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.”

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