頻頻回首: 黎熹年《鹹魚女孩》中的跨世代創傷與賽伯格社群想像

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 頻頻回首: 黎熹年《鹹魚女孩》中的跨世代創傷與賽伯格社群想像 Backward Glances: Transgenerational Traumas and Cyborg Community Imaginings in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl. 指導教授：黃涵榆博士 Advisor: Dr. Han-yu Huang 研究生：謝東翰 Advisee: Dong-han Hsieh 中華民國 106 年 7 月 July 2017.

(2) Hsieh i. 摘要本論文探索黎熹年《鹹魚女孩》中的亞裔加拿大人對於過往和身分認同困境的糾結情懷。儘管多元文化的接納，但是亞裔加拿大人的族裔歷史和記憶已受加拿大多元文化主義的官方歷史侵蝕。相扣的敘事策略巧妙地捕捉頻頻回首並隱喻地反映離散軌跡。女媧和米蘭達的故事相互交替構成多向度且交織的敘事時空。藉由闡述跨世代創傷與賽伯格社群想像為理論基礎，筆者聲稱米蘭達的離散主體因著過往的殘餘而經歷改變，也主張賽伯格社群擱置全球資本主義的支配以及顛覆異性戀霸權的正統。論文共有三章。第一章在加拿大多元文化的背景下爬梳跨世代創傷與賽伯格社群想像的理論脈絡，同時提供文本分析作為進一步的闡述。第二章汲取瑪麗安娜·赫希的後記憶觀點論述米蘭達的離散主體及其轉變政治。米蘭達的族裔氣味和記憶被官方視為一種幻想疾病難以捉摸的病徵反而動搖由跨國公司所支配的城市中過度淨化的空間和高度理性的秩序。如鬼魂縈繞般復返的過往不斷促使她再次檢視全球資本主義的剝削以及種族和性別歧視仍持續的當代。第三章從唐娜·哈洛威和朱迪斯·巴特勒的理論視野探究賽伯格社群打造在革命網絡中的重要性，進而顛覆全球資本主義的邏輯與異性戀霸權的規範，期盼本體論的典範轉移。在賽伯格社群的想像中，酷兒情慾與生殖的流動性鬆動種族他者的資本支配以及性別二分的父權壓迫。因為變化節奏中的賽伯格潛能抵抗全球資本主義的權勢和誘惑，所以本小說與其說是倖存故事，不如說是奮鬥故事。. 關鍵詞: 加拿大多元文化主義、跨世代創傷、賽伯格社群想像、全球資本主義、異性戀霸權.

(3) Hsieh ii. Abstract This thesis explores the Asian-Canadian affective entanglement with the past and identity dilemma in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl. Despite the mosaic cultural embrace, the Asian-Canadian ethnic history and memory have been undermined in the official history of Canadian multiculturalism. The alternation between the stories of Nu Wa and Miranda constitutes the multidimensional, interwoven narrative space and time. The interlocking narrative strategy subtly captures backward glances, metaphorically reflecting the diasporic trajectory. By elaborating on transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings as the theoretical fundamental, I aver that Miranda’s diasporic subjectivity undergoes transformations with the residues of the past, and that the cyborg community suspends the domination of global capitalism and subverts the legitimacy of heterosexual hegemony. The thesis consists of three chapters. Against the backdrop of Canadian multiculturalism, Chapter One teases out the theoretical context of transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings while providing textual analysis for further elaboration. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Chapter Two discusses Miranda’s diasporic subjectivity and its politics of transformation. Miranda’s ethnic odor and memory, officially recognized as an elusive symptom of the dreaming disease, unsettle the overly sanitized space and highly rationalized order of the city dominated by transnational corporations instead. The haunted return of the past unceasingly drives her to reexamine the present where the exploitation of global capitalism and racial and gender discrimination still persist. From the theoretical perspectives of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, Chapter Three delves into the cyborg community building paramount in a revolutionary network to subvert the logic of global capitalism and normativity of heterosexual hegemony in hope of the paradigm shift of ontology. In the cyborg community imaginings, the fluidity of queer.

(4) Hsieh iii. eroticism and reproduction destabilizes the capitalist dominance of racial others and the patriarchal oppression of gender dichotomy. With the cyborg potentialities in the cadence of change resisting the power and allure of global capitalism, the novel is not so much the story of survival as the story of struggle.. Keywords: Canadian multiculturalism, transgenerational traumas, cyborg community imaginings, global capitalism, heterosexual hegemony.

(5) Hsieh iv. Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank my advisor, Professor Han-yu Huang, for his timely assistance and circumspect comments on my thesis. His flexibility and leniency endow me with ample time and space to reflect on the inadequacies of the thesis and then complete it on my pace. From this perspective, he is not so much my advisor as my mentor. In addition to the knowledge of completing a thesis I have gained from him, I eventually have learnt the value of writing as a means to manifest the enjoyment in the process of reading literature and studying literary theories. His efficiency and enthusiasm in advising further teach me the invaluable lesson of self-discipline and conscientious study. Hence, the thesis will vividly conjure up the significant moment of my cooperation with him whenever I read it. My immense gratitude also goes to the committee members, whose incisive comments and suggestions help me further clarify and refine the core points of the thesis. Professor Yuh-chuan Shao is rather patient in guiding me the path toward the articulation of focal ideas with thought-provoking questions and notes. Professor Chi-wen Liu ignites both my research interest in Asian Canadian literature and insight in analyzing literary texts. I would soundly like to thank myself. Without the self that persists in the passion for literature, I can hardly imagine the thesis would proceed smoothly and even culminate in its completion. Despite the obstacles and frustrations I have encountered, the enthusiasm and expertise of my advisor and committee members have exceptionally plucked up my confidence that could steadily wade across the unsettling grip during the impasse of writing. The completion of the thesis, nonetheless, does not mean the termination of the literary journey, but serves as the milestone that enormously raises my spirits to resume relentlessly the fantastic journey in my lifetime with the solitude and savor of reading literature as life enrichments..

(6) Hsieh v. Table of Contents. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...1. Chapter One.................................................................................................................14 Transgenerational Traumas and Cyborg Community Imaginings in Context. Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….29 Miranda’s Diasporic Subjectivity and Its Politics of Transformation. Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………...47 The Logic of Global Capitalism and Potentiality of Biotechnology. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………67. Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..71.

