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Embracing the Icon: The Feminist Potential of the Trans Bodhisattva, Kuan Yin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Cathryn Bailey
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Abstract

I explore how the Buddhist icon Kuan Yin is emerging as a point of identification for trans people and has the potential to resolve a tension within feminism. As a figure that slips past the male/female binary, Kuan Yin explodes the dichotomy between universal and particular in a way that captures the pragmatist and feminist emphasis on doing justice to concrete, particular lives without becoming stuck in an essentialist quagmire.

Type
Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities
Information
Hypatia , Volume 24 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities , Summer 2009 , pp. 178 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Hypatia, Inc.

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