Ghosts, Marriage, and Madness: The Immigrant Symbolic, Pregnancy as Feminine Epistemology, and the Death Drive in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

This essay builds on Asian American scholarship regarding the trope of ghosts in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, contending that haunting as a method for narrativizing the Chinese Exclusion era (1882–1943) is notably different from some Western forms of universalist and rationalist history that can treat marginalized people as unintelligible or inhuman, as ghosts or ghost-like. It offers warrants for that contention by proposing a conception of haunting as situated at the intersections of Asian American immigration history, feminist theory, and Žižekian psychoanalysis, whereby immigrant Others who do not conform to the heteronormative logic of marriage as a route to citizenship are relegated to the realm of madness that Slavoj Žižek identifies as the death drive. In linking the historical narrative of immigration exclusion to the death drive that describes haunting as a return to a persistent site of loss, this essay argues that No Name Woman's and Moon Orchid's gendered and racialized "madness" is a way to reckon with the failures of translation and of the successful immigrant narrative; yet, their exclusion from the realm of human rationality deemed necessary for citizenship compels us to revisit immigrant experiences not by determining its final outcome but by suspending it.