(7) Hsieh 1. Introduction Larissa Lai (born in 1967) is a Chinese-Canadian writer, critic and professor. As a lesbian, she writes two novels that are concerned about the issues of race and gender. Her first novel When Fox is a Thousand (1995) is related to her concerns about national identity, gender, and history. Her second novel Salt Fish Girl, published in 2002, rewrites the ancient myth of the goddess Nu Wa, who gets rebirth in late 19th century China in the first time and then develops an intimate relationship with the Salt Fish Girl. Betraying her to go to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness, Nu Wa goes back with a foreign tongue and then is tricked with the arranged marriage to a tobacco merchant. Paradoxically, Aimee conceives Miranda, born in the mid-20th century, after consuming a durian in which Nu Wa miniaturizes herself and coils around the durian seed. However, Miranda’s pungent durian smell pervading inside and outside her family expels Miranda’s family from Serendipity into the Unregulated Zone, where the family runs a store business and Miranda witnesses people troubled by traumatic memories. With the residues of the past, Miranda recognizes Evie, the reincarnation of the Salt Fish Girl, though she gets frightened by her revelation of nonhuman status. Cooperating with escaped Sonias, Evie and Miranda sabotage the working of multinational corporations by imprinting the soles of the shoes the cyborg workers made with their political messages and reproducing on their own without any male intervention. With a black-haired baby girl at the birthing scenario, the novel creatively ends with the sensual copulation between Evie and Miranda, re-imagining the ethnic origin of postgeneration queer Chinese women. With the multifaceted timelines and spaces interwoven in Salt Fish Girl, Lai intends to critique the contemporary era. Her generic choice of science fiction itself denigrates the accelerating development of technology in the present condition. The dystopic speculative fiction is delineated by Martín-Lucas, who claims that as “an.

(8) Hsieh 2. enabling genre for social critique and political intervention,” it helps critically reexamine the current social condition by envisioning possible dire repercussions in the grim future (70). Roslyn Weaver also thinks that the use of apocalypse in literary science fiction can “speak against present society and critique current practices” (193). The dystopian scenario foresees the near future world if the use of biotechnology goes untrammeled. Aguila-Way points out that the new technology might be “remobilized to challenge the racist, heteronormative, and scientifically reductive versions of genetic science on which bioimperialism is predicated” (147). Therefore, Salt Fish Girl’s futurity is “an open-ended process” contingent upon the complex interrelatedness between genes, bodies and environments (Aguila-Way 162). Guy Beauregard reasons Lai’s deconstructive narrative technique: “Salt Fish Girl deliberately blurs historical and future narratives, calling into question notions of temporality, memory, and history” (149). The narrative strategy of Salt Fish Girl obfuscates the linear progress of capitalist development by alternating between the past and the future, attempting to secede from the rigid boundary between the East and the West. With the postmodern writing strategy of non-linear temporalities and shifting places, Lai opens up a specific space of imagining cross-ethnic and transnational coalitions as exemplified by the cyborg alliance in an attempt to subvert the politics of neoliberalism and myth of multiculturalism. The concept of identity is no longer fixated on the quest for authentic Asian-Canadian position, but rather reformulated as the constellation of the traumatic residues of racial violence and gender exploitation. While the trajectory of future is potentially imagined, the urgent need of glancing backward to the past reshapes the Asian-Canadian identity, despite the oblivion and elision of the past by the official narrative of multiculturalism. This particular identity is reinvested and crosses the racial, ethnic and national boundaries. Salt Fish Girl’s treatment of memory is distinct from the convention of Asian identity,.

(9) Hsieh 3. but rather a “politics of queer and feminist solidarity” (Christopher B. Patterson and Y-Dang Troeung 76). The issue of Asian-Canadian identity has heated up the contemporary debate of Asian-Canadian studies. Despite the mosaic cultural embrace, the Asian-Canadian ethnic history and memory have been undermined in the official history of Canadian multiculturalism. Thus, the immigrants cannot give voice to their past life experiences which become the haunting remnants left behind in the history. The tolerant acceptance toward the immigrants is the mere appearance. The immigrant desires for wealth, progress, and democracy are the spirits that uphold the appearance. As a matter of fact, the nation deteriorates increasingly due to the overuse of biotechnology and destabilization of global capitalism. With the rapid pace of technology and globalization, the capitalist society maneuvers workers to toil in a factory so as to maintain its normal function. Among many novels in the emerging field of Asian Canadian literature, Salt Fish Girl has ignited my curiosity about the understanding of the Asian-Canadian identity and its underlying questions about the possibility of renegotiable and unstable identity as represented by the ongoing conflation between the past and the present. Although multicultural Canada seems to tolerate and accept Asian Canadians, have they really gained freedom without racial and gender discrimination or are they still oppressed and exploited? In my view, the Canadians of Asian descent beget racial discrimination and fetishism owing to their ethnic odor and color; moreover, they are further repressed and exploited, because the hyper-capitalist society uses the biotechnology to exploit and oppress factory workers, especially the female ones, who are objectified and thus dehumanized. What are the possibilities as well as limitations in the cyborgian resistance against the logic of global capitalism? Despite the resistance opening up new possibilities, I ruminate over the limitations of resistance to further investigate the influence of their subversive tactic on the existing.

(10) Hsieh 4. socio-political framework. Investigating the implication between race and gender is imperative to suspend the operation and exploitation of capitalism. The alternation between the stories of Nu Wa and Miranda constitutes the multidimensional, interwoven narrative space and time. The interlocking narrative strategy subtly captures backward glances, metaphorically reflecting the diasporic trajectory. How is the Asian-Canadian identity formed via the recollection through the past and projection of the future? The aforementioned questions will be in my mind when I study the narratives of Nu Wa and Miranda. By elaborating on transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings as the theoretical fundamental, I aver that Miranda’s diasporic subjectivity undergoes transformations with the residues of the past, and that the cyborg community suspends the domination of global capitalism and subverts the legitimacy of heterosexual hegemony. My thesis draws on the concept of transgenerational traumas to examine the Asian-Canadian identity, the cyborg politics to investigate female workers implicated in the domination of global capitalism, and the subversion of identity to challenge the heterosexual and patriarchal system. In “The Generation of Postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch expounds that the affective link to previous generations is the concept of postmemory as the “living connection” in the memory structure of generations (111). The affective transmission of traumas to following generations makes the transgenerational inheritance of histories imaginable, though the postgeneration vicariously experience them. In the same vein, Gabriele Schwab’s Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma offers the term “haunting legacies” to illuminate the past influence on future generations: What I call “haunting legacies” are things hard to recount or even to remember, the results of a violence that holds an unrelenting grip on memory yet is deemed unspeakable. The psychic core of violent histories.

