Judith Butler and Shamanism is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, it is relatively easy to draw a comparison between Butler’s theory of gender as performance and the female protagonist in the section of the novel entitled “White Tigers.” However, a parallel also exists in the “Shaman” section of Kingston’s novel. The story of the mother, Brave Orchid, who trains to become a doctor in China, is enhanced when viewed through the lens of shamanism. Shaman are seen as mediators between the material world and the spiritual realm, healing individuals and the community from the inside (the spirit) out (the physical being). In the “Shaman” section, Brave Orchid serves as a shaman to her community of female student doctors when she rallies them together in order to defeat the “Sitting Ghost.” As a shaman, Brave Orchid’s own encounter with the Sitting Ghost is described in terms of a physical showdown; however, when the other young women are brought in, the vanquishing of the Sitting Ghost is more of a ritual; the other women do not actually see the ghost as Brave Orchid did. In this particular example, it is interesting that this sort of spirituality is juxtaposed with the more scientific, modern study of medicine. Brave Orchid helps her community of women doctors to overcome and vanquish their superstitious fear of a monster that haunts the dormitory by night. In this sense, Brave Orchid helps them to move beyond old world beliefs and to enter a more modern world of science and rationality. Brave Orchid is a mediator that effectively changes, or “heals,” her fellow doctors from the inside out. She asserts, “Run, Ghost, run from this school. Only good medical people belong here. Go back, dark creature, to your native country. Go home. Go home.” “Go home,” sang the women (Kingston 75).
Here, Kingston has constructed another “woman warrior.” While there are male and female shaman, warriors are traditionally identified as male. Thus the role of “attacker” that Brave Orchid assumes operates as a way to subvert social norms that dictate “female” behavior. Brave Orchid, as a warrior/shaman, is a powerful, complex, and assertive role, a role that displaces the “no name women” in the text.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.