A Liberatory Complementarianism?: Contemporary Tibetan Nuns Theorize Motherhood and Womanhood

Complementarianism, a Christian and post-Christian understanding of gender in which men and women are understood to have intrinsically different bodies and characteristics that “complement” one another, is generally understood by western feminists as a discourse of patriarchal oppression. However, in this paper, the authors drawn on an indigenous theory of gender proposed by a group of learned nuns in contemporary Tibet to argue that the association between patriarchy and complementarianism is not universal, and should not be mapped onto non-western and non-Christian contexts. Rather, the Tibetan nuns’ theory of complementarian gender roles, working in tandem with a shrewd interpretation of the lived identity of motherhood as sources of liberative compassion, serves as a localized argument for gender equality in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism.