Technology is racialized and gendered through fetishization of an exotic other

Miranda is queerly produced and queerly reproduces. Her menopausal mother immaculately conceives her after consuming durian fruit harvested from the Unregulated Zone. Salt Fish Girl ambiguously fails to clarify whether Miranda is conceived by this consumption, because the durian has been genetically modified by Dr. Flowers to induce fertility, or whether the conception results from Nu Wa’s having implanted her “genetic essence” into the fruit (Bahng 680). The precise mechanics of reproduction aside, the novel suggests that Miranda, like her mother, becomes pregnant by eating durian. In the moment that she ostensibly conceives, Miranda describes the fruit as an animal-like organism: The yellow pieces glistened like fresh organ meat. . . . I had always thought there was something cannibalistic about eating [durian], and so I never had. But this time an overwhelming sense of wonder compelled me. I scooped the creamy yellow flesh into my mouth, felt its taste and odour merge with my own. It gave me a very peculiar sensation, as though I’d bitten my own tongue. And yet it was delicious. (223-24) “[Y]ellow flesh,” evocative of a euphemism for Asianness, racially infuses the durian. Miranda expresses bodily identification with the “fresh organ meat,” thinking that eating it is somehow “cannibalistic,” a suggestion that perhaps connotes notions of primitive savagery. To her, the “yellow flesh” tastes like her own yellow flesh, leaving her with the “very peculiar sensation” that she has “bitten [her] own tongue.” The language, of course, mirrors Nu Wa’s dream of eating the human-sized fish that likewise tastes like her own tongue. For Miranda, the durian becomes animal-like not only through its “reptilian” qualities but also because the fruit tastes like her own animalistic body. The seemingly autoerotic and “cannibalistic” act of consuming the fruit can thus be read as a form of trans-species reproduction, the queer interaction between the body of the durian and the body of Miranda resulting in the production of a new body. Like Miranda, the “Sonia” clones also engage in queer reproduction. Larissa Lai describes the Sonias as hybrid entities, “[m]anufactured from the DNA of a Chinese-Canadian woman interned with her Japanese-Canadian husband during the Second World War, combined with the DNA of freshwater carp in order to get around human cloning laws” (“Future” 175). Evie, in particular, “is no figure of purity.” She describes herself as “point zero three per cent fresh Cyprinus carpio — freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life form” (Salt 158). The same fishy spots that make Miranda not quite human are likewise used to dehumanize the Sonias, allowing Flowers to enslave them in his capitalistic production of Pallas shoes. The artificial insertion of the animal into the racialized body transforms the Asian body into a kind of liminal entity, neither human nor animal. The “unnaturalness” of Evie’s origin becomes a source of anxiety for Miranda, even though she similarly possesses fish-like qualities. This anxiety about the unnatural implicitly reflects fears about purity, both of the human body generally and of racial purity specifically. The hybrid human-animal body carries the threat of racial miscegenation, eliciting the fear of a body that cannot be codified by normative structures of identity. The overdetermination of the human-animal hybrid performs the subversive disruption that Chen sees in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “the body without organs”: The body without organs is that body that actively refuses its own subjectivity by engaging the dis-ordering of its “organs.” In the body without organs, no given organ has merely one functionality, and the organism itself cannot be represented as an ordered system. Instead, the body without organs makes impossible any coercive systematicity by affirming an infinite functionality and interrelation of the “parts” within, “parts” that can only be individuated by one of an infinite number of permutations of a body into “parts.” (Chen 151-52) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept gestures toward the interdependence of all organs within a single body. The distinction between one organ (“part”) and the next becomes muddied in the body in which all of the organs function in “interrelation.” Likewise, the delineation between what is distinctly human and what is distinctly animal blurs in the body that is both. The fishiness of her genes transforms Evie into a new life form that exceeds humanness, despite her human-like form. Nu Wa’s bifurcated tail and shape-shifting form similarly express this categorical blurriness. Are her legs a split tail? Is her tail fused legs? By oscillating between human and animal, the liminality of the human-animal body resists being contained by a system of recognition that equates a body’s value with its humanness. As Tara Lee argues, however, we must remember that the fragmentation of the body has sometimes been employed by neoliberal capitalism: “The corporate manipulation of the body entails a disassembly, but more importantly, a reassembly . . . that is a conglomeration of parts gathered from multiple sources” (99). Lee further posits that, “While capitalism wants to sanitize away the fragmentation it has perpetrated, Lai’s durian politics insists, like [Donna] Haraway’s cyborg politics, ‘on noise and pollution’ . . . to demonstrate that the disruptive body cannot be eliminated so effortlessly” (105). The human-animal body is capable of dissent through its evolutionary descent. In other words, it dissents through the ruptures of animality that refuse the ostensible cohesiveness of the fully evolved human subject.