Franck Biiie
Introduction
In 2009, a video on YouTube went ‘viral’ in Mongolia. It showed a young woman’s hair being shorn, a culpable-looking man sitting by her side, his head in his hands. The aim of the video, posted by the extreme nationalist group Dayaar Mongol (All Mongolia), was to publicly humiliate the young woman who had allegedly had sexual relations with a Chinese man — presumably the man sitting next to her. While the video was extremely shocking for the majority of viewers, it did not come as a complete surprise. Over the previous two years there had been a series of newspaper articles and press conferences by the nationalist group (Jargal 2007) warning they would shave off the hair of any Mongolian woman found having sexual relations with foreign men — though in practice the warnings targeted specifically Sino-Mongolian relations. In an earlier interview, in October 2007, Byambatulga, the party’s stand-in leader — the head of the party, Enkhat, was then serving a prison sentence for murder — assured me that such shavings had already taken place and that members of the group routinely carried electric shavers with them. According to Byambatulga, these public humiliations were a reminder for the offenders, as well as for any other ‘straying’ woman, to remain faithful to the nation. As in post-Second World War France, where women who had relations with occupying German soldiers were publicly shaved, Mongolian nationalist rhetoric firmly posits women (and female sexuality) as crucial to national and ethnic purity concerns. It is precisely those offending citizens (rather than the Chinese partners) who find themselves on the receiving end of nationalist violence (Bille 2010). Sex workers, in particular, have been heavily targeted by the Dayaar Mongol members. As Byambatulga argued, ‘Prostitutes make twice as much money if they don’t use condoms, so the ones who go with the Chinese run the risk of becoming pregnant and producing Chinese children’.
The centrality of women’s sexuality (and reproductive powers) in matters of national security is not specific to Mongolia. Various scholars have drawn attention to the symbolic relation of women and the nation (Kandiyoti 1994 [1991]; Das 2007) and the inextricable links between nationalism, sex and violence (Enloe 2000; Lambevski 1999). Attacks on national territory by bellicose ‘Others’ are frequently described through terms that have patent sexual connotations, such as ‘penetration’ or ‘rape’, while actual physical rape remains an all too common feature of most armed conflicts. In such a context, the harnessing of female sexuality, and the controls and limitations imposed on the foreign actors who have had sexual relationships with ‘national females’ remains a core concern of most, if not all, contemporary forms of nationalism.
In the case of Mongolia, these concerns are further heightened by its geopolitical position — a country of extremely low density (only 2.7 million people for an area of 1.5 million km2) wedged between Russia and China, two of the largest, most powerful and, in the case of China, populous nations on earth. The sentiment that Mongols have of being sandwiched between two giant neighbours is compounded by the fact that much of the cultural Mongolian region is included within Russia and China. In fact, at around 4 million, the Mongolian population of China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) actually exceeds that of Mongolia, though the region is overwhelmingly — and increasingly — dominated by Han Chinese (currently 79 per cent of the total population).
As will be discussed below, a sentiment of impending Chinese menace, actively promulgated by Moscow during the socialist period in order to ensure Mongolian compliance, has left a palpable imprint on Mongolian media and informal social communications. These factors, deployed in a society where ethnicity has traditionally been passed exclusively though the male line, have led to the formation of a unique precipitate. Mongols have traditionally distinguished between the paternal links (the ‘bone’) and the maternal ones (the ‘flesh’) (Bulag 1998: 143). Ethnicity was conceptualised as being transmitted through the father’s line, the female body thereby reduced conceptually to a vessel. As a result, women in contemporary Mongolian society, as bearers of cultural values and ethnic survival, find themselves in a particularly difficult position, compelled to negotiate a treacherous terrain between national expectations and their own personal, professional and emotional wellbeing. Yet, because much of the socialist rhetoric of progress and female emancipation has been internalised, this ‘double burden’ remains largely invisible.
If this social dimension has been well explored in the context of Russia (see Ashwin 2000), Mongolia has remained understudied. An increasing number of ethnographies of Mongolia have been published in recent years but only a handful has focused explicitly on gender or sexuality (Benwell 2006; Bille 2010; Lacaze 2012a, 2012b). Yet if Mongolia, as a post-socialist country, shares a number of cultural features with Russia, as a nomadic country with a proud military history it is also a unique cultural environment. Immensely proud of the ancestral figure of Genghis Khan, Mongolian society attaches a great deal of social capital to markers of hypermasculinity such as strong resilient bodies, wrestling, and the capacity to drink alcohol. The Mongolian summer festival of Naadam (also known as the ‘three manly games’ — eriin gurvan naadam), the customs of which focus precisely on virile qualities of strength and endurance, is a particularly apt illustration of this cultural inclination.
The position of women in Mongolia also differs in significant ways from other post-socialist settings. Mongols are keen to emphasise that Mongolian women, unlike other Asian women, are ‘free’. While Mongols readily acknowledge the social and cultural transformations that have taken place under Soviet Russia’s influence, the ‘freedom’ of Mongolian women is understood to be deeply embedded in nomadic culture and to precede the socialist period.
This socialist period, from 1924 to 1990, was very long-lived. When it adopted a socialist government in 1924, Mongolia became the world’s second communist country, and the first one in Asia. Previously Mongolia had been under the control of the Qing Empire, like other outlying regions such as Tibet or Xinjiang. The socialist revolution of 1924 — orchestrated with the support of Russian Bolsheviks — led to the independence of Mongolia as a country, and to the hardening of the administrative division between ‘Outer Mongolia’ (today’s independent Mongolia, Mongol Uls) and ‘Inner Mongolia’ (today’s China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Neimenggu Zizhiqu).