(11) Hsieh 5. includes what has been repressed or buried in unreachable psychic recesses. The legacies of violence not only haunt the actual victims but also are passed on through the generations. (1) In Schwab’s account, the unspeakable grip haunts the postgeneration. The concept of haunting legacies deserves further articulations as the primal theoretical parameter, though they are hardly explainable and fall into the ruins of history. The past event would ferment as a trauma that shadows the destiny of generations. The unwanted legacies cannot be undone, but continue to haunt the postgeneration. The trauma is too violent and painful to speak or remember. Instead, it would be stored and further repressed in the recesses of the psyche that cannot be retained, so the repression and forgetfulness are the psychical mechanism as a protective shield to go through the trauma. Otherwise, it is too overwhelming. The unspeakability of trauma testifies to violent histories. The concept of postmemory helps unravel the memory structure of characters in Salt Fish Girl who terribly suffer from the dreaming disease compelling them to incessantly reminisce the traumatic histories of previous generations. They cannot help but recall and reembody those collective memories in the sense that histories become embodied not from any factual or manipulated historical record, but from the affective body. As such, Miranda’s racialized body giving off the durian stink arouses the embodied and affective connection to the past.1 However, in Miranda’s case, her postmemory is not so traumatic as those characters, but rather an intimate reconnection with her previous life as Nu Wa and the entangled affection for her lover. Such diasporic haunting affectively re-connects and re-turns the forgotten and unwritten links to the diasporic origin. As seen in Miranda’s encounter with Evie, their interaction reembodies their previous life as Nu Wa and the Salt Fish Girl. In Bleeding Chrome, Allan proposes the concept of “replication” to manifest the transgenerational perception of Miranda, who certainly has no direct life experience to Nu Wa: “[Miranda’s] mind and body replicate the essence of the ancient serpentine woman” (123). 1.

(12) Hsieh 6. Nonetheless, Hirsch is critically aware of the over-identification with the past in fear of one’s particular life stories displaced by the past. From Hirsch’s caution of the over-identification with the past, I have further observed that Miranda’s transformation of her own vulnerability and shame transports herself back to the stringent issues of the present where she recognizes Evie via the residues of the past. The remnants of the haunted past serve as a medium for Miranda and Evie to rewrite the history and make a revolution for the potentiality of the future. Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics and Judith Butler’s theorization of the gender politics will be applied to the analysis of the subversion of cyborg potentialities. The seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” provides the fundamental definition of cyborg: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291). Based on the classical definition, the configuration of the cyborg is an amalgam of both machinic and organic entities. The introduction of technology has reconfigured the meaning of humans, since the relation between humans and technology is intertwined. The cyborg would emerge in the real world as well as in the fiction: “[T]he cyborg [serves] as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (292). Moreover, Haraway is concerned about the exploitation and oppression of female workers in her sketch of “the informatics of domination” with the advent of technology (300). To some extent, her deconstruction of gender binary resonates with Butler’s concept. In Gender Trouble, Butler theorizes gender as the cultural effect of performativity. By undoing the gender binary, the paradigm shift of ontology would potentially emerge. Conjoining the theoretical perspectives of Haraway and Butler, I intend to examine the interrelatedness of race and gender in the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism. The cyborg community manifests the act of underground resistance against the hegemonic power of.

(13) Hsieh 7. corporate-controlled Serendipity, potentially creating a temporary sense of belonging to make new spatial and temporal articulations. The redeployment of biotechnology to reproduce queer children and the intercourse between Miranda and Evie all bespeak the subversion of global capitalism and heteronormativity. In recent years, numerous critics have discussed the condition of AsianCanadians with theoretical strategies to negotiate the Asian-Canadian identity in the multicultural Canadian society, but an interpretation adopting Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Haraway’s trope of cyborg and Butler’s subversion of identity in the analysis of Miranda’s development of growth, global capitalism and potentiality of biotechnology remains a deficiency. Kate Chiwen Liu contends that the postcolonial strategy of hybridity evades the Canadian political deployment of multiculturalism. The lesbian genealogy is rendered hybridized owing to genetically modified bodies and identities and the textual manipulation of postmodern writing. Associated with the “Oriental,” those elements, such as durians and the mythic goddess Nu Wa, are also hybridized in the same contextualized spaces and time under the exploitation and exoticization of multinational capitalism. With the above strategies of hybridity, Liu proffers the concept of “post-colonial anti-exotic” to circumvent the cooptation of corporations and to engender the potential of characters. Like Liu’s mention of postmodern writing style, Meng-Chun Huang thinks that the postmodern hybrid writing style concurrently reflects the hybridity of Asian-Canadian identity. The objects of examination in her thesis are memory and the other that open negotiations between the Asians and the Canadians of Asian descent. The thesis interrogates an ethics in the encounter with the other with Kristeva’s idea of love. Huang reiterates the significance of the particular exploration of the Asian past in the ongoing negotiation between the “Asian” and the “Canadian.” Some critics have analyzed the condition of the Unregulated Zone, in which the.

(14) Hsieh 8. chaos abounds and rational order destabilizes. Latimer depicts the Unregulated Zone as “a place of subversion and potential rebellion” (170). Likewise, Cheryl Lousley regards the Unregulated Zone as a “contested space of both nightmares and political possibility” due to the inaccessible intervention of “transcendent authority” (144). In fact, Serendipity and the Unregulated Zone are dialectically co-constitutive. That is, the immigrants, including Miranda’s family, are docile workers in an effort to realize the promise of better life in Serendipity. On the other, due to disease, poverty and changing climate, the Zone within the environmental dystopia is literally unregulated outside the government of the corporate capitalism. Therefore, the Unregulated Zone is an abject underworld which is depicted as “abject decadence” (Martín-Lucas 75). The pervasiveness of smell within a racialized body is one of the pivotal themes in the novel. Although the durian smell catalyzes the sensibility of “the anti-Asian racism” (Lousley 153), the odor embodies “silenced histories” (Wong 114). Through the permeating odor, the past can be unraveled and understood as “an uncanny ecological remembering” (Lousley 154). In Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives, Eleanor Ty points out the fact that “the value of remembrance and unforgetfulness” demonstrates the urge to revisit the past that is clandestinely effaced (91). On the other, Evie’s fishy odor materializes the Salt Fish Girl’s smell, whose father is a fish trader in 19th century China. It is her salt fish smell that triggers the previous memory and melancholic yearning in Miranda. Usually, those with the dreaming disease who cannot bare painful memories are prone to commit suicide by drowning. Nevertheless, Miranda’s disease enigmatically arouses the affective and political sensibility with queer desires and networked hopes. The foul smell, officially recognized as a symptom of the disease, constantly revives the traumatic memories. Malissa Phung contends that diasporization is an unending process that always relates to the past histories which are repressed by the postgeneration. With the return of the.

(15) Hsieh 9. repressed, the descendants are afflicted with the painful histories lingering like a smell. Rey Chow claims that Salt Fish Girl uses many metaphors to showcase “an inherited, shared condition of social stigmatization and abjection” (146). In the same vein, Paul Lai highlights the subversive significance of smell to challenge the oppressive idea of rationality and progress in the Western project of modernity, thinking that the purpose of science fiction genre reformulates the existing world by accessing to “repressed memories” (175). As a result, Miranda’s smell marks “how she is connected to history, people, and the world” (Paul Lai 180). Further, the smell revives past traumas in the shaping of identity. Stephanie Oliver claims that the significance of smell relates to diasporic subjectivities, a smell as a shaping force of identity connecting racialized/gendered olfactory experiences from the past homeland to the present immigrant place. The posthuman kinship, she considers, offers an alternative to eschew the racist representation of Asian-Canadian identity. Similar to Oliver’s analysis, Sharlee Reimer’s investigation disparages the Enlightenment project, forming the notion of origin that is made problematic based on her thought on the networked connectivity. The sordid genealogy where the authentic origin becomes questionable is discussed in light of posthumanist feminism to demonstrate “unnatural, monstrous, racialized bodies” that unsettle the “authentic humanness” (8). The alternative to the existing post-apocalyptic world relies on the troubling of the myth of authentic, natural origin. Following the discussion on the discomfort the smell gives off, Tara Lee broods over the fallacy of uprooting the body out of its social context and yearning for “a garden that no longer exists” (196). Instead, Lee puts the body in “its messiness and disarray” (197). With the characteristics of its “noise and pollution” (Lee 198), the durian smell permeates in the proximity of Miranda. While some critics stress the significance of smell and racialized body to destabilize the status quo, other critics explore the function of sneakers and condition.

