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Studies on Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi so far have yielded considerable arguments on the domestication (or humanization) of the supernatural females in his metamorphosis narrative, a process through which the alien power of these supernatural females is eventually assimilated into the patriarchal society of human world. However, through a close reading of Pu's metamorphosis narrative, I argue that supernatural females continue to constitute a subversive force even after they have been domesticated. Although subject to the positionality of the patriarchal order, women are not completely passive and powerless within this structure. Unable to transcend the disciplines of phallocentric society, they somehow manage to survive within that order through various ways. In practice, women pose a profound threat to these disciplines by implicitly redeploying and transforming them into women's own favorable advantage that can in turn secure feminine power. Thus, a real subversion does not come from transcendence, but precisely comes from within. With an examination of the supernatural women's individual efforts as well as their various forms of alliance, this article aims to make manifest of how supernatural females proactively constitute a permanent threat to the patriarchal society.
Keywords: redeployment, subversion, grand narrative, private narrative
PARODIC REDEPLOYMENT OF PATRIARCHAL DISCOURSE
Although women are traditionally viewed as vulnerable groups that are normally more inclined to be exposed to oppression, tangible or intangible, they are not completely silent recipients of injustice, but subjects with agency who are able to proactively redeploy the dominant discourses over femininity. Despite the fact that under the patriarchal circumstances, they cannot afford to be litigious, they manage to transform that law to make the most of it. As Judith Butler would suggest, power can neither be withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed, a true subversive force can only be gained through "a parodicredeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of its full-scale transcendence" (Butler 1990, p. 124). In other words, as she states elsewhere in Gender Trouble, "If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself." (Butler, 1990, p. 93) It is precisely in this sense that Nancy Fraser concludes Butler is correct in...