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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Tibetan Buddhist nuns navigate encounters with Western feminist discourses through digital connectivity and transnational networks. Whilst younger nuns seek an own voice, they demonstrate cautious resistance to frameworks that do not emerge from their lived worlds.

Paper long abstract

Examining Tibetan Buddhist nunneries in Nepal, this paper demonstrates how the binary of intra muros and extra muros – inside and outside monastic walls – has been fundamentally reconfigured through internet connectivity. A new generation of nuns increasingly engages with global discourses, yet their encounters with feminism reveal complex dynamics of translation, appropriation, and resistance.

Through ethnographic work in Nepalese exile communities, this paper explores how feminist discourses reach these often patriarchal religious institutions via Western and Southeast Asian visitors, benefactors, and digital platforms. These encounters frequently transmit Euroamerican feminist frameworks without adequate contextualisation for the specific social, religious, and political worlds nuns inhabit. Whilst some younger nuns express eagerness to participate in broader conversations about gender and agency, many demonstrate an internalised sensitivity – a kind of epistemic caution – that prevents them from connecting too readily with feminist vocabularies that feel externally imposed.

This paper asks: How do nuns navigate digital spaces whilst maintaining commitments to Buddhist values and community hierarchies? What happens when feminist solidarities cross cultural and religious boundaries without sufficient translation work? How might anthropologists trace these encounters ethically, particularly when our own analytical frameworks may replicate the very dynamics of epistemic violence we seek to critique?

By examining the gap between nuns' lived experiences and available theoretical tools, this paper considers how digital connectivity simultaneously opens possibilities for voice whilst potentially foreclosing others – revealing the tensions inherent in transnational feminist knowledge production in polarised times.