Neohelicon

DOI 10.1007/s11059-017-0399-4

Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White

Snake, and Mazu

Peter I-min Huang1

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2017

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 quo-
tations refer to contemporary Western-based theory and criticism—namely, Stacy
Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited entitled Material feminisms (2008) and Ser-
enella 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 con-
structions 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.”

Keywords Material feminism · Material ecocriticism · Ecofeminism · Mazu ·

Nu Wa · White Snake

Any discussion of the material theoretical bases of feminism and ecocriticism will
encounter at some point along the way Donna Haraway’s feminist articulation of the
“cyborg.” In “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism

& Peter I-min Huang

peter@mail.tku.edu.tw; peter0084@icloud.com
1
Tamkang University, Tamsui District, New Taipei City, Taiwan

123
 P. I. Huang

in the Late Twentieth Century,” first published over a quarter of a century ago,
Haraway defines the cyborg as that which emphasizes “the confusion of boundaries”
(if also “the responsibility in [the] construction” of those boundaries); the
“condensed image[s] of both imagination and material reality”; the refusal of an
“anti-science metaphysics,” and the attestation to “compounds of hybrid techno-
organic embodiment and textuality” (1985, pp. 150, 181, 212). In addition, Haraway
compares women (human–females) to cyborgs (human–machines). She points out
that both are considered to be incomplete under normative patriarchal thinking,
which models “the human” on the human male, tethers “the female” to the material
(nature), and characterizes that material (nature) as something that is secondary,
base, insensate, passive, and an object. In other words, under patriarchal thinking,
just as “the cyborg” is not considered to be a fully legitimate subject (human)
because it is partly material (machine) so the human female is denied the status of
the subject (human) because she is associated more (than the human male is) with
materiality (nature).
What Haraway does in her audacious theoretical coupling of “the female” and
“the cyborg” is reconfigure the sexist and speciesist equivalences between women
and animals (“female = nature”) in order to affirm base material matter as well as
argue for the very real agency and value of matter, either “natural” (ecogenic)
beings and things or human-made (anthropogenic) beings and things. As Stacy
Alaimo and Susan Hekman critically unpack the material feminist layers of
Haraway’s “cyborg,” it calls nonetheless for a “material-discursive” approach to
knowledge, or an approach that does not abandon the argument that humans
construct reality even as human thought and language are shaped by material matter
(2008, p. 4). I will return to that point a little later in my own argument that
Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as well as her term “natureculture” (qtd. in
Latimer and Miele 2013, p. 11) are useful for recognizing, and paying more
attention to, the material feminist and material ecocritical aspects of the worship of
Nu Wa and Mazu. Briefly summarized here, my argument is that while Haraway’s
“cyborg” represents an attack on ontological thinking and desire for origins, its
reaffirmation of the mortal, finite, and vulnerable casings of material bodies
resonates with material practices of worship of Mazu and with the messages of
environmental advocacy that Mazu and Nu Wa embody. That argument also is that
Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, her term “natureculture,” and Alaimo’s concept
of trans-corporeality resonate with material feminist counter-narratives to dominant
patriarchal and speciesist narratives of White Snake. Mazu embodies the sea as well
as sailors, Nu Wa protects and repairs the sky as well as the humans beneath it.
Further, as deities, cultural figures, and actual objects (made of stone, wood, tinsel,
and so forth), the deities are compositions of mind and matter, culture and nature,
and human-made and nonhuman-made things. Similarly, White Snake, a figure that
patriarchal Chinese culture demonizes and calls monstrous, perverse, and evil, is a
material emanation of both nature and culture and a material feminist and ecocritical
figure.
Haraway’s concept of “the cyborg” is an antidote to the “linguistic turn” in
literary theory and criticism, which intentionally and unintentionally fueled
prejudice against material realities and older materialist discourses about reality