(16) Hsieh 10. of cyborgs. For the main characters, the alleyways provide an alternative route to gain some freedom in the capitalist city. As Joanna Mansbridge argues, “[t]he alleyways in which the Salt Fish Girl, Nu Wa, Miranda, and Evie move through the cities provide alternative pathways that subvert the flow of global capital. It is these pathways that allow a sense of agency and mobility within a capitalist hegemony (126). However, factory workers are exploited and oppressed. As Nicholas Birns points out, “[t]he Sonias and Miyakos, for instance, are clearly designed as indicators of the low-wage jobs occupied disproportionately by people of colour in the postmodern, global economy” (11). According to Birns, the female workers are exploited in the economic context. Sonja Georgi marks sneakers as a metaphor for the capitalist exploitation of citizens and also for the political subversion of cloned women workers (165).2 These workers build the community to fight against the injustice, imprinting the rhetorical questions on the soles of the shoes. Laura Hildebrand thinks that the illegal cyborg community is marked as contamination or impurity (72). That is, those hybrid bodies or cyborgs can be subversive beyond the containment of clean and pure ideology. Likewise, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez thinks the cyborg community might be “disruptive of conventional society, whether in its economic workings (capitalist exploitation) or in its heterosexual normativity” (123). As Cuder-Domínguez shows, the Sonias can reproduce their offspring without any male intervention, further challenging the. 2. Although Georgi holds an optimistic view to the subversion of cyborg workers, the limitations of their subversion would be overlooked under the taken-for-granted celebration of cyborg potentials. As she concludes, “[a]s ‘new children of the earth,’ this generation is born outside the dichotomies of human/non-human, legal/extra-legal, white/black, male/female, rich/poor. Its birth proves the successful subversion of the white patriarchal and corporate control exerted on its cyborg mothers. The baby heralds a new generation that no longer struggles with the border of legal and ‘extra-legal’ but redefines the space of ‘virtuality’ that mainstream North American society reserves for both transnational hybrids and cyborgs” (171). Besides acknowledging the guerilla-like sabotage on the current socio-political violence the cyborgs have desperately done, in Chapter Three, I will further investigate the fallacy of regarding the subversion of the cyborgs as “successful” by pointing out the predicament in an attempt to overthrow the overall structure of the capitalist and patriarchal regime, while providing a more potential alternative of the subversion to the threshold of the paradigm shift of ontology..

(17) Hsieh 11. heteronormative sexuality. Furthermore, Sonia Villegas-López argues that Lai enacts the “new ontology of the body that fosters productive and enriching readings of interbreeding, same-sex relationships, and cyborg politics” (28). The Sonias are made from the genes of people in the Third Word, so their ethnic and racial identity is hybrid. Elizabeth C. Harmer critiques that “[i]t is not the cyborgs in this text that contain a potential to liberate, but it is the process of remythologization that constantly opens up possibilities” (1-2). The process of remythologization denotes that those cyborgs are capable not solely of “resistance,” but of “renewal” (3). More specifically, the cyborgs can engender the “re-articulation of earlier modes of existence in terms of techno-modernity” (169). Likewise, Robyn Morris contends that Larissa Lai questions the constructed hierarchy between human/animal, animate/inanimate, self/other to control and dominate others who are entrenched in “the process of racialization” (93). The rigid boundaries can be ruptured by those hybrid or cyborg bodies whose reproduction is unconventionally queer. Heather Latimer regards the new reproductive technologies as relating to “the creation of new bodies and to new myths and stories of origin” (169). By consuming durian fruits the Sonias have produced via reproductive technologies, they are able to build a “redemptive space and a female community” (Latimer 177). In general, the aforementioned critics have discussed the hybridity of Asian-Canadian identity, the condition of the Unregulated Zone, the significance of smell, and the cyborg politics. In the thesis, I attempt to deepen and complicate the major issues the critics have touched upon by elaborating on transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings as the theoretical foundation that offers a new perspective to the understanding of Asian-Canadian identity and the futurity of resistance, and the reflection on the contemporary climate dominated by the global capitalism. The thesis consists of three chapters. Against the backdrop of Canadian.

(18) Hsieh 12. multiculturalism, Chapter One examines the theoretical context of transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings while providing textual analysis for further elaboration. In “The Generation of Postmemory,” Hirsch’s notion of postmemory helps unravel the influence of traumas on the postgeneration. The descendants inherit traumas vicariously, even though historical atrocities have taken place before their birth. The traumatic returns not merely help reexamine the present, but look toward the future. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway’s cyborg politics serves as the form of resistance and arouses queer desires to build a community in which female workers can see through the intersectional manipulation between race and gender in the logic of global capitalism, and elude the grip of heterosexual logic of reproduction by using the biotechnology that once has manipulated them to reproduce. The subversion of heterosexual norm would be further discussed in the analysis of Butler’s Gender Trouble. Chapter Two discusses how Salt Fish Girl displays Miranda’s diasporic subjectivity and its politics of transformation. Intriguingly, Miranda is not only overwhelmed by traumatic memories passed on to the postgeneration, but also unconsciously by her previous lifetime as Nu Wa. Hirsch’s notion of postmemory helps unravel the legacies of historical traumas. More specifically, the traumas characters inherit are the emphatic possibilities of horrific events of previous generations. In Miranda’s case, the lingering evocation of past is materialized by the reconnection with Evie, who is the reincarnation of the Salt Fish Girl. Miranda’s ethnic odor and memory, officially recognized as an elusive symptom of the dreaming disease, unsettle the overly sanitized space and highly rationalized order of the city dominated by transnational corporations instead. The haunted return of the past unceasingly drives her to reexamine the present where the exploitation of global capitalism and racial and gender discrimination still persist..

(19) Hsieh 13. Chapter Three plumbs how Salt Fish Girl entices the desire to build a cyborg community. The cyborg female bodies manifest the politics of solidarity that challenges the capitalist patriarchal order and resists the multicultural containment and conformism. The heteronormative sexuality and domination of patriarchal system are subverted in the presentation of lesbian eroticism and practices of queer reproduction. Implicated in the global consumer culture, the sneakers serve as particular objects for the cyborgs to propagandize their political beliefs against the injustice of global capitalism. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of Haraway and Butler, this chapter attempts to demonstrate how the cyborg community building is paramount in forming a revolutionary network to subvert the logic of global capitalism and patriarchal violence in hope of the paradigm shift of ontology beyond the constraints of Asian-Canadian identity politics..

