Abstract or Keywords
This chapter analyzes the appropriation of a Buddhist monastic space by girls and young women. The author’s case study is the Peace Grove Institute, a small residential Buddhist community of 21 girls between the ages of 7 and 31 located in Lumbini (Nepal), site of the Buddha’s birth. The Peace Grove Institute provides a quasi-monastic, socially safe space for girls which allows them to delay marriage and to continue education. Langenberg also highlights how this institute is an ongoing creation of the Peace Grove girls themselves. She explores the modality of female agency of the Peace Grove nuns within the disciplinary norms of female Buddhist monasticism, and within the educational and cultural environment of Peace Grove nunnery. Langenberg sees an otherwise less obvious dimension of Buddhist female agency at work, which she describes as aesthetic agency, detectable in the girls’ expressiveness, confidence, physical charisma, and mobility—a significant manifestation of and precondition for the exercise of female power in gender-conservative Lumbini.