Words and Swords to Fight Conventions: Genre and Gender Hybridity in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, the Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston departs from the monolithic literary and cultural discourse to embrace diversity, discarding homogeneity and order as prescribed by patriarchal cultures. The author cuts across canonical literature by presenting a hybrid genre that seeks to disturb the normative genre and gender ideology, just as Fa Mu Lan, the legendary warrior, transcends traditions by encompassing the two genders to neutralize them. Kingston interrogates the cultural constructs of femininity and masculinity through the creation of the counter-stereotypical figure of the woman warrior, who proved to be braver than males in her masculinized martial performance. This mythical transvestite is used in the text to divulge gender illusion, yet while Fa Mu Lan fought with her sword for justice and equality, Kingston fights with the power of the word for the disruption of all binary discourses. The essay concentrates on the second section of the book, “White Tigers,” to examine how the text simultaneously rises above genderism and genericity through its hybridization of both textual forms and corporeal identities.