By Jade Keegan
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Abstract
In his novella Sand Rites (featured in his collection The Desert Wolf), Guo Xuebo weaves a fascinating tale centered around the lives of two former shamans residing in Black Sand Village, a fictional village located in the Horqin region of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR). Amidst anecdotes conveying the binary nature of the male and female shamans’ relationships throughout the 1940s to the 1987 present of the novella, Guo paints a haunting image of the Inner Mongolian desert as a woman, exposing the way in which women and the land suffer under patriarchal domination. With this metaphor as the basis, Guo’s novella provides a foundation for an exploration of gender and ecology as they relate to Indigenous peoples of Inner Mongolia. Taking Guo’s portrayal of the desert into account, this paper examines both the novella and its gender politics in the context of ecofeminism, arguing that Guo ultimately reinforces ecofeminist perspectives in his depiction of the male shaman, the female shaman, and their connection to the natural environment.
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