Maxine Hong Kingston, Ghostbuster Feminist

Maxine Hong Kingston is a first generation Chinese-American writer who became recognized after the publication of The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts in 1976. In this study, I argue that Kingston’s book of the uncanny draws on Chinese- American women’s writing in order to construct the role-model of a bicultural Ghostbuster feminist able to fight the ghosting patriarchal policies of the US. By contextualizing second wave feminism and women’s writing in the 1970s, we can observe that Kingston’s writing style is part of écriture feminine, and that this helped her overcome her bicultural uncanny experience.