The queer futures alt resolves the link

Amidst the globalizing forces of multinational capitalism, our life world is simultaneously expanding and contracting, bringing the issues and “faces” of otherness to our daily life. Both in the multicultural society of Canada and in Taiwan, the others—be they laborers, immigrants, ethnic minorities, or those different from “us” in terms of religion, political stance, sexual orientation, customs, and biological composition—constantly challenge our sense of “self” and boundaries, while the mixing of different cultures happen daily and everywhere. Exoticizing the others and their cultures in different forms of commodities seems to be an easy way out: while we, in consumption, thought we comprehended these aestheticized and fetishized differences, we are blind[oblivious] to the fact that the issues of boundaries are matters of daily negotiation, and that there are always faces of the Other beyond our comprehension and challenging our cognitive and emotional capacities. Against such logic of self-satisfying consumption of the others, SFG‘s “post-colonial anti-exotic” strategies “re-politicize” the “exotic” elements by textualizing and hybriding them. The unfamiliar, or de-familiarized, elements in the text, ranging from the mythic goddess Nu Wa, the Oriental spaces of New Kubla Khan and the bar in the Land of Mist and Forgetfulness, to ethnic foods such as durian and salt fish and exotic ornaments such as mask, exotic paper animals, are neither romanticized-fetishized nor decontextualized; instead, they are all multi-contextualized so that their meanings get pluralized. Instead of weaving a consistent system of imagery as modernist novelists do, Lai allows the images to diverge and multiply in meanings, the plotlines to bifurcate and converge repetitively, just as various words and details take on multiple intertextual resonances. These strategies of hybridization, of course, do not undermine the text’s lesbian cause; instead, it constructs a lesbian genealogy and sets it in the context of interacting social levels of business, technology and family relations. The text traces these power relations back and forth in history, in order to locate thoughts and “seeds” of resistance across time and suggest future possibilities. To relate the title of the opening chapter, Bifurcation, to the text as a whole, the word refers not only to the splitting of the human tail, but also to the dual plot of Nu Wa-Salt Fish Girl and Miranda-Evie, the failure and separation of the first pair compensated for and consummated by the child-bearing of the second. However, bifurcation does not happen just once in these major plotlines; the constructed lesbian genealogy is filled with intertexts and repetitions, while in both plotlines there are divergences caused by the characters’ differences from and betrayals of each other. Miranda’s ambivalence is shown in her worries about her job and her fears of Evie, who is “alien and dirty,” with “strange origins” and “odd sisters” (151, 228). No wonder that with the birth of their baby, Miranda thinks that “[e]verything will be all right . . . until next time” (269), implicitly acknowledging the gap between the two of them, and the immensity of the system’s control. Bifurcation in SFG is actually an on-going process of hybridization, which can be manipulated and contained within the capitalist (multicultural) system of control—or an act of openness to and communication with differences. Besides a possible negative future, there is another negative ending in the text: Sonias’ failed sabotage, with many of them killed, their home base destroyed, and only a few survivors running off to a place they knew. The union of Miranda and Evie across the lines of class and “humanity” is no easy matter, just as Miranda does not “yet” recognize the Sonia group as her “family” (249). In a way, the text wants to ask us: what will happen “next time,” and what will happen to the survivors of the Sonia group? Will there be conflicts within and between the two groups, or will the two potentials be realized in a larger resistant group that allows further diversification? By leaving these questions unanswered, the text does not so much trouble the already porous borders of multicultural Canada, as pose the most difficult question to us readers: what does “recognition” mean and how should we “recognize” the others—as lovers, family, or as subjects which are equal but different—in the interconnected and penetrating capitalist systems of communication, which are also systems of commodification through fragmentation, exploitation and exoticization?