ABSTRACT
The chapter constitutes an attempt at mapping the intersections between representations of same-sex desire and postcolonial science fiction, interrogating the way in which gender, sexuality, and desire are represented in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl. The chapter insists upon an in-depth investigation of the liminal spaces at the intersection between gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, framing those points of convergence as constitutive parts of many Othered identities and corporealities, in a way which facilitates the redefinition of boundaries and fundamental concepts for both the queer and the postcolonial. Moreover, the chapter establishes Othered queer bodies as the loci of transgression and counter-discourse, arguing that those bodies reject the Western, colonial notions of sexuality and sexual expression in a direct act of defiance against the fetishizing, objectifying colonial gaze. With that in mind, the chapter establishes the queer body as the central locus of a power struggle at the intersection between gender, sexuality, and race, insisting upon the simultaneous subversiveness and vulnerability of queer Othered corporealities which emerge as fragmented, liminal entities that bridge together the past, the present, and the future at the same time as they acknowledge the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity of the colonial and postcolonial embodied experience.