(20) Hsieh 14. Chapter One Transgenerational Traumas and Cyborg Community Imaginings in Context Canadian multiculturalism seemingly welcomes racialized others and embraces ethnic difference in the promise of freedom and affluence. As it turns out, however, the racialized are still deemed as others and exploited materially and politically with their predicaments of history clandestinely erased. As Lisa Lowe writes, “[a]s the state legally transforms the Asian alien into the Asian American citizen, it institutionalizes the disavowal of the history of racialized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of freedom in the political sphere” (10; italics original).3 Under the surveillance of neoliberal state apparatus, the ethnic characteristics and histories are officially negated via equal representation in the socio-political domain.4 What’s worse, the racialized minorities cannot help but internalize social views toward them, and the discriminatory internalization even leads to the discrimination among them with the repercussions of feeling inferiority complex (Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” 26). In Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, with the aim of “fortunate installation,” Miranda’s family migrates to Serendipity, a walled city on the west coast of North America, in hope of freedom and material gains, and then becomes “corporate citizens” (14). Nonetheless, not residing long enough in the “new-found state of bliss” (17), the family is expulsed to the Unregulated Zone due to the “illicit” durian odor emanating from Miranda’s body (13), or the result of Miranda’s intervention into her father’s virtual business. In this way, the city as a regime of purification intends to cleanse Miranda’s odor, whose ethnic characteristic is Although it seems a bit discordant to put Lowe’s critique of Asian American immigration into discussion, the phenomenon of Asian Canadian immigration is similar to her critique. 4 The neoliberal state that institutes multiculturalism attempts to stabilize and fix the immigrant identities through the “legal” operation of exclusions and inclusions as well as labeling categorizations. As Lowe claims, “[t]he state announces its need to fix and stabilize the identity of the immigrant through legal exclusions and inclusions, as well as through juridical classifications. ‘Legal’ and ‘illegal,’ ‘citizen’ and ‘noncitizen,’ and ‘U.S. born’ and ‘permanent resident’ are contemporary modes through which the liberal state discriminates, surveys, and produces immigrant identities” (19). 3.

(21) Hsieh 15. obnoxious to the state. Before being transported in the Unregulated Zone, Miranda is cocooned in her parents’ utopian dream and could not think of herself “as a child afflicted by history, unable to escape its delights and or its torments” (70).5 Later, Miranda is conscious of her strangeness with the sense of inferiority complex and thus daunted by the rapidly changing world: “I was a sheltered child, living out my parents’ utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last” (71). Internalized by Dr. Flowers’s view, Miranda’s father seriously regards Miranda as abnormal and urgently needs medical intervention to cure her. In consequence, those immigrants are racially discriminated with the erasure of ethnic histories, despite the advent of multiculturalism opening new possibilities of freedom and materiality, and flagging the political banner of democracy and equality. According to Lai, the motivation to write Salt Fish Girl is “to point ever further back beyond the moment of birth to those moments in the past experienced by those who have gone before us”; the past, then, becomes accessible. As Lai states that “we can touch those moments” with “a sense of history that is not factual, that is not for the ‘historical record,’ but that is experienced in and written on the body” (“Future Asians” 173). In Lai’s account, the official record does not account for the authenticity of history. Rather, the revival of the body where repressed histories and memories are inscribed is significant in the understanding of history. Based on Lai’s rationale for looking backward, I claim that her traumatic returns potentially open up a space recreated by the cyborg community with cosmopolitan imaginings. Larissa Lai conjures up the remains of history, calling upon not forgetting to excavate the past “I did not understand my condition as a ‘condition,’ nor did I know that there were others in other compounds or out in the Unregulated Zone who were afflicted with variations of the same bizarre symptoms, and whose bodies reeked of oranges, or tobacco, or rotten eggs, or cabbages. Or else of silk, of cotton, of coffee, of blood and carnage, of coal, of freshly baked bread, of machine oil, of dust and rain and mud” (70). 5.

(22) Hsieh 16. behind the discourse of official articulations. The queer desire for retracing the cultural and historical past preceding the postgeneration plays a pivotal role in political transformations. To understand the particular form of trauma in Salt Fish Girl, I will employ Marianne Hirsch’s “The Generation of Postmemory” to unravel the intricately traumatic threads across generations. In the very forefront of the essay, Marianne Hirsch claims that she is preoccupied with the traumatic connection between generations (104). After the outbreak of violent events, the traumatic effect would be like a ripple effect transferring to the next generation in the history or myth (103). The living connection remains to be analyzed in the recent decades and becomes a heated debate in feminist dialogues; also, the psychic working of memory and trauma remains an intellectual discussion and further analysis, and even beyond the Holocaust studies (104). The remembrance ensuing the aftermath of catastrophe becomes an ethical and aesthetic issue (104). The aftermath here denotes the prefix “post” of postmemory. The contradiction resides in the memorial mechanism of this sort of trauma that forms in the psyche of inter- and intra-generations; they don’t witness traumatic events prior to their birth, but cannot help but inherit their parental past vicariously (104). The aftereffects of trauma resonate with the belatedness of memory. Significantly, Salt Fish Girl is written in 2002, the turn of the century; thus, as a millennium writer, Larissa Lai attempts to look backward so as to rethink the present. I use the concept of postmemory as one of my theoretical frameworks. As Hirsh claims, it is not “a movement, method, or idea . . . rather, as a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience . . . a generational remove” (106; italics original). Hirsch does not attempt to find a way to resolve the traumatic experience, but to regard it as a psychical structure to understand.

(23) Hsieh 17. the essence of the traumatic transmission amidst inter- and intra-generations. The trauma is so intense that the postgeneration seem to feel as their own memories. Hirsch’s interest in the coinage of the term postmemory derives from the phenomenology of photography in Spiegelman’s work (107). The Holocaust not only traumatizes its victims, but also passes down to generations via photographic images as its medium (112). Evoking the catastrophic history, photography proffers a sort of immense medium for the postgeneration to be deeply affectionate about the aftereffects of the event, though it still remains incomprehensible (107-08). Gabriele Schwab’s understanding of traumatic legacies can further complement Hirsch’s idea of postmemory. In Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, Schwab, concerned about the psychic life, assumes the ineradicable legacies of violent histories which exceed historical knowledge and understanding. Based on Nicholas Abraham’s account, Schwab differentiates the normal process of mourning from the loss of mourning. In the normal sense, a person would introject a lost object through mourning by digging a grave outside metaphorically; in contrast, if the person fails to introject the object, the object would be incorporated and then buried inside the psyche. Once the defensive mechanism operates in the psyche that disavows the lost object, the incapability of loss would haunt this person in the form of nightmares or intrusive thoughts. The dead, or what has been repressed, would return like ghosts. Even before the transmission of traumatic memories unto the next generation, the atrocity has its “haunting quality” (2). To avoid the traumatic effect of the violent history, a person harbors repetitive and intrusive traumatic memories in a flashback or nightmare, and also has somatic symptoms so as to sever the grip of unwanted thoughts and memories (2). The person would be imprisoned in the traumatic spiral in the body whose pain greatly bespeaks the psychical trauma and stages the traumatic drama plummeting the person into the.

