Gender·body·discourse: Postcolonial Feminist Study Of The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior,by Maxine Hong Kinston,is a canonical autobiographical novel in Chinese American literature.By combining the personal experience with family history and the imagination with the rewriting of Chinese folklore,the novel weaves Chinese women’s stories into the American reality of the first-person narrator “I.”Being marginals to the hegemonic Eurocentric culture,it is inevitable for Chinese American women and their counterparts in the East,under the oppressions of a deep imbrication of race,gender,and class,to be overall portrayed as a monolithic,singular “thirdworld woman”—a de facto image produced and colonized by the misappropriation of their materiality and historical heterogeneity.However,this widespread and highly-acclaimed novel,depicting the oppression,resistance,and struggles of women living against backgrounds in China and the U.S.,performs an intensive counterattack on the stereotypic Oriental female images,which underlines its core theme of providing discursive space for subaltern women to reclaim their female subjectivity and providing reference and reflections in their liberatory struggles.The novel not only accuses mainstream American society of the marginalization of Chinese women,but seeks to deliver the real images and unique experiences of third-world women to the world.This thesis,based on postcolonial feminist theory and focusing on a textual discussion on the female subjects who were silenced by Western hegemonic discourse,oppressed by patriarchal norms and whose identity and heterogeneities have been misappropriated by the Western knowledge mechanism from three dimensions,namely,discourse,body,and gender,examines the degree to which the gender role,female body and discursive power of the subalterns resist various oppressions and dominant discourse.This thesis finds that the novel,from its gender and body perspective and through the deconstruction of grand historical narrative,succeeds in overthrowing the oppressive and disciplinary mechanisms over gender and body,ensuring the establishment of female discursive power and subjectivity.In recording the eclectic experience of multiple “others” constructing female subjectivity,the novel provides a practical reference for the adaptation and survival strategies of women in the third world,minority women in western society,and transnational women laborers across the West-East borderlands within globalization.