The session takes up Larissa Lai’s 2018 novel The Tiger Flu to argue that recent feminist and queer science fiction of color resist and reconfigure generic, technological, and environmental tropes and norms in order to imagine alternative futures and relationships across and among animals, machines, humanity, and the environment. The session will offer The Tiger Flu as a deep dive, a cast study to articulate how speculative literature allows, according to Raffaella Baccolini, readers to “see the differences of an elsewhere and thus think critically about the reader’s own world and possibly act on and change that world.”

The Tiger Flu is set in a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest in the year 2145, in a climate change ravaged and technologically transformed Vancouver, now called Saltwater, where mega-corporations, paramilitary groups, and governments compete for resources and control; where biotechnology, cybernetic implants, massive computer mainframes in the form of moon-like satellites (named Chang and Eng) are contrasted by failing food supplies, environmental disasters, and a global pandemic that originated in the cloning of Caspian tigers. The Tiger Flu features the intertwined stories of two young women: Kirilow Groundsel, a member of a rogue commune called Grist Village, home to women-only clones, and Kora Ko, a teenage girl living with her family just outside Saltwater City, who unbeknownst to her is a long-lost cousin to the Grist sisters with the “starfish” power to regenerate parts of her own body.

Alenda Chang’s presentation will engage the ways that The Tiger Flu predates the current coronavirus crisis but describes our moment in eerie detail: tone-deaf, megalomaniacal tech tyrants obsessed with objects in orbit; a world-altering pandemic that greatly exacerbates economic disparity; and the predictably poor consequences of de-extinction science. She suggests an environmentally oriented reading of The Tiger Flu, which asks: what does it mean to label a pandemic with the name of an animal species or class (as in the “avian” flu)? What does COVID-19, anti-Asian racism (the “kung flu,” the “China virus”), and public confusion over zoonotic disease tell us about the material force of words, whether through attribution, correlation, or speculation? And how does Lai’s prescient work perversely model environmental utopia through apparent dystopia? From protagonist Kora Ko’s start as a meat-averse subsistence farmer, to the Grist sisters’ asexual reproduction through parthenogenesis (echoed in their names drawn from floral and invertebrate features), to the return of the long-vanished Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgate) only to be farmed for tiger-bone wine production, the book’s extensive and deliberately impure human-animal crossings suggest at least one possibility for a multispecies future. Lai’s parable implies that rather than traffic in the linear and pointed tropes of disease vectors and invasive species, we ought to think in terms of permeable bodies and surrounds (as in Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “trans-corporeality”), and new forms of collectivity.

Stevi Costa and Edmond Chang in a two-part, interconnected presentation will address the ways that The Tiger Flu is deeply critical of ableist mind/body dualism assumed by much of science fiction and upends the cyberpunk trope that treats the body as “meat” and the “prison of the mind” (a la William Gibson’s Neuromancer) and argues that hope and possibility, even in a dystopian world, is deeply embodied. The presentations extend Alison Kafer’s argument that the future has “been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness,” positing a “curative imaginary” that assumes a future where disability is cured or eradicated. It would seem that if science fiction is indeed what Darko Suvin calls “the literature of ideas,” it has historically only imagined a future in which able-bodiedness remains the status quo. The presentations argue that Lai's novel challenges and reconfigure this “curative” and technological fix via the Grist Sisters, whose way of life imagines a different relationship to cure, one that envisions a future for disabled lives through “the sexy suture:” ritualized organ transplants provided by the village’s “starfish women,” whose bodies continually regenerate. Drawing on disability praxis, their social structure relies on a network of caregiving and caretaking complicating the curative imaginary from a queer crip feminist standpoint. The radical lifeways of the Grist Sisterhood stand out in stark contrast against that of Chow and Traskin’s more ableist and technolibertarian intervention; they seek a top down, technological fix for the “tiger flu” hoping to “cure the mind of the body” by transferring the consciousnesses of the sick to the orbiting mainframes Chang and Eng.

Each panelist will contribute a 15 minute paper or presentation leaving ample time for discussion and conversation.