(24) Hsieh 18. abyss of liminal experience. As Schwab claims, “[w]arfare and genocide . . . are liminal experiences that bring us to the abyss of human abjection” (2). That is to say, the bright side of humanity seems to be dimmed by traumatic war experiences, exposing itself to the vulnerable dimension of humanity. Furthermore, she thinks that the violent history would sedate in the unconscious, describing the trauma as an “undetected disease” (3). Overall, her main theoretical account examines the psychic life in which traumatic experiences are secretly entombed in the psyche and can be transformed into inspirations to create such artistic works as literature, art, and memoir. Oftentimes, it is the children or offspring that will be haunted by the denied or buried secret languages in the tomb, though they have no direct exposure to the past traumatic events which are kept in silence and traumatic amnesia under the political and historical currents. Schwab explains that the tomb is often related to family secrets: “Often the tomb is a familial one, organized around family secrets shared by parents and perhaps grandparents but fearfully guarded from the children. It is through the unconscious transmission of disavowed familial dynamics that one generation affects another generation’s unconscious” (4). The core idea means that the dynamic of familial traumatic memories is construed as the intergenerational haunting via the unconscious transmission in a vicarious fashion. Despite the traumatic transmission to the postgeneration Schwab and Hirsch have teased out, Hirsch critically warns the dire repercussions by dint of the over-identification with the past: Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. (107).

(25) Hsieh 19. In other words, unconsciously over-identifying with the past would immerse oneself in it without being aware of the present. In this way, one’s particular life stories and experiences would be inundated by the past. Take Salt Fish Girl for instance. Miranda remembers her previous incarnation as Nu Wa at the unconscious level, but she does not let the past as an entrapment determine her destiny. Instead, she has a revelation concerning the ethnic odor in the present. To put it clearly, despite the social expulsion and discrimination, Miranda can embrace the repressed queer desire and her ethnic difference, no longer deeming her body abject. As a result, in reviewing traumatic histories of racial and gender exploitation, she can understand the present and anticipate the possibilities of the future in the encounter with Evie. The concept of postmemory makes the diasporic geneology understandable in the present in which Nu Wa’s reincarnation as Miranda can be more intimate. In what follows, I will use Haraway’s trope of cyborg and Butler’s troubling of identity to further examine the interrelatedness of race and gender exploitation in the machination of global capitalism. Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics founds on the theoretical understanding of the political transformation of community building in Salt Fish Girl. In her most renowned essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway, as a self-proclaimed cyborg rather than a goddess (316), regards all humans as cyborgs who are “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (292). In this statement, humans are the intertwined combination between machine and organism as a “border war” (292). The status of the cyborg endows us with “ontology” and “politics” (292) so as to engender new possibilities in the history of racial and gender oppression. As she claims, “[l]iberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility” (291). To get truly liberated, one is conscious of and concerned about the oppressive social condition with a ray of.

(26) Hsieh 20. possibility. The image of the cyborg is composed of imaginative possibility and social entity. As Haraway claims, “[t]he cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (292). Against “the myth of original unity” (292), the cyborg is “way of holism, but needy for connection” (293). Rethinking the worldview of Western humanism that places Man at the center of the universe, the cyborg feels natural to embrace the connection for the neglected otherness outside the wholeness blueprint of humanist universal Man. As to the cyborg’s gender, the creature belongs to a “post-gender” world (292). Unlike the traditional, western narrative of oedipal relation, the reproduction of the cyborg is without any male intervention and thus outside the conventional family, and forms a community in seeking for liberation rather than salvation. In the merged borderline of machine and organism, the cyborg community building resonates with Haraway’s pivotal claim “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (292; italics original). That is, the cyborg is neither machine nor organism, but a fusion of both.6 It is revolutionary to disrupt anchored boundaries in the capitalist and patriarchal society. As Haraway states, “[t]he main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (293). The community building is a utopian world without gender consciousness and termination: Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its. Haraway delineates the traditional frameworks that dominate the other in favor of the self: “In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics―the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other―the relation between organism and machine has been a border war” (292). The fusion of the border “cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities” (311). 6.

(27) Hsieh 21. father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. (293) In contrast to the heterosexual hegemony, the cyborg anticipates the world in which the paternity cannot act as a savior for women who are deemed frail and await to be saved via the founding of a family. In the conjecture of family nexus, women are incomplete until the connection with the paternal bond. However, the cyborg refashions the oedipal relation in a family as a whole unit and universe, and subverts the binary between men and women as a mechanism of domination. In consequence, “[C]ompletely without innocence,” the cyborg is tarnished by the perversity of the unruly and subversive remapping of gender (292). Furthermore, Donna Haraway’s analysis of boundary crossings is threefold. Firstly, in the new millennium, “the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached” (293). The distinction between human and animal is hardly separable. Nature and culture are redefined and thus recognized transparently. The gap between human and animal also dwindles. In the first analysis, then, Haraway claims that “[c]yborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling” (293). This kind of coupling is like a spiral of “marriage exchange” (293). The second boundary crossing is related to “animal-human (organism) and machine” (293). The distinction between man and machine is questioned. The machine does not remain passive, as we originally have thought; rather, it has agency and autonomy as human beings. The machine becomes “alive” with the life on its own. The becoming alive of the machine makes humans unnerved, for their ontology that is intimately defined in correspondence to the machine is radically rattled (294). Instead, the machine is part of ourselves. As Haraway claims, “[t]he machine is not an it to be animated,.

(28) Hsieh 22. worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (315; italics original). The third differentiation is a section of the boundary breakdown “between physical and non-physical” (294). Therefore, the cyborg myth, as Haraway concludes, is concerned about “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities (295). The potential of cyborg is manifested as rigid borders become destabilized and ultimately rendered riskily leaky and merged. The contested meanings by the perverse possibility of cyborg are endowed with resistance in the technological system of domination. In the cyborg imagining, the connection with animal and machine becomes imaginable. This monstrous form of life is perverse and illegitimate with partial identity. The fractured identity seeks to build a political union against the logic of domination and incorporation, as the connection building of cyborg is “a poetic/politic unity” rather than “unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation” (297). However, it is significant to note that Haraway conjures up the specter of humanist dichotomy, despite her post-humanist efforts to cross over and merge it. That is, the humanist boundary has not disappear and should not be transcended by the solipsism. Illuminating the interstice within the very boundary in light of the post-humanist field can further reflect on and demystify the intersectional structure of power relations that opens up the potentiality of subversion effecting its force within the humanist universe. In “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway claims that “[f]eminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object” (583). In other words, the partial position that is in the marginalized perspective is claimed to lighten the unseen and neglected façade of vision under the totalizing regime of Western objectivity.7 Moreover, the partiality. “‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (584). 7.

