In this excerpt, Schueller examines the way in which The Woman Warrior questions accepted cultural definitions of female and ethnic identity.

Ever since its publication in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has been praised as a feminist work. But while critics have written extensively about the articulation of female experience in The Woman Warrior, they have been unable to deal simultaneously with the questions of national and racial identity that the book so powerfully raises. However, if we approach women's writing as centrally concerned not strictly with gender but with oppression, we can fruitfully examine the conjuncture and relationship between female and ethnic identity, an important issue not only for this text but for feminist theory as well. I will briefly examine the politicization of female identity offered by some feminist critics and then examine The Woman Warrior as a dialogic text, one which subverts singular...