Why Do Some Tibetan Women Climb the Highest Mountains? Gendering Mountaineering Practices on the Roof of the World

This paper explores the lives of a number of Tibetan mountaineering women who have risen to celebrity by climbing the highest peaks in the world. It shows how they negotiated their gender and ethnic identity within the highly complex context of modern Tibetan mountaineering in the People's Republic of China. Even though they use mountaineering as a means for emancipation, these Tibetan women enact gender roles in ways that are more complicated than the simple binary opposition between 'old society' and 'new society', reflected in Chinese modernisation narratives, suggests.