ABSTRACT
China’s Stone Forest is a tourist site inscribed with the mythic Sani heroine ‘Ashima.’ This chapter asks about gender/sex/sexuality dimensions of touristed landscapes, such as the Stone Forest, that are intimately tied to human imagery. Ashima’s story of an ideal ethnic minority girl defines, and is defined by, cultural and physical landscapes; Ashima is a sign of the Stone Forest’s seductive topography. H er sexed allure, an em bodiment of colonization and commoditization as well as ethnogenesis, is expressed in visual and w ritten texts, behaviors, and expectations. The Stone Forest, dialectically form ed and reworked by diverse people over time, attracts tourists by difference and extremes of uniqueness in natural karst topography and cultural characteristics. Desiring Ashima, as commodity, sex object, exotic other, or as an emblem of ethnic pride, homeland, an d /o r nationalism, drives production and consumption of this touristed place. It is also a site where hybrid notions of gender and political identity evolve and global /local economies connect and transform. As the Stone Forest becomes a cosmopolitan tourscape, we can see that its signifier of Ashima is also resituating into local Sani identity and place. In term s of local power relations, in the Stone Forest we see patriarchal, ethnic hierarchies of the Han intersect with m ore equity-based relations.
