Abstract
Women’s reproductive rights continue to be a highly contested ground. Larissa Lai’s queer speculative novel The Tiger Flu (2018) comments from a feminist, critical posthuman perspective on how the gendered and racialized bodies especially of women from the Global South are culturally marked as ultimately expendable and exploitable. This chapter analyzes how Lai explores the potential of alternative reproductive technologies such as cloning and genetic engineering as a means of empowerment for marginalized and subaltern subjects. From an ecocritical perspective, the thus arising new non-human entanglements provide an alternative to the Western, patriarchal, neo-liberal system that, if left unchecked, might lead to the destruction of the planet and all life on it—through new odd kinships, a more equal and egalitarian way of life becomes possible.
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Notes
- 1.
A more in-depth discussion of Humanism can be found in Kate Soper’s (1986) Humanism and Anti-Humanism.
- 2.
Kevin Morley, David Robins, Toshiya Ueno, and Kumiko Sato have provided much of the critical groundwork of the concept; “techno-Orientalism” as a term was first defined in print in Morley’s and Robins’s Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (1995), while Ueno has arguably published most widely about the concept itself.
- 3.
In their transgressive hybridity that defies binary categorization, but also in a quite literal reference to the following passage already alluded to above from “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), the Grist sisters seem a direct embodiment of Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept: “These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a ‘Western’ commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by ‘Western’ technology, by writing. These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies” (177).
- 4.
See, for example, the 1978 federal class action lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan.
- 5.
The Grist sisters’ multiple births, as many as ten in a “litter,” call up societal fears of “unnatural” interventions via assisted reproductive technology and remind of the controversial debate around Nadya Suleman who was referred to by the media as “Octomom” after she gave birth to eight surviving babies in January 2009 that were conceived via in vitro fertilization. While the ethical implications of this particular case can be questioned—the fertility specialist who performed the procedure was investigated and expelled from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine—the public outcry and the ensuing debate about whether women should even have access to assisted reproductive technology can serve as an indicator for a collective societal fear of—and demand for control over—women’s reproductivity.
- 6.
The clones live in a “backwoods” way, both literally in their deliberate isolation from others as well as figuratively, in my reading, with their alternative cultural traditions and belief systems that to a Western-biased observer might appear as “primitive” and “barbaric,” despite how superior they are in many respects to anything Western science has to offer. Their spatial remove is thereby both in space and in time, calling up Anne McClintock’s (1995) term of “anachronistic space” that describes colonial conceptions of indigenous peoples as inhabiting an anterior time, pre-modern, or “primitive” imaginary past.
- 7.
This is a powerful commentary by Lai on the importance of (cultural) memory, and as Kirilow explains about forget-me-do, “[t]hrough its use, we cultivate what we remember and what we forget in order to make Grist history” (43). Only by remembering the pain of one’s oppression, can one truly resist it. This knowingly rings with the unwillingness of Western culture to account for past injustices and atrocities, such as genocide of indigenous peoples and slavery, which enables the continuance of racism that, most perniciously, can also be internalized by the victims of such oppression and their descendants.
- 8.
During the feast, it becomes clear that the dishes contained the flesh of the murdered Elzbieta Kruk—another cannibalistic incident, this time by Isabelle Chow’s hand. This, again, could be read as a critical comment on capitalist greed.
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Gatermann, J. (2022). Groomed for Survival—Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_5
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