FISH, ROSES, AND SEXY SUTURES: DISABILITY, EMBODIED ESTRANGEMENT AND RADICAL CARE IN LARISSA LAI'S THE TIGER FLU

Alison Kafer argues 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 (27). Elsa Sjunneson and Dominik Parisien, editors of Uncanny Magazine's "Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction" special issue, further contends that science fiction replicates the curative imaginary, applying technological fixes to bodies in ways that carry ableist ideologies into the future. 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. Our paper takes up Larissa Lai's 2018 novel The Tiger Flu to argue that recent feminist and queer science fiction of color resist and reconfigure this "curative" and technological fix via the Grist Sisters, a rogue collective of female clones, who are trapped in the middle of a conflict between Isabelle Chow, the CEO of HOST Light Industries, and Marcus Traskin, the lord and CEO of the Pacific Pearl Parkade, both of whom seek to find a solution to the "tiger flu" pandemic. The Grist Sisters' 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 in which the community provides critical life support for one another, complicating the curative imaginary from a queer crip feminist standpoint. The radical lifeways of the Grist Sisterhood stands out in stark contrast against that of Chow and Transkin's more ableist and technolibertarian intervention. Against a backdrop of advanced climate degradation, collapsed nation-states, and a global disease, Chow and Traskin 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 two giant orbiting mainframes called Chang and Eng. All in all, 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. By rejecting networked consciousness in favor of radical networks of activist community care, the novel allows readers, in the words of Raffaella Baccolini, 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."