(29) Hsieh 23. would become influential when connections spark surprises in the webs of encounter among the marginalized as a community.8 The duty is attributed to the cyborg community building from which liberation derives. Nonetheless, Haraway is aware of the danger of falling into the chasm of difference: “But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference” (300). The cyborg politics of connection could become less powerful, once the duty for connection is conflated with the oppression of state apparatus and becomes complicit in the domination rather than embraces those differences that are playful and truly subversive. In Haraway’s systemic mapping―“informatics of domination,” she proclaims: “Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed [as] transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination” (300). The old hierarchy becomes destabilized and then gives way to the new paradigm of terrifying networks of domination with the assemblage of traditional binary. In the new paradigm, the advent of technology refashions the body: “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women” (302). The traditional way of women’s relations is transformed into technologically-empowered networks. Without a specific locus for women, their cyborg identities are “geometrics of difference and contradiction” (307). Knowing consciously the technological networking, they would engender the possibility of “new couplings, new coalitions” “We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice―not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals” (590). 8.

(30) Hsieh 24. (307). For women’s cyborg identities, to survive in the world of historical domination means myriad attempts of struggle: “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism” (312). Against the male-dominant form of language, cyborgs intend to write back so as to put the fossilized universal meaning in question and ambivalence. It is worthy to reexamine Haraway’s main idea concerning the cyborg politics of boundary crossing: “To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of dominations of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals―in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self” (313). In other words, the binary in Western humanism engenders oppositions and oppressions. Paradoxically, with the distinction and interdependence between self and other, the self would not exist without the other. In such unequal power relations, the other is always marginalized and void of an entity, whereas the self is dominant and self-governing. The arbitrary boundary of the self would exclude the others who are deemed monstrous. Ironically, monsters as the embodiment of the other “have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations” (315). In “The Promises of Monsters,” Haraway heralds the advent of “a monstrous turn” (77). She depicts the world of monsters as “the absence of beginnings, enlightenments, and endings: the world has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives” (77). The linear time of patriarchal hierarchy is displaced with the non-linear temporality of networks and actants with scary surprises. The multifarious forms of collectives and actants consist “of permanent and multi-patterned interaction through which lives and worlds get built, human and unhuman” (77). The noise and riot of monstrous others manifest “a.

(31) Hsieh 25. powerful infidel heteroglossia” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 316). Their pollution and disorder destabilize the static boundary of dualism, due to their embrace of heterogeneity and permeability. As Haraway argues, “[c]yborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (316). More specifically, cyborg imagery does not intend to reach beyond the dualism, but rather unmasks the domination of it. In exploding the illusion of dualism, cyborgs can really strive for liberation, further surviving in the systemic relations of dualism. Take Salt Fish Girl under investigation through the lens of Haraway’s cyborg politics, the Sonias cyborgs, together with Miranda, make a revolution using the biotechnology that used to exploit them as a subversive tool to overthrow the patriarchal and heterosexual domination. Evie, the most subversive figure of the Sonias, is composed of 0.03 carp gene and belongs to a whole series called the biogenetically engineered Sonias, who are exploited as factory manufacturers in the Unregulated Zone to produce Pallas shoes. Now that the escaped Sonias are aware of their plight, they unanimously build a community of resistance against the status quo via the production of sneakers whose soles are imprinted with subversive slogans to both awaken consumers and question global capitalism. Another cyborg embodiment deserved to be noticed is Miranda, who has the durian gene and fish characteristics inheritable from her previous incarnation as Nu Wa. Not typically defined by the humanism that posits the rigid binary of human/animal/machine, her queer ontology is human-plant and also human-animal, crossing the boundary to probe into more possibilities of human life. Significantly, Miranda is capable of reproducing offspring with Evie to mark the potential threshold of futurity. Judith Butler’s thought on a new paradigm of identity helps examine ontological power relations further. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,.

(32) Hsieh 26. Butler rethinks sex/gender dichotomy. For her, sex is biological determinism and gender is social construction through which gender is simply the effect of repetitive performativity. Hence, the social mechanism of phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality is questioned. To maintain the symbolic power of patriarchy in the mechanism of compulsory heterosexuality, women are internalized by social rules to be subject to men in order to be a “good” wife. The social categorization of men and women is discursive: “The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’―that is, those in which gender does not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender” (17). In other words, gender identity is arbitrary and becomes politics. The categorization of men and women can only be legible when other sorts of possibilities are excluded: “The institutional heterosexuality both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system” (22). In this context, heterosexuality is the norm to which both men and women undoubtedly conform; on the other, the same-sex desire or other fluidity of desire is repressed. As a result, the complexity and nuance of desire is facilely reduced to the sameness from which other differences aren’t allowed to imagine. In the hegemonic domain of sexuality, women are suppressed and silenced so as to maintain the patriarchal regulation: “The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original” (31). Rethinking the ontological binary, Butler proposes the subversion of identity: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (25). According to Butler’s argument, gender identity is no more than the illusion masked by social norms where gender produces repetitive acts to correspond to those norms that meet one’s expectation. The.

(33) Hsieh 27. identity is void and merely embedded with meanings in the social constructs of gender performativity: “If the regulatory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply contested sites of meaning, then the very multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing” (32). That is to say, sex and gender are rendered as the locus of political games where power and knowledge operate. This hypothesis can debunk the Truth of constructed meaning. The possibility arises once the constructed meanings contradict themselves. In the context of Salt Fish Girl, although the fluidity of lesbian eroticism challenges the compulsory heterosexuality, the core structure of heterosexuality has not been displaced. To put it further, the social categorization of men and women remains existing, as shown both in the dominant male figure as Dr. Flowers and in the birth of the black-haired baby girl by the copulation between Miranda and Evie, both of whom are confined in the conventional framework of the masculine and the feminine. Despite the limitations of resistance, I consider that the cyborg community imaginings have radically charted a new paradigm of ontological existence. The cyborgs have seen through the grip of patriarchal oppression and built the community in a temporary sense of belonging to survive the racial and gender exploitation and oppression of global capitalism. As the ending intimates, nevertheless, the revolution of a new paradigm shift is a painstaking journey. With the destabilization of heteronormativity brought about by the reproductive ability, the cyborgs have incubated potentialities to be poised for the predicaments of the future. This chapter has founded the theoretical context of transgenerational traumas and cyborg community imaginings with textual analysis for further elucidation. In Hirsch’s view, the postgeneration will be haunted by the past lived by their predecessors. The inherited traumatic memory will let the offspring paralyzed. However, Hirsch critically cautions the over-identification with the past lest one’s life.

