Speculative sex: Queering aqueous natures and biotechnological futures in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl

As a work of ecofeminist science fiction set in a futuristic Canadian Pacific Northwest, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) challenges a regime of biotechnological power through what I term “speculative sex.” In opposition to cloning programs that produce genetically engineered human-animal hybrids, Lai’s novel explores how lesbian sexuality inspires strange conceptions and oceanic (re)births. Drawing from posthumanist, new materialist, and feminist approaches to water (particularly through the lens of Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water: Posthumanist Feminist Phenomenology), this chapter examines how Lai queers aqueous natures and biotechnological futures through queer (pro)creativities. In analyzing water as a focal point, this chapter also elucidates how a shift from terrestriality to aqueous natures allows for an affirmative ecofeminist politics that counters the rigidly masculinist logics of Anthropocenic discourse. I propose that the wet sexual politics of the novel advances a critique of this rigid eco-masculinity by utilizing the tools and conventions of queer women’s writing. As a literary hydrology, Lai’s novel re-encodes spaces of colonial conquest to make way for amniotic corporealities that jumble accepted cartographies of space, time, and species.