ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the productive connection between the risk narrative of catastrophe and an ethical exposure to the Other—or the vulnerable opening to alterity—in two recent climate change novels: Larissa Lai’s critical dystopias Salt Fish Girl (2002) and The Tiger Flu (2018). Taking cue from the former novel, where lesbian feminist politics combines with a post-anthropocentric approach to trans-speciation as a response to the excesses of techno-scientific capitalism (the cloning of Asian women as slave workforce), The Tiger Flu brings critical posthumanist ethics further in an exposure of the damaging effects of transhuman endeavors at the expense of the weaker sectors of the population. In both texts, Asian female clones are configured as the epitome of the vulnerable bodies in Judith Butler’s terms in Precarious Life (2004), since their lack of recognition as full human beings turns them into “less than human” and therefore disposable bodies, following Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013). Furthermore, the novels propitiate an ethical relation to those vulnerable bodies in Levinasian terms, whereby the reading subject is destabilized by the vulnerability of the face of the Other, soliciting our responsibility not only for the sake of the Other but also for the othered planet.
