Her visions of her mother as some kind of monster-deliverer appear in Kingston's nightmares. She states on page 86, "My mother has given me pictures to dream -- nightmare babies that recur." The grotesque imagery of her mother delivering monsters corresponds also with her dreamlike memories of foods they ate when she was a child in China. The images converge in Kingston's head to provide the foundation for her self-image and her identity as a Chinese woman living as an immigrant in the United States. At the close of the "Shaman" chapter she comments about her mom's psychic legacy: "She sends me on my way, working always now and old, dreaming the dreams about shrinking babies," (109).
Kingston's memories and thoughts of her mother are partly created by her nightmares. The distinction between waking and dream life are not important for Kingston's psychological development or the creation of her self-image.….

oman arrior
My aunt haunts me -- her ghosts drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her," (16). Aunts, the sisters of fathers or mothers who serve as surrogate female role models, play a central role in Maxine Hong Kingston's The oman arrior. However, Kingston's aunts are no warrior women; in fact, "No-Name oman" and "Moon Orchid" embody the antithesis of the woman warrior-heroine. No-Name oman disgraces herself and her family, killing herself and her newborn and forever erasing her name from the family tree. Kingston can but imagine the true spirit of this no-name aunt who haunts her since her mother told her the tale of her downfall. Similarly, Moon Orchid displays shameful characteristics: she cannot pull her weight doing chores when she arrives in America and she hasn't got the gumption to stand up to her husband. Both….

Woman Warrior
Maxine Kingston's Woman warrior has been a controversial addition to the literature written by Chinese-American writers. The writer has tried to answer the critical question of Chinese-American identity and hence been criticized for adopting an orientalist framework to win approval of the west. The woman warrior speaks of a culture that neatly fits the description of the "Other" in the orientalist framework. It appears alien, remote and immensely degrading to women who were treated like non-human beings by Chinese chauvinistic society. However things changed for the generation of Chinese that grew up in the U.S. Or at least that is what Kingston wants us to believe.

Frank Chin has been the most vocal critic of Kingston's who accused her "of reinforcing white fantasies about Chinese-Americans" (Chin, 1991) and claimed that writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang who won approval of the American white readers….

It is true that while Kingston can use irony against the stereotypes of passivity imposed upon Chinese femininity, at other times she seems to use these stereotypes less self-consciously. Her portrayal of her mother calling white people 'ghosts,' and her decision to name her mother Brave Orchid, seem to reflect cultural construction of Oriental women and Asians in general as superstitious and somewhat primitive in their understanding of the world. But there are always intrusions of the modern world that satirize the tendency to render China as exotic and Oriental. The fact that Kingston calls her mother 'Brave Orchid' and her aunt 'Moon Orchid' are less important than the cultural clash that transpires between their ways of life.

The characters in Kingston's work are always recognizably human in the manner in which they illustrate the immigrant experience. Moon Orchid is shown marveling at as well as being horrified by American ways….

Forbidden Face and the oman arrior
In My Forbidden Face, Latifa narrates a poignant coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up under the brutal regime of the Taliban. Latifa skillfully pulls the reader into a world that seems that of a typical teenager. She writes of "college, girlfriends in search of music tapes, film videos, novels to read avidly in bed in the evening" (11).

Latifa's protected world collapses when the Taliban assume power in 1997. Until then, Latifa had enjoyed the privileges afforded by her family's relative affluence. Latifa went to school, talked to her friends about fashion, dreamed about Indian and Iranian movie stars. She did not wear a veil and donned skirts that were hemmed at the knee. More importantly, the young author had strong career ambitions. Her own mother was a gynecological nurse, while Latifa herself planned for a career in journalism.

Latifa makes it clear that….

Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, the Woman Warrior, may be considered a microcosm of the work as a whole. The section "No Name Woman" incorporates the recurring themes of silence, invisibility, ghosts and using words as weapons.
It is argued, that the story's central theme is the process of "finding a personal voice" (Ling). This is mainly about the Aunt, but also about the mother and the narrator. It is a combination of three female characters each trying to find a voice and fighting against silence, some by choice such as the narrator, some by force, such as the mother, that makes this a powerful theme.

Silence is especially important in the story in relation to women, women are not expected to be outspoken but to live in the background, not expressing their feelings and more importantly, not being expected to have feelings, "the work of preservation demands that the feelings playing….

Maxine Kingston's Contribution To Literature
Maxine Kingston's Contribution to Contemporary Literature

Maxine Hong Kingston's literature falls into the Contemporary Literature movement and many critics consider her work to be an important contribution on the feminist front as well as that of Asian literature. Kingston was born in Stockton, California in 1940 and is the best recognized Asian-American writer of today. (2094) The oman arrior demonstrates the struggle experienced as a Chinese-American growing up in America as well as focusing on other issues such as success and mother-daughter relationships. The oman arrior is able to tell the story of one woman who discovers her self through overcoming the memory of her heritage and finding her place in society.

The oman arrior is formed from what many critics like to call fiction and fact and memory and imagination (Lauter 2094). The book examines the "difficulties in Kingston's development as a woman and as a Chinese-American"….

