Woman Warrior

I recently thought of a paper that I wrote for my English seminar Memory, Haunting, and Migration that I should post on this blog.  The paper was written about Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and looks at girl power through a slightly different cultural lens.  If you’ve never read the book, I fully recommend that you run out and get it from your local library! 

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From the very first lines of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, the reader is drilled with the same rhetoric that the narrator has heard all her life: that women are worthless and place a burden on their families.  Yet the narrator’s stories also portray vivid descriptions of female strength and opposition to adversity.  Although being told that they are worth little more than maggots, these women assert their power and each become warriors for womanhood.  However, it is the narrator, who presents these stories of the women preceding her, that faces the ultimate struggle with her culture.

As the narrator recounts her childhood, she conjures up the memory of adults saying that Chinese girls would fail it they “grew up to be but wives or slaves” (Kingston, 19).   However, in this same memory she recalls being told tales of swordswomen raging across China to protect their family’s honor.  These tales give young girls hope that they can achieve what the heroines do, but the lack of support from their families seems to denigrate these ideas.  With this juxtaposition of stories comes the swift transition of the narrator recounting the story of Fa Mu Lan to the narrator telling it in the first person.  By becoming Fa Mu Lan, the narrator puts the reader into the minds of every young girl who has heard the tale of the heroine and finds inspiration in her own strength through it.

Whoredom

“But Whoredom is a massive part of our history and power as women. When fully instructe din the art of sacred sexual power, Whores are the people who can teach us all the stuff we grow up not learning about sexuality, our bodies and our innate sexual power. Our cultural ignorance and intolerance of Whores keeps Whores from realizing the full potential of Whoredom. It likewise robs women and men of Teachers who can help us understand women’s sexual power.”

- Inga Muscio in her book cunt: a declaration of independence

can i borrow that?

It’s come up in conversation a couple of times that I’ve been reading Queenbees & Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman and the reaction that I’ve been getting from people is pretty interesting. My college-aged female friends have almost uniformly been really interested what the book has to say about cliques and growing up female. Some have even asked to borrow the book after I’m done reading it.

Reading the book, I can tell you that it is not a self-help book for young women but rather, one for the girls’ parents since it directly addresses the guardians of these “queenbees and wannabes.”  So the thought that immediately rose to my mind when my friends showed so much interest in this book was, why?  Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to begin reading this book under the guise of research for the next in a series of papers for my seniors honors project.  But why are we interested in reading something that is not about us or directed towards us?

One potential reason is because we’re certainly young enough where we can vividly remember our high school experiences.  Reading Wiseman’s book could give us insight into our younger selves and provide an idea of how typical our lives were.  In one section of the book, Wiseman describes the different types of girls in a high schools including the queenbees, sidekicks, targets, and so on.  But we certainly shouldn’t need to consult a checklist in a book to see what type of girl we were in high school.  Everyone already knows if they were the popular girl or a socially outcasted nerd.  However, what I think the book does is to provide almost a sense of pride for those popular girls while providing the nerd a sense of comfort in knowing that her situation was not uncommon.  Reading the description of her own role, the popular girl or Queen Bee can reminisce on the adulation that she received and the power that she had in high school.  Meanwhile, that nerdy girl can feel better knowing that she was not alone in her pain and maybe even feel happy that she is no longer in that situation.

That’s only one of the potential reasons for why a female my age would be so interested in reading Wiseman’s book but there are certainly others. Stay tuned because I’ll be throwing those your way in the next few days : )

required reading

Next on my reading list is Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence.

You all probably recognize the book since it was the basis for Tina Fey’s brilliant movie Mean Girls.  I’m bringing it to the gym with me right now, so I’ll be sure to post my initial thoughts really soon!

Suggested Reading

Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvesite in the New World by Catalina De Erauso

I’m pretty sure the title speaks for itself. I read it for my Women’s and Gender’s Study Class, True Confessions: Autobiography, Gender, and Sexuality. It’s a really fast and interesting read that I highly recommend.