Medicine links

Technological bodies behave as texts that speak about the material practices applied to them. The discourses of biology, medicine, and technology have been usually seen as guarantors and producers of “true” knowledge, which makes them very difficult to challenge or discredit. The human body has thus been historically constructed by the gaze. Michel Foucault highlighted how the body had been configured by medical discourse and particularly by “the loquacious gaze of the doctor” (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic xi). In tune with the Foucaltian notion of biopower, or “technology of the self,” Braidotti’s critical formulation of “organs without bodies”— a reinterpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s “bodies without organs”—gives full expression to the manipulation of women’s bodies under the auspices of the medical profession, particularly the female organs of reproduction or the use of plastic surgery. These issues arise in Salt Fish Girl. Lai’s dystopian fantasy offers a bleak picture of contemporary society, menaced by environmental waste and by the spread of a contagious illness, the “dreaming disease.” The benefits of technology are restricted to the suburban ideal of Serendipity, but its control extends to the depressed Unregulated Zone, which remains under constant state surveillance by means of government officials such as Miranda’s father, a tax collector who uses virtual reality to prevent crime. Miranda’s “original sin” is to interfere with technology, by manipulating her father’s Business suit, a breach for which the whole family is expelled from Edenic Serendipity (Salt Fish Girl 32). Miranda is among those afflicted by the dreaming disease. Since birth, her body emanates a pungent smell of cat-pee and pepper, fishy and stronger than mother’s milk (48). Her reeking body resists classification and “unsettles” the status quo: she is a woman, of Asian descent, who has been conceived by unusual means, which comes to represent the inability of the system to keep unruly bodies under control (Lee 94–95). The diseased bodies of Serendipity participate in a silent revolution that warns the medical and economic establishment against the material presence of the abject other and the unsubtle menace of the return of the repressed. Memory-traces and the sense of smell are thus connected by Lai in her fiction “in a very emotional, intimate kind of way [: : : and in] a history that has been largely unwritten and is in the process of being forgotten” (“Future Asians” 172). Activated by the sensory organs, memory is the physical inscription of history that relates racialized women’s lives to their past.3 In her novel and in Winterson’s, women and cyborgs, whose testimonies constitute a “site of resistance,” are in charge of the task of preserving memory. That is why among the effects of Miranda’s syndrome are the dreams in which she evokes the “memories of a muddy river,” after which she starts drawing her dead mother as a sea serpent (Salt Fish Girl 186), in due reference to the serpent goddess Nu Wa. The image of Miranda’s “rebirth” at the end of the novel precisely fulfills what Haraway and Braidotti have termed the desire or the fantasy of being “at the origin of oneself” (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 66), so accurately exemplified by the posthuman figuration of the cyborg.4 In order to cure her “disruptive body” (Lee 94), Miranda’s father tries different remedies, including going to a Chinese herb shop in the Unregulated Zone. Finally, he takes her to visit a geneticist of repute, Dr. Rudy Flowers, whose use of biotechnology is regarded by his fans as the “new language of God” (Salt Fish Girl 76). In his clinic, Miranda’s body turns into a worthy object of research, and her coxndition is diagnosed and verbalized for the first time. Only then does the girl learn to bear the mark of shame, as she confesses, “I was shocked. Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt dirty. I felt the shame my father had felt since he had first plucked that dangerous fruit” (72). She is both Eve’s daughter and the posthuman monster in Braidotti’s formulation: “the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm” (Nomadic Subjects 78). The memory disease is the motif that undermines the logics of the body/mind dichotomy in Lai’s novel, as it also breaks the boundaries between different species. The quick spread of the infection is due to pollution and the genetic manipulation of natural resources: They theorized it might be the product of mass industrial genetic alteration practices— that the modifications of agricultural products in recent years had contaminated the soil, that the microbes that lived in the earth were mutating and infecting humans. That humans could get diseases once only possible in plants, or that indeed, the new disease was a strange hybrid, combining those that affected plants and those that affected animals. (Salt Fish Girl 102) People are infected with bacteria that give them the memory structures of other species. Furthermore, the intensification of some of the senses leads directly to the unconscious activation of memory. Miranda’s illness, as well as her inherited hybrid nature, can be interpreted at the same time as the result of violence—exerted by the invisible forces of capital and racist ideology as they erase difference and try to impose class and ethnic homogenization—and as the rebellion of posthuman bodies such as Miranda’s against those very forces. In the overly technological Serendipity, bodies are the focus of attention. Corpses are dissected on television by Dr. Flowers, who is seen as a new messiah, and bodies in which difference is visibly inscribed are subjected to scientific scrutiny and experiment. Miranda’s oozing fistulas are variously read either as Freudian wounds or as the mouths of the faithful “opening to accept a holy wafer” (113). As one of Flowers’ followers explains to Miranda, “[t]he body is the language of the Third Testament” (76).