School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Complex conformities: Tibetan women's life writing and the en-gendering of national history in Exile

Ofner, Isabella Heidi ( 2016)

This thesis examines the ways in which the life writing of Tibetan women in exile negotiates the place of gender in the (re)writing of Tibetan history, within the larger project of ideological nation building. Located at the intersection of literary, cultural and historical studies, this study is concerned with the alternative histories contained within women’ s life stories and their relation to ‘ official’ Tibetan national history and the structures of power that maintain the gendered nature of the historical archive in the Tibetan exile community. Engaging questions of gender, nationalism and life writing through the lens of postcolonial feminism, I use a historically contextualized close-textual analysis to show how five selected exile Tibetan women’ s life narratives present previously neglected national histories that both challenge and uphold the dominant exile political history of Tibet during the first half of the twentieth century. This research project is thus also an inquiry into our understanding of what constitutes Tibetan national history and the possibility of transforming the Tibetan historical archive, within which women and their histories have mostly remained hidden from view.