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

and truth at the turn of the last century (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, p. 2). The
fashionable and formidable embrace of “the discursive” was at the expense of “the
material.” It hindered scholars inclusive of many feminist poststructural thinkers
from engaging with the material world “in innovative, productive, or affirmative
ways” (ibid., p. 4). To be sure, the turn was productive in the sense that scholars
challenged prejudices rooted in essentialist and chauvinist forms of thinking and
opened up and fostered “complex analyses of the interconnections between power,
knowledge, subjectivity, and language” (ibid., p. 1). However, in their hyperbolic
emphasis on “the discursive,” they overlooked the agencies of things and beings
outside of language. They also note the alliances between feminism and
environmentalism by accusing both of being “founded upon a naı̈ve, romantic
account of reality” (ibid., p. 4). Yet, their own rigorous articulations and brilliant
defenses of “the ‘flight from nature’” and strenuous and dazzling efforts to
disentangle “woman” from “nature” and “the body” teeter on the edge of the same
essentialist chasm that feminists and ecocritics are accused of standing upon (ibid.).
Although it is not the intent of some of poststructuralism’s most important
figures to denounce material matter, figures who indeed accommodate “the material
in their work,” their “focus on the discursive” is one that a generation of postmodern
and poststructuralist thinkers obsessively pursue (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, p. 3).
Today, almost twenty years after the coining of the term “the body without organs”
by two of those figures, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (and Deleuze especially),
it continues to generate considerable interest among scholars who engage with
theories of subjectivity in terms that underestimate the agency of “bodies” despite
the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept is fraught with ambivalence about “the
body” (Hughes 2011, pp. 1–5).
For sure, as the name of the concept reflects, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject
the idea of “the body”; rather, they reject ideas about closed, stable systems of truth,
the individual, and subjectivity. In A thousand plateaus, their most important
writing, they define “the body without organs” as a metaphor for a thinking that
represents not an opposition to “organs” so much as a rejection of the “organization
of the organs” (1987, p. 30); and as something that stands for “not a dead body but a
living body [that is] all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the
organism and its organization” (ibid., p. 30). It speaks for “disarticulation,”
“experimentation,” “nomadism” and an “unorganized body-world of non-formed
elements and anonymous affective forces” (ibid., p. 159, p. 268). In other words, it
represents political and social efforts to undo pernicious forms of fundamentalist
thinking that rest upon the idea that identity is constituted by a closed or complete
body or system (Cull 2011, p. 49). Further, although scholars’ many fashionable
permutations of it undercut serious consideration of materiality and material
agencies, in the emphasis that Deleuze and Guattari give to the concept it stands for
contingency, fluidity of value, and temporal states of being, or for values that
complement material feminist and ecocritical reassessments of the body inclusive of
the body of the nonhuman “other.”
Timothy Clark, who analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s “the body without organs”
from an ecocritical perspective, argues that the authors are concerned with the effort
to abandon the “human standpoint” by becoming open to “otherwise unimagined

123
 P. I. Huang

modes of perception and sense” (2011, p. 198). Thus, while Deleuze and Guattari
are mostly interested in issues of human transcendence (or escape from human
limitations) in scientific, imaginative, and industrial technological contexts, they
bring up questions about materiality and the construction of it that material
feminists and ecocritics will engage with in earnest in their work of both
decentering notions of “the human” and reappraising “the body” (ibid.). Brian
Massumi, a translator as well as key critic of Deleuze’s work, brings notice to that
concern when he explains that “the body without organs” attests to that which is as
“actual” as it is “immediately virtual,” “conditional,” “temporal,” “the interval,” and
“the threshold” (1996, p. 224, p. 162). “The body without organs,” he states,
“always [is] swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it
free” (ibid., p. 161). As another Deleuzian scholar Moira Gatens argues, “the body
without organs” stands for the “in-between” of bodies or with that which passes
“between” bodies” (1996, p. 174). Similarly, Todd May, in emphasizing that “the
body without organs” represents the critical natural of “relations” and “connections”
(2005, p. 124) points to material ecocritical and material feminist arguments about
bodily exchanges.
Material feminist scholars and material ecocritics push the residual or threadbare
loyalties to “the body” that appear in the work of such major poststructuralist
thinkers as Deleuze and Foucault (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, p. 3). What
distinguishes their extensions (as well as interventions in) poststructuralism is they
give as much attention to “matter” as to discursivity. That interest appears in a study
by Alaimo, in its central concept of trans-corporeality (2008), and in Haraway’s
concept of the cyborg and Haraway’s term “natureculture.” Those tropes draw
attention to “the middle place,” which refers as much to the interfaces between
material things as it does to Deleuze’s and Foucault’s notions of junctures (or
breaks) that signify seismic cracks in, unease about, and shifts in cultural and
political systems and ideologies (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, p. 6). Haraway’s
cyborg thing-being and Alaimo’s “trans-corporeal” thing-being speak for compo-
sitions and amalgamations of nature and culture that cannot be separated according
to either the category of nature or the category of culture (or body/mind and matter/
meaning). Meaning is matter; it is where, as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
state, “politics, society, technology, [and] biology” meet (2014, p. 6). Haraway’s
term “natureculture” speaks most pertinently for transgressing a dominant
metaphysical tradition in the West, which separates nature and culture (Latimer
and Miele 2013, p. 11). In effect, it proposes that there is no material being
including no human being that is not shaped by other material beings: “no part of
being human […] is unaffected by its material interaction with other materialities”
(ibid., p. 16).1
Alaimo’s term “trans-corporeality,” among the most instrumental in the material
turn in ecocriticism in the present decade, complements Haraway’s “natureculture”
as well as Haraway’s material feminist defense of “the cyborg.” Similar to the latter,
1
See also the work of material ecocritic Karen Barad. In Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics
and the entanglement of matter and meaning (2007). Barad uses the term and concept “intra-action” to
call for the recognition of the multiple agencies of the material world and humans’ ontological
entanglements with non-humans and the environment.

