Fa Mu Lan, Mulan, and Crouching Tigers: Woman Warriors in the U.S. Culture of Violence

Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center presents a talk by Naoka Sugiyama on Chinese female hero Fa Mu Lan.

Fa Mu Lan, the legendary Chinese female hero, has been featured in a broad range of cultures and media.  In the U.S., under the influence of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), Fa Mu Lan became a feminist icon.  The Disney production Mulan (1998), obviously inspired by Kingston’s bestseller, was a box office success, indicating that the American audience was now ready for the female heroes who have the same kind of positive characteristic that was earlier assigned to male heroes. In recent Hollywood films such as King Arthur (2004), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), as well as in TV series such as Powerpuff Girls (1998-2004), women heroes are not different from the male model; her independence, self-assertiveness, and mental strength, commendable features of women of our time, are underlined by the use of violence. This issue has divided feminists into opposing camps. Kingston herself has commented that she should not have presented Fa Mu Lan as a war hero and has tried in her later work such as The Fifth Book of Peace to recreate a pacifist female hero.

The strong appeal of woman warrior characters in different contexts, however, leads us to reconsider gender specificity of violence.  Are women as competent as men in exercising violence, and if so, is it a feminist gain?   Do woman warrior characters promote militarization of women as Kingston warns, or will we be able to find positive role models in the woman warrior characters even when we are against physical violence?  Compared with the representation of the warrior woman in Japanese media, for example, where the pacifist sentiment prevails since the end of World War II and where female warriors are confined to the realm of fantasy, the representation of women and violence in American films seems to reflect the relationship between the two in America’s social reality.    

Aided by media images on the screen, this lecture will aim at stimulating a debate on gender and representation of violence by examining the trend in American film as well as assessing the validity of Kingston’s own efforts to critique the popular phenomenon and encourage non-violent alternatives.

Naoko Sugiyama, an IU Ph.D. and currently visiting scholar in Comparative Literature, is Professor of American Studies at Japan Women’s University. Besides her book, Representations of Motherhood by American Minority Women: Kingston/Morrison/Silko (in Japanese, 2007), her recent articles include “Daughters Transcending Races: Toni Morrison’s ‘Refitatif’ and Paradise as ‘Passing’ Stories” (2006), “From The Woman Warrior to Veterans of Peace: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Pacifist Textual Strategies” (2009), and “‘Girls’ Novels’ in the 1980s and the Tradition of Women’s Culture in Japan” (2011).