A feminist posthumanist approach to resist Gender-based Violence (GBV): Re-reading Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Monica Byrne’s the Girl in the Road
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Abstract
The persistence of Gender-based Violence (GBV) against non-normative identities, despite declining heteronormative hegemony, underscores the urgency of reimagining resistance. The science fiction novels—Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road (2014)—foreground female protagonists with different desires that disrupt gender constructivism and pave new ways of resistance to dismantle patriarchal and essentialist symbolic order. The near-future narratives of the two novels provide perspectives on how GBV is shaped by intersecting oppressions that affect the “weaker other” and how resistance emerges in a techno-futuristic world. This research paper, therefore, aims to investigate various entangled layers of GBV that are represented in the two novels and, in doing so, also tries to deconstruct gender essentialism through a feminist posthumanist lens, which critiques gendered and anthropocentric hierarchies. Moreover, this paper attempts to show how the narratives locate the roots of gender-based violence and means of combating the same in speculative settings. By re-reading the novels in a feminist posthumanist way, this research paper also proposes to represent hybrid identities in interaction with future technologies and ultimately aspires to a simultaneous posthumanist and post-gender world. By interrogating the interplay of speculative technology and posthuman agency, this study aims to contribute to a broader discourse on understanding gender and power in the imminent future.
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