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

it stresses “movement across bodies”—human, nonhuman, machine, biological, and

so forth—and the inseparable connections between humans and their environments,
which are as full of other “fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions”
as they are full of human bodies (Alaimo 2010, p 2). As Alaimo and other material
feminist ecocritics point out—namely scholars in the vanguard of ecofeminism such
as Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy (1998) and scholars who forge the area of
environmental justice such as Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein
(2002)—that attention promotes greater and much needed concern about the
physical environments that affect the world’s most vulnerable human populations
and the socioeconomic policies that in effect trash those environments and their
human populations. The unwanted legacy of both mainstream poststructural theory
and postmodernism is that in expelling, respectively, materiality and depth, an
ostracism that reflects the effort to rethink value across cultural as well as aesthetic
lines, scholars gravely oversight the problems of the planet’s most oppressed groups
of humans, indigenous and neo-colonized peoples and their “authority of (lived
corporeal) experience” (Murphy 2000, pp. 79–80).
For sure, material feminism and material ecocriticism espouse a “constructivist
conservation,” for that can build upon rather than abandon some of “the lessons
learned in the linguistic turn” and so accomplish “the very project of postmod-
ernism” by deconstructing “the dichotomy between the real and the discursive”
(Iovino and Oppermann 2012, p. 78). However, in recognizing or approaching “the
human and nonhuman territories as one and the same essential reality,” material
feminism and ecocriticism give more consideration to the nonhuman other, which is
hardly if at all addressed when poststructuralism and postmodernism “come to
town” in literary and cultural studies departments (ibid.). Thus they challenge the
mantra of postmodernism: “the real is a product of language and has its reality only
in language” (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008, p. 2).
The contribution that material feminism and ecocriticism make to the return of
the material is particularly useful for examining age-old practices of deity worship
in Taiwan that continue into the modern period and include the worship of Mazu,
protector of the sea and fishers in Taiwan. They are also productive for critically
reading the “mother-goddess” figure of Nu Wa and the monster-woman White
Snake. All three figures conceptually and materially resonate with the arguments
that material feminists and ecocritics make about the need to see the human as
always connected to, part of, and shaped by material matter: water, the sea, air, the
sky, statues of Mazu, temple processions in honor of Mazu, paintings of Nu Wa,
myths surrounding White Snake, and so forth.
In the tenth century CE, in the time of the Song Dynasty, when people from
Fujian Province in the south of China crossed the Taiwan Strait by boat, they carried
wooden sculptures of a goddess to secure their safety in the crossing. They called
this goddess Mazu. When they encountered a storm at sea, they would call upon her
for help. According to popular legend, she was born in 960 CE on the island of
Meizhou (湄洲嶼) in Putian County (莆田), Fujian Province (福建). When she was
born, she did not cry, and thus her father named her Lin Mo-niang (林默娘) (“silent
girl”). By the time she was four years old, she could swim like a sea monster or little
dragon (小龍) in the ocean (Chou 2001, p. 153). She also knew how to help fishers

