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10. The Woman Warrior Revisited: Jael, Fa Mulan, and American Orientalism
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10 The Woman Warrior Revisited Jael, Fa Mulan, and American Orientalism Gale A. Yee I purchased the paperback version of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior when it appeared in 1977. The irony is that I never read it until I had to teach it for a women’s studies class in the late 1980s. It was the concept of a Chinese woman warrior, not the book itself, that intrigued me as a Chinese American female: the ancient legend of a powerful woman who, like many in the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, defied the conventions of the weak, obedient womanhood of traditional Chinese patriarchy. She was for me a female counterpart of Superman who fought for truth and justice, but perhaps not for the “American way.” It was this concept of a female warrior that drew me to write on Jael in Judges 4 for a Semeia volume devoted to women, war, and metaphor (Yee 1993). My fascination with her continued as I speculated on what I would do for an Asian American reading of Judges 4–5 (Yee 2006: 162–63). My contribution to this Texts@Contexts volume therefore offers me a welcome opportunity to delve once more into the woman-warrior motif through an intercontextual comparison between Jael1 and Fa Mulan, the Chinese woman warrior who inspired Kingston’s work. Intercontextual features can be found in their shared warriorhood, their respective ethnicities, their (trans)gendering, and the reception history of their narratives. Particularly with respect to Fa Mulan’s reception history, I will focus on the American Orientalism that plays a significant part in the mass-marketed Disney production Mulan (1998) and my own conceptualization of my ethnic heritage. 175 Warriorhood Both Jael and Mulan can be considered warriors, although in differing ways. In my 1993 article on Judges 4, I argued that the social structure of premonarchic Israel offered possibilities for women to engage in informal wartime operations. Because the family household (bet ’ab) was the basic socioeconomic unit and because women held critical leadership positions within this unit, albeit informal ones, women like Deborah had opportunities to emerge as leaders during times of war. Furthermore, if one extends the definition of warriorhood beyond those who fight on the battlefield to those who work in covert operations and intelligence, then Jael would be considered a warrior. Her assassination of Sisera, the enemy’s top-ranking general, already classifies her as a warrior, more broadly defined. The fact that she uses trickery is no different from the guerilla tactics already employed by the Israelites (Yee 1993: 109–14). A significant number of myths of heroic Chinese women, of whom Fa Mulan is the most well known, defy the stereotype of women as victims of Chinese patriarchy (Dong 2011: 9–50; Mann 2000: 835–62). Although originating between the fourth and sixth centuries ce, an anonymous folk song, “The Ballad of Mulan,” was published in a thirteenth-century anthology of lyrics, folk songs, and poems.2 The song describes a young woman at a weaver’s loom, anxious about her father’s conscription into the khan’s army, because he had no older son who could be drafted in his place. Mulan decides to purchase a horse and other equipment “to take my father’s place to go on a military expedition” (Dong 2011: 54). Bidding farewell to her parents, she fights valiantly for twelve years alongside her fellow male warriors, who take her to be one of them. When she is presented in the emperor’s court, she eschews a promotion in rank and honor, preferring a fast camel that would whisk her back to her hometown. Upon her arrival, she enters her boudoir, removes her military attire, puts on a dress, fixes her hair, and applies makeup to her face. When she emerges as a lovely woman, her comrades, who evidently came home with her, are amazed: “We spent twelve years fighting together, but didn’t know that Mulan was a woman” (Dong 2011: 55). Lest one regard Mulan as some proto-feminist heroine, stories about Mulan and her kind were written and transmitted primarily to illustrate how Confucian patriarchy should function. Patriarchal Chinese values celebrated and hinged on powerful women. A distinctive feature of Confucian patriarchy is the separate realms of yin/yang cosmologies, the male, the public “outer,” and the female, the domestic “inner” (Mann 2000: 842). Although Mulan transgresses these boundaries by her warriorhood, she adheres to the...