Bio

Losang Rabgey is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Machik, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, England, where she specialized in gender anthropology and the Tibetan diaspora. Rabgey received a Master’s degree in Anthropology and a B.A. in Sociology and Environmental Studies, both from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her fieldwork has focused on oral life histories of Tibetan women in India and the West. She has presented her research at a number of universities in the United States and Canada.

Rabgey’s dissertation is the first study focusing specifically on Tibetan diaspora women emerging from the ordinary classes (as opposed to the élite). It is about the construction of gender identity and how women and men are differently shaped by culturally scripted practices of power. Her scholarship also interrogates the inscription of nationalist and patriarchal authority on the female body in the Tibetan transnational diasporic community. Women’s responses to, and narrativization of, these gendered cultural scripts lead her to explore how women assimilate, accommodate and resist norms of gendered practice.

Rabgey is one of the first Tibetan woman in the West to get an advanced degree. After her parents fled Tibet in 1959, Rabgey was born in a refugee settlement in northern India. Her family soon emigrated to Canada and in 1987, Rabgey traveled with her family to her father’s village in Kham, Tibet. Her family has established Machik through which community development projects for the village region in Tibet are pursued, with emphasis on Tibetan women’s and girls’ education.