ABSTRACT
Indios and Mazu's Body-guards both implicitly articulate that patriarchal institutions marginalize and suppress "the female" under various social, political, cultural, and environmental frameworks. Mazu represents a force that especially speaks for the ties between the female and the environment, ties that ecofeminists emphasize. The narrator of Jade Chen's semi-autobiographical novel, Mazu's Body-guards, the youngest of the three main characters, tells the story of the suffering and punishment of a generation of three women under the rule of colonial and postcolonial governments in Taiwan. Haraway's cyborg and "natureculture" are concepts that are very useful for addressing deity worship in the East such as the worship of Mazu in Taiwan, a deity that is understood in both material and conceptual, human and other-than-human, and cultural and natural terms. Ecofeminism speaks more for what all beings and objects in the world share more than for what distinguishes them and for what can be used against them in order to subordinate them.