123
 P. I. Huang

by making an accurate prediction about the weather, so they came to depend on her
“weather reports” (ibid.). She helped them in other ways, protecting their ships and
appearing like the wind from the heavens or a dragon from the sea to guide them.
Thus, she came to be called goddess (shen nu; 神女) and female dragon (long nu; 龍
女) (ibid., 180). Often, she is depicted with a small axe at her waist, which she uses
to free fishers from nets and ropes when they get caught in them. In some places
such as Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian, people honor her with an axe wrapped in
red ribbon. They place it at temples built in her honor or in front of her statues and
other images (ibid., 181). In many representations of her, she is dressed in bright
red, for that makes it easier for fishermen in distress to see and call out to her. Often
she is accompanied by two bodyguards or guardian generals, “Thousand Miles Eye”
(千里眼) and “With-the-Wind Ear” (順風耳), a red demon with two horns and a
green demon with one horn.
As popular legend also reflects, Mazu’s father was a high-ranking government
official who decided to retire from his post and move to a remote fishing village on
Meijou Island (湄洲嶼) (Chou 2001, p. 58). He made a humble living by working as
a fisherman and married Mazu’s mother. After giving birth to five sons, Mazu’s
mother prayed to Kuan-yin, goddess of Mercy (觀音), to give her a daughter. Her
wish was fulfilled by Kuan-yin (ibid.). One evening, after Mazu’s mother said her
prayer, Kuan-yin appeared from her wooden statute and gave to Mazu’s mother a
red flower from a vase. She told Mazu’s mother that after eating the red flower, she
would give birth to a daughter as beautiful as a flower (ibid.). Thus, according to this
particular legend, Mazu is a gift from Kuan-yin and symbolizes love and mercy,
attributes from her mother Kuan-yin (ibid).
In Taiwan, Mazu is mostly venerated as a protector of sailors, fish, fishers, and
the sea. She has more temples than any other god on the island (Chou 2001, p. 27)
and is one of Taiwan’s three most beloved deities (after the Earth god [土地公] and
Kuang-ying [goddess of Mercy] [觀世音)].) The localization or “Taiwanization” of
Mazu in the broadest of practices of worship of her is her identity as the protector of
the island of Taiwan. Another narrower localization is the worship of her for
protecting Taiwanese farmers and the land (by bringing rain to both) and the sea and
the Taiwanese people who make a living from it. Her popularity in the past is
evidenced by the four hundred temples that were built in her honor during the Ching
Dynasty. Since then, that number has more than doubled. In 2000, there were 838
temples. Many festivals also are held in honor of Mazu. One of the biggest festivals
in Taiwan is the annual eight-day festival of Mazu. It begins every year on the 23rd
of March, the date of Mazu’s birth. One and a half million people participated in the
most recent procession. The pilgrimage that they take is more than three hundred
kilometers. The pilgrims start out at 10:00 a.m. from Jenn Lann Temple (鎮瀾宮) in
the town of Dajia (大甲) in Taichung County (臺中縣) and walk to twenty-six
townships in central Taiwan.
What material feminism and ecocriticism theory help to articulate or highlight
about practices of deity worship in Taiwan, in particular the practice of deity
worship of Mazu, is that many people do not relate to those deities only as
disembodied and transcendental entities. They relate to Mazu in particular as much
if not more in physical and material terms than they do in transcendental and

