward professional advancement or economic return. Therefore, we propose creative becoming as one way of understanding these cultural practices, whether contemporary art, literature, film, digital content creation, or grassroots cultural and feminist initiatives. Drawing on cultural studies approaches to identity and representation and on feminist theories of subjectivity and affect (Hall [1990] 2021, 2011, 2012; Berlant 2011), we see creativity as an ongoing process through which subjects are shaped, experienced, and reimagined. This perspective guides the aim of the issue: to foreground Tibetan women as active agents in cultural production, knowledge-making, and the transformation of cultural landscapes and social possibilities.

We invite contributions that ask how Tibetan women in contemporary China sustain creative commitments within the demands of everyday life, and what forms of subjectivity, belonging, and cultural possibility emerge through these processes. We are especially interested in how creative engagements intersect with women’s aspirations and social relationships, and with wider processes of nation-building, ethnic politics, and state governance, and in how cultural production both reflects and shapes the dynamics of gender, ethnicity, and power. Submissions should be empirically grounded and theoretically informed, drawing on original data or primary materials (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods). We welcome interdisciplinary approaches and scholars from diverse academic backgrounds.

Suggested topics (including but not limited to)

• Tibetan women working across traditional and digital cultural sectors, such as artists, filmmakers, influencers, and livestreamers
• Forms, narratives, and aesthetic practices in Tibetan women’s cultural production
• Cultural entrepreneurship among Tibetan women, such as crafts, fashion, tourism, and e-commerce
• Digital and platform cultures shaping Tibetan women’s experiences, such as algorithmic visibility, monetisation, and online misogyny
• Feminist initiatives among Tibetan women, such as grassroots, collective, and community-based projects
• Tibetan women’s cultural participation in relation to state policies, ethnic governance, and nation-building
• Cultural spaces, networks, and audiences in Tibetan women’s creative practices
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to cultural production, creative labour, subjectivity, and everyday life

Submission details

We invite interested authors to submit an abstract of 300-500 words, together with the paper’s title and a brief biography (no more than 100 words) that includes institutional affiliation, contact details, and research interests, by 30 November 2026. Authors will be notified by 7 December 2026. The first draft of the full paper is expected by 30 March 2027.

If you are interested in contributing to this special feature of China Perspectives, abstracts and queries should be sent to LIU Chang at evekhalil1995@gmail.com.

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review process. Research articles (written in English) should be 9,000 words long, and follow the format of the article guidelines available here: https://www.cefc.com.hk/chinaperspectives/submissions/style-guide/.

References

AZIZ, Barbara Nimri. 1987. “Moving Towards a Sociology of Tibet.” The Tibet Journal 12(4): 72–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43300269

BERLANT, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.

BRALLIER, Joshua. 2023. “Conference Report: The Second Lotsawa Workshop, ‘Celebrating Buddhist Women’s Voices in the Tibetan Tradition’”. Journal of Tibetan Literature 2 (1):217-27. https://doi.org/10.58371/jtl.2023.57.

BUTLER, Alex. 2003. Feminism, Nationalism and Exiled Tibetan Women. Kali for Women.

DEBOOS, Salomé, and Nicola SCHNEIDER (eds.). 2025. “Women’s Empowerment and its Expressions in the Tibetan and Mongolian World(s).” Special issue, Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 56. https://journals.openedition.org/emscat/6936?lang=en

DUFFY, Brooke Erin. 2016. “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19 (4): 441–457. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186

EBRON, Paulla, and Anna TSING. 1995. “In Dialogue? Reading Across Minority Discourses.” In Ruth BEHAR and Deborah GORDON (eds.), Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 390–411

ELLIOTT, Mark. 2015. “The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a ‘Second-Generation’ Ethnic Policy.” The China Journal 73 (January):186–213. https://doi.org/10.1086/679274

EPHE-CRCAO (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études – Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale), 2023. Women on the Roof of the World: Identity, Ethnicity, and Modernity. Retrieved February 12, 2025, fromhttps://www.crcao.fr/2023/03/24/women-on-the-roof-of-the-world-identity-ethnicity-and-modernity/

FJELD, Heidi, and Theresia HOFER (eds.). 2012. “Women and Gender in Tibetan Medicine.” Special issue, Asian Medicine 6 (2): 175-216. https://doi.org/10.1163/15734218-12341234

GAYLEY, Holly. Love Letters from Golok: A tantric couple in modern Tibet. Columbia University Press, 2016.

GYATSO, Janet, and Hanna HAVNEVIK (eds.). 2005. Women in Tibet. New York: Columbia University Press.

HALL, Stuart. (1990) 2021. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited byPaul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021223-016

HALL, Stuart. 2011. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907.n1

HALL, Stuart, Jessica EVANS and Sean NIXON, eds. 2012. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Repr. Culture, Media and Identities. SAGE.

HESMONDHALGH, David, and Sarah BAKER. 2011. Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. CRESC. Taylor and Francis.

HILLMAN, Ben. 2018. “Studying Tibetan Identity.” In The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China, edited by William Wu and Michael Frazier, 713–735. London: SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526436085.n35

INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales), 2023. Charting the Uncharted World of Tibetan Women Writers Today: An Ongoing Conversation. Retrieved May 16, 2024.

JABB, Lama. 2015. Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

KAUR, Gurmeet. 2025. “Intersecting Nation-Building and Gender Marginalisation: Tibetan Women in Exile and the Role of Governance in Body Politics.” Asian Studies Review 49 (4): 818–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2025.2501664

KOLÅS, Åshild, and Monika P. THOWSEN. 2005. On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier. University of Washington Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwn73b

LOPEZ, Donald S. 1999. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Paperback ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MAKLEY, Charlene. 1997. “The Meaning of Liberation: Representations of Tibetan Women.” The Tibet Journal 22 (2): 4–29.

MELNICK, Alison. 2020. “Beyond the Recovery of Women: The Evolving Study of Gender in Tibetan Buddhism.” Religion Compass 14 (5). https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12287

NORBU, Dawa. 1992. “‘Otherness’ and the Modern Tibetan Identity.” Himal 5 (3): 10–11. https://www.himalmag.com/cover/a-pan-tibetan-identity

SCHNEIDER, Nicola, and Mona SCHREMPF (eds.). 2015. “Women as Visionaries, Healers and Agents of Social Transformation in the Himalayas, Tibet and Mongolia.” Special issue, Revue d’Études Tibétaines 34.

UVA (University of Virginia), 2022. Tibetan Women Writing Symposium. Retrieved May 16, 2024, fromhttps://cgii.virginia.edu/tibetan-women-writing-symposium

[1] See, for instance, Aziz (1987); Gyatso and Havnevik (2005); Fjeld and Hofer (2012); Schneider and Schrempf (2015); Gaylay (2016); Melnick (2020); UVA (2022); Brallier (2023); EPHE-CRCAO (2023); INALCO (2023); Deboos and Schneider (2025).