Embodying Otherwise

Larissa Lai’s (2002) visionary novel, Salt Fish Girl , is teeming with sensations beneath and beyond capitalist control. An atemporal narrative follows Miranda, a near-future young woman conceived by a durian and afflicted by a “memory disease” that produces distinctive body odor and flashbacks to episodes of colonial violence that the powerful would prefer to forget. While subjected to treatment for this “disease,” Miranda falls in love with Evie, erstwhile sweatshop laborer with carp DNA and body odor to match. In a story of anti-state, anti-capitalist rebellion, Miranda and Evie defect from straight, sane, and abled sterility. Aided by human/carp comrades called The Sonias, they realize spaces Elsewhere and Otherwise at the edges of the collective imagination. Using a queercrip conceptual framework, the article attends to the alienated, nonhuman body as a site of erotic play through Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ellery Russian’s (2010) concept of the “crip lust of recognition,” arguing that it is within that space of affirmation and lust that criptopias beyond the “rational” might be found(ed). Finally, Salt Fish Girl is read alongside recent works of speculative activist-scholarship to theorize queercrip, multispecies resistance and imagination toward criptopian possibilities.