Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake, and Mazu

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss two popular Eastern deities, Nu Wa and Mazu, and the mythical White Snake, critically reading them as age old “material feminist” and “material ecocritical” models of living and being in the world. The terms in quotations refer to contemporary Western-based theory and criticism—namely, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited entitled Material feminisms (2008) and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s edited Material ecocriticism (2014). As I will argue, the claims in those studies are useful for understanding the marginalized material and feminist bases of deity worship in the East. As part of that argument, I also refer to a key concept for poststructuralist scholars, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “body without organs,” for it complements the work of material feminists and ecocritics. Reading Mazu and Nu Wa through the interstices of that work, I argue that Mazu and Nu Wa embody a radical Deleuzian subjectivity that lies outside of “the body” as it (“the body”) speaks for obsolete policings and constructions of subjectivity and individuality, yet inside “the body” as it points to material feminist and ecocritical arguments that express that humans are always and already a composition of embodied nonhuman and human matter inclusive of inorganic and organic matter, human-made and nonhuman-made material, and natural and cultural “matter.”