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

metaphysical terms. As such, she carries tremendous environmental portent,

something that material ecocriticism and material feminism more so than any other
area of literary and culture studies highlight. She is neither a deity that only protects
the interests of “the human” nor a deity that is only a cultural construction of “the
human.” Her origins and emanations owe to the material environment and matter of
the sea as much as to the humans. Both human and nonhuman territories materially
as well as conceptually “build” or form Mazu, and she speaks for and embodies both
of those territories in turn. The sea as well as the fishers materially constitute and
enshrine her body, as the material matter of all sorts of bodies and flesh, artefacts
and beings associated with the worship of Mazu that constitute and embody her.
Haraway’s term “otherworldly conversations” conceptually captures some of that
aspect of the worship of as well as the goddess herself. She refers to it in her
argument that “coherent conversation between people and animals depends on
humans’ recognition of the “otherwordly” status of nonhuman animals (2008,
p. 178). More broadly, she uses it to emphasize the otherworldly status of all
nonhuman beings. I see those to be embodied by such deities as Mazu who is part
goddess, part material artefact, part natural environment, part human worshipper.
Thus, in the contexts that I flesh out here, Haraway’s famous “I’d rather be a cyborg
than a goddess” (1991, p. 181) might be revised. That statement reflects
(predominantly Protestant as opposed to Catholic) practices of Christian deity
worship in the West. In the case of deity worship of Mazu in the East, people relate
to that goddess in bodily terms—for example, by touching, carrying, and prostrating
themselves under her body and by taking turns to carry her (in the form of a statue)
in numerous annual temple processions. According to a Western sensibility, Mazu
would be understood less as a goddess and more as a cyborg, but in the East, the
distinction is a moot one, as Mazu is not as clearly separated along physical and
metaphysical lines. Asian Diaspora/American Studies, and East–West comparative
studies scholar Sheng-mei Ma provides one of the most exciting descriptions of a
Mazu procession. When he arrives close to the large crowds of people and the
deafening sounds of the firecrackers of a Mazu procession, he is overwhelmed by
the sea of devotees who reach out their hands to touch Mazu, whom people take
turns to carry on long poles that they balance on their shoulders (2015, p. 49). He
waits in the long line to “perform the ultimate obeisance” of crawling under the
sedan chair on which Mazu is seated so that her form might pass over his prostrate
form. He writes, “Once curled up in a fetal position, I was unto myself, strangely
uncoiled by the utter humiliation and self-abjection, awaiting her sedan chair to pass
over. It was very quiet with my face down to the pavement, all noise somehow
muffled, chaos receding” (ibid.). Then “she came,” Ma writes. “I dared not touch
her, she touched me, twice with the front and back drape of her chair” (ibid.). Her
touch was like that of “a mother [who] waves a fan over her child, humming a
lullaby, the fan tip drowsily, scraping, tickling the child’s back” (ibid.). The “act of
crouching to forgo oneself” before Mazu, as Ma describes it, is one that transgresses
the boundary between materialism and transcendentalism (ibid.).
Another Eastern deity and goddess, Nu Wa, has the upper half of a woman’s
body and the lower half of the body of a snake. In the classic Chinese text Shuo Wen
(說文) by Tsu Tzu (楚辭), Nu Wa is given this description: “傳言女媧人頭蛇身,一

123
 P. I. Huang

日七十化。” (“It is said that Nu Wa appears with a human head and snake body
who can create many times”) (Yuan 1986, p. 16). In paintings of Nu Wa that date to
the Han dynasty (approximately 206 BCE to 220 BCE), where Nu Wa also is
depicted as a half-woman and half-snake, she carries an instrument similar to a
compass (Jiang 2013, p. 41). She also is seldom alone and appears with her partner,
a male principle figure, Fu Xi (伏羲), who is depicted as half man and half snake
and holds a ruler (ibid.). The instruments they carry, Kuei (規) and Gi (矩),
represent human forms of knowledge, notably scientific and technological skills; at
the same time, the figures of Nu Wa and Fu Xi emphasize their connections with the
body of the earth and nonhuman beings. Here, we might see an Eastern material
feminist analog of Haraway’s cyborg and material ecocritical analog of Alaimo’s
“trans-corporeal” figure, for Nu Wa represents science and technology, or human
knowledge and skills, as well as environmental knowledge, or other forms of
material knowledge and agencies. Nu Wa in particular also can cultivate and
transform all creatures on earth (“媧,古之神聖女,化萬物者也) (Yuan 1986, p. 16).
Patriarchal culture has suppressed the material feminist and material ecocritical,
significances of Nu Wa. She emphasizes above all the inseparability between the
human and nonhuman and nature and culture. This is reflected in another legend that
has accreted around her over time. It is one of the most spectacular stories of Nu Wa
(Yuan 1986, p. 26). When the world came into existence, it was engulfed by a
terrible fire and flood. Thus, one of the four pillars supporting the sky was broken.
Using her scientific and technological wisdom and skills, Nu Wa put out the fire and
stopped the flood. She also patched up the broken sky with colorful stones, a repair
that she performs every evening with the setting of the sun. Thus, today, people pray
to Nu Wa when there is terrible flooding (ibid., p 27). Her materialist ecocritical and
feminist portent are overlooked because of dominant patriarchal structures and
ideologies that either coopt feminist-based teachings and practices or overlook,
underestimate, and belittle those teachings and practices.
Other eschatologies of Nu Wa betray oversight of the deity’s material feminist
and material ecocritical values. Xun Jiang (蔣勳), one of Taiwan’s most recognized
scholars of aesthetics, discusses Nu Wa’s identity as the fixer of skies by referencing
Nu Wa’s appearance in the Chinese classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber (2013,
p. 44). In that text, two male gods break a pillar supporting the sky in one of their
ongoing quarrels. The sky breaks and a great hole appears in it. People suffer
because of the broken “roof” of the sky. Nu Wa sympathizes with the suffering of
the people. She does not run away or abandon the damaged earth. She collects
36,500 stones and heats them to fix the broken sky (ibid., p. 45). Her act is embodied
every evening in the setting of the sun. The sunset is Nu Wa’s care for the people of
the earth. She uses different colored stones to fix the broken sky. Humans are
captivated and enchanted by the breathtaking sunset (ibid.). Unfortunately, many
have not been taught to not emulate the principle of environmental care for the skies
(the biosphere and atmospheric regions of the earth) that Nu Wa represents and
enacts at the end of each day on Earth.
Nu Wa shares material feminist and material ecocritical affinities with White
Snake, a hybrid female-animal creature. A recent film adaptation of the popular
myth of White Snake, Fahai, or The Sorcerer and the White Snake (白蛇傳說之法

