THE CYBORG CONTINUUM: FROM MYTH TO TECHNOCAPITALISM IN LARISSA LAI’S SALT FISH GIRL

Text topic: Human

Text author: Татјана Милосављевић

The paper makes use of Judith Butler’s poststructuralist approach to gender and Donna Haraway’s theorization of the posthuman figure of cyborg to explore the subversion of the heteronormative apparatus in Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl. This work of the early 21st century Canadian speculative fiction weaves a narrative continuity between a mythical serpent goddess, her reincarnation as a natural woman and her final embodiment as a cyborg in a late-capitalist technocracy. The queer poetics of the novel intersects with the exploration of the boundaries between the human, animal and the machine in a multilayered narrative that imagines a technologically-mediated reproduction of the two lesbian protagonists, thus transcending the heteronormative institution by means of a posthuman subjectivity. Ultimately, Salt Fish Girl may be said to take issue with coextensive ideologies of sexism, racism, scientism and speciesism by imagining a radical agency of a self-reproducing female subject that combines different natural species and a machine, challenging the humanist assumptions about the privileged position of man (or, the male, to be more precise) in a chain of beings in which the exploitation of women, nature and animals has been rooted.