Focusing on the country of Thailand, my paper explores how Theravada Buddhist nuns construct religious identities and pursue monastic lives despite their exclusion from formal ordination and recognition within the Buddhist institution.  It identifies Buddhist nuns’ self-perceptions and attitudes toward ordination while examining gender and identity politics in Buddhist Thailand from a feminist critical perspective.  Of central importance in this study is understanding how religious women negotiate the tension between the Buddhist principle of the soteriological equality of women and men, and the reality of gender discrimination in institutionalized Buddhism.  It seeks to unearth women’s own claims on religion and the motivations behind aspiring to, or not aspiring to, secure formal ordination. 

Exploring the reasons why women choose to remain mae chi versus striving to become bhikkhuni leads to several pertinent issues that will be examined in this paper namely; Orientalist attitudes and assumptions in Western scholarship on Buddhism; the tendency of Western feminist scholars of women in Buddhism to highlight social equality, not spiritual enlightenment, as the goal of Buddhism; how Western understandings of self and personhood perpetuate negative evaluations of women’s lot in Theravada Buddhism; how to engage in cross-cultural feminist criticism and be sensitive to Asian women’s subjectivity; how to negotiate the tension between making feminist claims and upholding the integrity of cultural and religious traditions; and finally, the extent to which the influences of global feminism and cross-cultural human rights advance or misrepresent women’s religious lives in Thai Buddhist culture.

This paper will utilize scholarship on Muslim women and veiling to provide rich insights into the pitfalls of imposing a Western feminist critique on the practices and allegiances of non-Western religious women. This does not preclude the feminist task of exposing sexist or oppressive institutions or practices; rather, it calls feminist scholars to examine how women use these very same institutions and practices to loosen the bonds of patriarchy imposed on them.  This paper will negotiate the tension between making cross-cultural feminist claims about practices deemed sexist within the Theravada tradition and giving voice to religious women’s own interpretations and appropriations of such practices.  Moreover, it will grapple with the tension that often arises in feminist studies of religion between concepts of “insiders” and “outsiders,” and who has the authority to speak about and critique religious traditions and institutions.