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

海) (2001), directed by Siu-tung Ching (程小東), proffers an implicit material

feminist, material ecocritical, and anti-patriarchal response to mainstream readings
of White Snake. Those readings demonize White Snake. They represent her as
monster and an evil seducer of mortals. Ching subverts those readings. His film also
challenges the view that there can be no affective and moral relations between
nonhuman beings and human beings. According to mainstream patriarchal versions
of the myth of White Snake, such as that recounted by Hsia-dong Cheng (2011), the
romantic love between the mortal Xu Xian (許仙) and White Snake is a
transgression of the boundary between human and nonhuman beings, so White
Snake is punished by the arch-conservative, patriarchal, and anthropocentric monk
Fahai (法海). Fahai putatively stands for justice and the law. Eventually, he
separates Xu Xian and White Snake and imprisons her in the Lei Feng Pagoda (雷峰
塔). In Fahai, or The Sorcerer and the White Snake, Ching questions the patriarchal,
and anthropocentric, justice and law of Fahai.
The White Snake myth traces back to the Southern Song dynasty. During the
Ming Dynasty it was very popular. It was recited by blind bards in the area of
Hangzhou (杭州). One of those stories appears in A complete work of the White
Snake legend (白蛇傳合編) by Ru-Fei Ma (馬如飛) (1975). In it, Xu Xian is
orphaned by the death of his parents when he is six years old. He is raised by his
elder sister. When he becomes a teenager, he starts to learn medicine instead of
academic subjects, the subjects that most intellectuals of the times pursued. He runs
a pharmacy to make a living. During the tomb sweeping festival, he pays respect to
his parents, whose bodies are buried at West Lake (西湖) in Hangzhou. He
encounters White Snake. She appears as a beautiful lady accompanied by her maid
the Green Snake. It is raining when they meet. Xu Xian lends his umbrella to White
Snake. They fall in love and eventually marry. White Snake helps Xu Xian to run
his store. They have a prosperous business. They celebrate the dragon boat festival
by drinking wine. Xu Xian is scared when the White Snake reveals her natural shape
of a serpent. He begins to approach death, so White Snake asks the God of
Longevity to give her a magic medicine to save her husband. After Xu Xian
recovers, he goes to Jinshan Temple (金山寺) to give his thanks. The monk Fahai is
angry that Xu Xian, a human, has relations with an animal. He goes to the temple
and imprisons Xu Xian there. White Snake (and Green Snake) then go to the temple
to rescue Xu Xian. In this popular version of the White Snake myth, White Snake
then evokes evil spirits to flood the temple but is defeated and imprisoned in the Lei
Feng Tower (雷峰塔) by Fahai (Ma 1975, p. 6).
In director Siu-ting Ching’s Fahai, or The Sorcerer and the White Snake, White
Snake commits no evil acts. Rather, she represents a positive figure of human–
nonhuman relations and partnership. She first meets Xu Xian after he falls into the
lake and almost drowns. She rescues him and he falls in love with her and asks for
her hand in marriage. She agrees to marry him but at this time also does not reveal
her serpent form, and when they visit her family, she transforms her parents and
relatives into a human form. After the marriage, the couple open a medicine shop in
Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. During a plague, White Snake, hybrid natural
(animal) and cultural (human) figure, uses both her natural or nonhuman and
cultural or human knowledge to heal people. Her and Xu Xian’s business prospers