(34) Hsieh 28. experiences would be inundated by the past with the loss of one’s particularity. In anticipating the possibility of revolution, Haraway’s concept of cyborg sheds light on the community as a resistance movement against capitalism and heterosexuality. To challenge the compulsory heterosexuality and fixed identity, Butler’s notion of the subversion of identity inaugurates a new paradigm of ontology in radically examining the gender dyad. In Salt Fish Girl, though the onslaughts of the past in the form of disease relentlessly haunt Miranda, she seems not to be influenced deeply. Rather, with the residues of the past, she transforms her own vulnerability into potentiality via the community imaginings and queer desires, learning to embrace her own and others’ ethnic differences..

(35) Hsieh 29. Chapter Two Miranda’s Diasporic Subjectivity and Its Politics of Transformation Examining the effect on the postgeneration by the return of transgenerational traumas, this chapter mainly discusses Miranda’s diasporic subjectivity formation in the oscillation between the past and the present to question the overly-simplified otherness in the multicultural categorization. Plumbing the psychic structure of memory, Hirsch coins the term postmemory to delineate past traumas that can be passed down to the postgeneration in a vicarious manner via the mediated form of photographs or abstracted nightmares and dreams. In so doing, future generations would unconsciously inherit the haunted and traumatized past that belongs to their progenitors. The past can be touched upon affectively and materially by them despite the fact that it happens before their birth. In reading Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, I investigate how Miranda relentlessly gets haunted by reembodying the forgotten past suppressed in the highly capitalist city built upon the multicultural ideal of progress and order. In the materialized form of trauma and memory, Miranda’s inscrutable and ungraspable alienness problematizes the racialized dichotomy under Serendipity’s surreptitiously strategic containment and assimilation of the immigrant others who blindly believe in hope of progress and democracy. While Hirsch warns the over-identification with the past in fear of one’s particular life stories being dis/replaced in the shared sense of the past, I study, then, how Miranda finds a temporary solace of belonging in her ethnic odor and pleasure of taste undoing the homogenized grip of corporate control under the logic of multiculturalism.. I. The Trauma not Owned, but Inheritable In “The Generation of Postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch delineates the psychical aftereffect of traumatic events that pass down to the postgeneration. These generations.

(36) Hsieh 30. are haunted by the traumas of their family or ancestors, though they do not involve in the past events. Oftentimes, they are stuck in the shadow of the past vicariously. The shadow will relentlessly return in the repressed psyche of future generations in the form of nightmares or mental torments. The psychical phenomenon inherent in one’s body relates to Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. Postmemory, as the prefix post suggests, is far from the same as memory. As Hirsch indicates, the psychic structure of postmemory reveals the rupture caused by historical traumas so as to “reactivate and reembody” the more far-reached distance of historical and cultural memorial framework in corresponding forms of individuality and family (111; italics original). The embodied connection to the past would become alive. The site which transmits the past would be in the family with the appearance of symptoms which render postgeneration victimized. As Hirsch claims, “postmemory is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission deeply embedded in such forms of mediation” (114; italics original). I would like to demonstrate that the concept of postmemory helps Miranda find identity and belonging, both of which are clandestinely forgotten and effaced in multicultural Canada. The notion of transgenerational haunting in Miranda’s family stems from the assimilation into the brave new world through the mechanism of repression of ethnic memory and history of gender exploitation. As Schwab shrewdly states, Family legacies of transgenerational haunting often operate though (sic) family secrets and other forms of silencing. Such silences and secrets inevitably affect aesthetic forms and modes of production and representation in second-generation narratives about the legacies of violent histories. (13) Thus, the transgenerational haunting is propelled by the residues of trauma that result from the silencing of the past and would be passed down through such mediums of.

(37) Hsieh 31. transmission as photographs or intergenerational dialogues. While those who have undergone the violent histories are left with the lacunae on the basis of meaning and understanding of trauma, the future generations may construe traumas from a different angle. The receivers will be indirectly affected by the repercussions of traumas that are not fully known in victims of violent histories. In a mediated form, they still harbor the same traumatic responses as their parental generation, such as intrusive flashbacks or repetitive thoughts, but in a vicarious way. In the process of exploring such mediated forms as historical records or photography, the future generations have the responsibility to stitch the shreds of traumatic history into a more understandable tapestry to further articulate their shared sense of ethnic identity. As Lai claims, “an exercise in nostalgia”―one that attempts to weave a “consciously artificial history for those . . . who come from histories that are broken, fragmented and discontinuous, histories that exist in multiple languages and that have survived multiple traumas and multiple acts of forgetting” (“Afterword” 257). However, contrary to the physical trauma, the psychical one cannot be healed by the passing of time, and would be beleaguered by bouts of haunted returns. As Schwab metaphorically avers, “[t]he damages of violent histories can hibernate in the unconscious, only to be transmitted to the next generation like an undetected disease” (3; emphasis mine). Schwab’s choice of the word―“hibernate” resonates with the influence of traumatic events that is too profound to digest. To dilute the traumatic impact, the defense mechanism in the human psyche would begin to operate. In the process, those atrocities would be repressed in the recesses of the human mind, where the unconscious is responsible for the storage of such repressed stuff as compulsive thoughts or painful memories. More concretely, the way the unconscious deals with the influence of traumatic events is exactly like the state of a dormant volcano that would begin to erupt once being active. Intriguingly, in the context of Salt Fish Girl,.

(38) Hsieh 32. the afflicted with the influence of traumatic events are not the ones who are on the scene as those events take place, but are the ones who are born after them. As Schwab has keenly shown, the traumatic influence would be passed on to the following generations in the form of “undetected disease”; in so doing, the postgeneration will catch the disease that is not their own, but has become inherent in their blood of ancestors. They are haunted in the materialized form of psychical and physical illnesses by the specter of the traumatic events, even though they are not on the spot. Despite “a new and undocumented one” (71), the mysterious disease officially named as the dreaming disease runs rampant in Salt Fish Girl. To claim the order and regulation of corporate regimes and accordingly exclude the unknown, threatening disease, “[n]one of the corporations want to acknowledge it. But some call it the dreaming disease, or the drowning disease” (100). And those with the dreaming disease present various symptoms with “foul odours of various sorts that follow the person without actually emanating from the body, psoriasis, sleep apnea, terrible dreams usually with historical content, and a compulsive drive to commit suicide by drowning” (100). In Schwab’s account, she thinks that the transmission of the disease is induced by the traumatic events in history. Therefore, the afflicted get traumatized and cannot help but bear the intolerable pain on their own. The traumatized will be dissociated from the lived condition with the intensification of numb emotions; also, they will be beset by repetitive traumatic thoughts or images. As Schwab claims, “[t]rauma disrupts relationality or is . . . an attack on thought itself” (2). In other words, the temporality is no longer linear, but is ruptured in the scraps of historical time. The more successfully we eradicate the unwanted thoughts, the more painful our bodies would become. In the psychiatric term, this bodily phenomenon manifests somatic symptoms that reflect psychological tortures in a bodily manner. In Salt Fish Girl, the afflicted cannot help drowning themselves to avoid psychic torments;.