Women throughout Chinese history have experienced the oppression their tradition and culture exert as well as the power only members of their sex can attain in their chosen domains. Although readers have been exposed to historical anecdotes relating foot binding and Man's superiority to women, there are also many stories relating their freedom and tenacity, whether they are wives, concubines, courtesans or prostitutes. The history of Chinese women is not necessarily limited to persecution and being dominated, it is also peppered with inspirational stories of women who have been able to find happiness, success and fulfillment within the parameters Chinese tradition and culture dictate.
In Chinese society, the positions women maintained were very indistinct (http://www.wm.edu/CAS/anthropology/faculty/hamada/Virtual_Classromm/wwwb.../208.htm,1)."In Chinese society, women as a category had a dependent status." (Watson, 1991, 232). efore a girl married, she was controlled completely by her father. After she married, this responsibility was transferred to her husband. If her….

The overall literature available on this theory is more or less mixed as some studies claim that there is nor relation between the two concepts (Pelletier & Herold, 1988), whereas others state that rape fantasies are high where women are sexually suppressed (Hariton & Singer, 1974), yet another study concluded that the women who had higher ratio of rape fantasy were mentally more healthy towards the concept of sex (Gold et al., 1991; Shulman & Horne, 2006) and experienced lower levels of shame (Shulman & Horne, 2006; Strassberg & Lockerd, 1998). Hence, it is important to analyze whether there is actual link between rape fantasies and the sexual guilt phenomenon.

Openness to Sexual Experience

The philosophy of the openness to sexual experience is in direct opposition to the sexual blame avoidance phenomenon. Here the idea is that having rape fantasies is part of the sexual identity and need of a woman (Gold….

Esposito finds that the premodernist revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the pattern of Islamic politics that developed and left a legacy for the twentieth century. These movements were motivated primarily in response to internal decay rather than external, colonial threat (Esposito 40-41).
At the same time, many areas of the Islamic world experienced the impact of the economic and military challenge of an emerging and modernizing est beginning in the eighteenth century. Declining Muslim fortunes also reversed the relationship of the Islamic world to the est, from that of an expanding offensive movement to a defensive posture. Muslim responses to these changes ranged from rejection to adaptation, from Islamic withdrawal to acculturation and reform. Some responded by secular reform, and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Islamic modernist movements had also developed in an attempt to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity….

Women Called to Witness by Nancy a. Hardesty, Second Edition
The biblical feminists of today reinterpret the original scriptures with reference to women while trying to find religious reasons for their actions. An example of this is Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century by Nancy Hardesty, as also other writers like Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is suggested by the book that the motivation of women leading the fights for temperance, female ordination, abolition and women suffrage in the beginning of the nineteenth century was from their evangelical Christian faith. 1 The Second Great awakening revivals touched the lives of each of these great warriors. The author proves that the traditional, evangelical activist was as intelligent as the Christian feminist. The differences between public and private, male and female, and politics and religion that were defined through the Industrial evolution were deliberately….

The possibility that such attention was paid to these event in earlier times in European cultures is obvious but absent from modern representations of rites of passage. What can be interesting is the correlation between the two rites of passage discussed here, the "sweet 16" party and the Quinceanera and their similarities to weddings. Because weddings are expected to be delayed, more so in U.S. culture but also in Mexican and other cultures, as a mark of good judgment some rites of passage and especially those for girls seem to have become mirrors or proxy weddings, where massive expenses are sometimes incurred and dress is decidedly formal.
It must first be understood that the quinceaneras is actually a religious rite performed in conjunction with a special mass in the oman Catholic Church as well a blessing and a group of ceremonies for the 15-year-old girl, 15 of her friends and/or….

Women in the Book Of Judges
Prof Name

The Book of Judges talks about ancient Israel, and how they extended their territory by acquiring lands from the non-Israelites. The book narrates how Israelites conquered and reclaimed their lost land from non-Israelites and how they used to turn from God whenever they are satisfied. But it is written in the Bible that, the guilty are by no means cleared, as Exodus (34:7) says this is the reason why the Lord used several Kings and Judges like Deborah to help the people of Israel find their way back to Him. As the book reveals, it is evident that most of the judges were men (as they were most of the times referred to as Judges). The book talks about a great woman Deborah, also referred to as the "bee," as a key judge in the entire book. This book unveils the importance of women….

oman
Maxine Hong Kingston's short story "No Name oman" approaches the silencing of women and the potential for their expression in younger generations through the story of the narrator's unnamed, possibly fictional aunt. In particular, the story highlights the way in which women can actually work to reinforce the social standards which keep them silenced and relatively powerless, because the narrator's mother uses the story of the nameless aunt in order to scare the narrator into hewing more closely to cultural norms. However, the narrator is critical enough to see through this ideological imposition, and works to undermine not only her mother's method of control through fear but also the underlying societal assumptions which motivates her mother in the first place. By examining the motivations of the narrator's mother in conjunction with the critical perspective of the narrator, one is able to see how breaking the silence of women's voices….

Author Goldman continues, "ather than assuming that all women are incapable of performance by virtue of the average woman's lack of capability, specific requirements should serve as the selection criteria, not gender" (Goldman 271). Gender should not matter if it does not matter to the women who want to join.
The government could open up more combat jobs to women to help solve the problem, and women who were interested in combat positions should be encouraged to serve in the armed forces. Indeed, in their own study, the government found that with the right training, women's physical capabilities can increase. Another author notes, "An Army esearch Institute of Environmental Medicine report (January 26, 1996) shows that intensive training of motivated women can increase their physical abilities" (Jernigan 51). Thus, physical limitations are simply an excuse many people use to argue against women in the military. Even the military itself recognizes….