ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the concept of intermediality as a model not only for thinking about processes of cultural production, but also for proposing a queer exploration of the potential fungibility of attributes like gender and sexual orientation, as well as articulating a Sinophone critique of the essentializing patrilineal assumptions underlying traditional assumptions of Chinese identity. Moravec’s proposition echoes the well-known “imitation game” proposed four decades earlier, in 1950, by the British cryptographer and computing pioneer Alan Turing. The story opens with several short paragraphs written in a dry, scientific language and specifying the lizards’ scientific name, taxonomical status, appearance, habitat, and so forth, followed by a discussion of their sexual and reproductive characteristics: Monosexual; all specimens are female. Concerns with literary creation run throughout Dung’s entire oeuvre, and capture Dung’s broader interest in processes of mediation and intermediality.