123
 P. I. Huang

and many sick people are cured by White Snake’s remedies. However, the monk
Fahai is jealous of their happiness and threatened by the powerful human–
nonhuman bond between them. Thus, he tells Xu Xian that White Snake’s human
form is false. Obsessed with exorcizing what he calls White Snake’s abominable
evil, he gives a potion to Xu Xian to give to White Snake that will transform her into
her serpentine form. He also gives Xu Xian a Buddhist dagger and tells him that he
will need it to protect himself from White Snake. At the time of the Dragon Boat
Festival (Duanwu, 端午節), Xu Xian gives the potion to White Snake. When she
transforms before him into a snake, he is terrified and tries to kill her with the dagger
given to him by Fahai. Mortally wounded, White Snake persuades Xu Xian that she
intends no evil to him. Grief stricken, Xu Xian travels to Mount E-mai (峨嵋山) to
find a magical herb to restore White Snake. That detail in the film differs from
popular, mainstream, patriarchal versions of White Snake. In those accounts, when
Xu Xian sees his wife turn into a snake, he is mortally overcome (by fear) and White
Snake steals a magic herb to restore him. In Ching’s feminist redaction, Xu Xian
sacrifices his form as a human being, crosses the false anthropocentric human–
nonhuman boundary, and accepts and respects White Snake as a fellow human–
nonhuman being.
Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” and Haraway’s “cyborg” are material feminist and
material ecocritical concepts that challenge contemporary cultural theory’s disdain
for nature. They thus are useful for ecocritics interested in the myth of White Snake
and the relationship between Xu Xian and White Snake that the myth recounts. That
relationship speaks for, and celebrates, the entanglements between humans and
nonhumans, culture and nature, yet it is commonly misread and abused under
mainstream patriarchal fears of extending ethical consideration to nonhuman things
and beings. Fahai, or The Sorcerer and the White Snake speaks for that relationship.
A box office hit, it provides an implicit materialist feminist and material ecocritical
reading of White Snake.
Today, many middle class Taiwanese treat deity worship and the many Buddhist
and Daoist temple processions and temple activities that are part of that worship
with secular shame and embarrassment. However, some recognize that the activities
not only promote and build sociality, civility, and community but also are helpful in
advocating for and sustaining local material-based movements. Some deity worship
has been highly effective when organizers have been or worked with environmental
activists and slowed or halted unsustainable kinds of industrial development. That is
especially true of deity worship of Mazu, which played an important role in
Taiwan’s modern environmental movement after the lifting of martial law in the
1980s. A landmark victory refers to a protest in that same decade. It concerned the
U.S. company Du Pont, which had set up factories in central Taiwan in 1986.
Environmentalists staged a protest in opposition to the Du Pont plant. On August 17,
1986, the protestors were blocked by the police. In response, the protestors moved to
a local Mazu temple, where they gave speeches and drew large crowds. Both the
protestors and those who gathered to listen to the protestors’ arguments against the
Du Pont company comprised many ordinary Taiwanese people. Those who attended
were persuaded by the protestors’ arguments and more people gathered at the

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

protest site. The massive protest finally ended on March 12, 1987, when Du Pont
announced that it would close down its factories in Taiwan (Chang 2008, p. 192).
More recently, in Kong Liao, a small remote fishing village on the northern coast
of Taiwan, protests by worshippers of Mazu, who are in a sense “mainstream”
environmental activists in Taiwan, which still has a deep Buddhist culture and
heritage, have been objecting to the government’s plans to complete Taiwan’s
controversial fourth nuclear power plant (Liou 2014, p. 265). The local people, their
local knowledge about Taiwan, and their local histories are key to mounting
successful campaigns against the nuclear industry and other industries in Taiwan
that are anti-environmental. As postcolonial and feminist scholar Liang-ya Liou
argues, for decades the ruling political elite of Taiwan have reduced and suppressed
the multiple histories and trans-indigenous identities of Taiwan under patriarchal
colonial ideologies of “China” that do not fully or adequately represent Taiwanese
people, most of whom are of mixed ethnic and racial descents (2014, pp. 238–244).
Mazu is particularly relevant to this issue because she has many different forms in
Taiwan. Hsun Chang, a renowned Mazu scholar, a research fellow at Taiwan’s
prestigious institute, Academia Sinica, analyzes various local indigenizations of
Mazu. Differently from Kuan-yin, the goddess of Mercy, the most popular deity in
Taiwan in addition to Mazu and the Earth god, Mazu is a less “universalized”
goddess and a more various, indigenized and local deity. She is critically materially
or environmentally shaped by the different regions of Taiwan where people worship
her (Chang 2008, 8). She is a more corporealized, materialized, or “embodied”
goddess than other deities in Taiwan. In comparison with the relationships that
define other deities and their worshippers, the relationship between Mazu and her
worshippers is more like that of a relative than a deity (ibid.).
As Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy point out in their early groundbreaking
collection of essays, Ecofeminist literary criticism: Theory, interpretation, pedagogy,
“feminist attention to the concept of the “other”” is one of the most important
characteristics of ecofeminism (1998, p. 5). Certainly that concept or construct is
one that appears and drives many other significant areas of literary and cultural
studies that emerge in the last third of the twentieth century. However, whereas most
scholars (with the notable exception of animal studies scholars and ecocritics) have
noticed the “the other” that is human, ecofeminist scholars have noticed “the other”
that is nonhuman. That contribution draws attention to practices of goddess worship
in the East such as those that are common among worshippers of Mazu. Alaimo,
Haraway, Hekman, Gaard, Iovino, Murphy, Oppermann, and other material feminist
and material ecocriticist scholars challenge the belief that the nonhuman world is
inert and inanimate as well as the belief that the nonhuman world exists merely for
human consumption. They speak for more-than-human ethics, materialities, and
agencies. White Snake, Mazu, and Nu Wa speak for those past as well as present
marginalized materialist feminist and environmental beliefs as they are found in the
East as well as in the West.

