Gender and Violence in Pandemic Futures in Larissa Lai's /The Tiger Flu/

Abstract

This article engages with the speculative future of Larissa Lai's 2018 novel The Tiger Flu and its exploration of utopian possibilities via alternative forms of female survival. In contrast to prototypical depictions of survival in classic dystopian or post-apocalpytic narratives, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), where straight white male heroes are the ones who take charge, Lai changes some central premises: the novel is alternately told from the first-person perspective of Kirilow Groundsel and from a third-person perspective that uses a second protagonist, Kora Ko, as a focalizer. Issues pertaining to gender and sex as material-discursive formations that shape social relations are thus foregrounded in The Tiger Flu not only by the fact that the eponymous flu itself has "a taste for men," but also through its two female queer protagonists of color, who are, moreover, not contained by the contours of lone hero/ine tropes. As we will show, however, the novel is likewise careful to not conjure feminist utopianism as a dea ex machina via its two protagonists and the worlds they inhabit: Lai's narrative also traces continuities from "the world before," showcasing that patriarchal structures, and particularly gendered violence, are not as far off as it would seem. Quite to the contrary, they are now frequently perpetuated and perpetrated by women and even by the protagonists themselves, and for that very reason might appear less conspicuous. The Tiger Flu hence simultaneously explores, celebrates, and criticizes utopian possibilities while emphasizing the continued parallel exploitation of both the environment and women - and by doing so the narrative teases readers with the possibility of utopian closure that it, however, ultimately denies in favor of interrogating ways of working towards utopia.