Posthuman Reproductive Futures: The Eco-Queer Kinship of Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu
摘要
The recent ‘posthuman turn’ in literary practice and criticism has facilitated an outpouring of literature concerned with the relationships of interdependence that human and non- or more-than-human entities establish in a planetary context of increasing uncertainty. Among the many proposals to conceptualize this problem stands out Donna Haraway’s invitation to ‘make kin as oddkin,’ which signals an expansion of family relations to include the non- or more-than-human. This movement, foregrounded by queer ecological feminism and amplified by the affordances of modern reproductive technology, is at all times framed by a posthuman ethics of care that demands mutual aid and responsibility. In this context, this chapter examines Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novel The Tiger Flu as an example of speculative feminist literature that articulates new possibilities for kinship. This chapter argues that The Tiger Flu articulates alternative familial and reproductive structures that challenge anthropocentric, heteronormative paradigms and predicate survivability on the interdependence between human and nonhuman entities.