123
 P. I. Huang

References

Adamson, J., Evans, M., & Stein, R. (Eds.). (2002). The environmental justice reader: Politics, poetics,
and pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Alaimo, S. (2008). Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman
(Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 237–264). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (2008). Introduction: emerging models of materiality in feminist theory. In S.
Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 1–19). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and
meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chang, H. (2008). Mazu: Search for faith (媽祖:信仰的追尋). Taipei: Boyoung.
Cheng, H.-D. (程小東) (2011). The sorcerer and the White Snake (法海:白蛇傳說). Taipei: De Pao
Media.
Chou, Z.-J. (周濯街) (2001). Mazu (媽祖). Taipei: Kuo Chia Publishers.
Clark, T. (2011). The Cambridge introduction to literature and the environment. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cull, L. (2011). While remaining on the shore: Ethics in Deleuze’s encounter with Antonin Artaud. In N.
Jun & D. W. Smith (Eds.), Deleuze and ethics (pp. 44–62). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (Trans. B. Massumi). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Fahai, or The sorcerer and the White Snake (白蛇傳說之法海) (2001). Dir. Siu-ting Ching. Prod. China
Juli Entertainment Media. Dist. by Distribution Workshop.
Gaard, G., & Murphy, P. D. (Eds.). (1998). Ecofeminist literary criticism: Theory, interpretation,
pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gatens, M. (1996). Through a Spinozist lens: Ethology, difference, power. In P. Patton (Ed.), Deleuze: A
critical reader (pp. 162–187). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Haraway, D. J. (Ed.). (1985). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late
twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New
York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (Ed.). (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late
twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New
York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). Otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman
(Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 157–187). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hughes, J. (2011). Introduction. Pity the meat? Deleuze and the body. In L. Guillaume & J. Hughes
(Eds.), Deleuze and the body (pp. 1–5). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Iovino, S., & Oppermann, S. (2012). Material ecocriticism: Materiality, agency, and models of
narrativity. Ecozon@, 3(1), 75–91.
Iovino, S., & Oppermann, S. (Eds.). (2014). Material ecocriticism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Jiang, X. (蔣勳) (2013). Bodily nourishment and cultivation (肉身供養). Taipei: Route Culture Company
(有鹿文化出版社).
Latimer, J., & Miele, M. (2013). Naturecultures? Science, affect and the non-human. Theory, Culture &
Society, 30(7–8), 5–31.
Liou, L.-Y. (劉亮雅) (2014). Belated postcoloniality: Post-martial law Taiwanese fiction (遲來的後殖民:
再論解嚴以來台灣小說). Taipei: National Taiwan University Press (台北:台大出版中心).
Ma, S.-M. (2015). The last isle: Contemporary film, culture and trauma in global Taiwan. London:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Ma, R.-F. (馬如飛). (1975). A complete work of the White Snake legend (白蛇傳合編). Taipei: Shiang
shen Publishing Company.
Massumi, B. (1996). The autonomy of affect. In P. Patton (Ed.), Deleuze: A critical reader (pp. 217–239).
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

123
Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake,…

Murphy, P. D. (2000). Farther afield in the study of nature oriented literature. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia.
Yuan, K. (袁珂) (1986). Anthology of ancient mythology (古神話選譯). Taipei: Chang An Publishers.

123