<i>Herland</i> ’s Speculative Fiction Offspring: New Materialist Posthuman Ethics in Larissa Lai’s <i>Salt Fish Girl</i> and <i>The Tiger Flu</i>

Abstract This essay explores Larissa Lai’s dystopian speculative fiction through the lenses of Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action, Stacy Alaimo’s notion of transcorporeal material ethics, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, and Rosi Braidotti’s postanthropocentric, Spinozist revision of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life or zoe. Lai’s feminist posthuman communities, intrinsically embodied and embedded in nature, hold a position of resistance within the overall context of the anthropogenic destruction of the environment. Zoe-centered egalitarianism materializes in their interspecies enmeshment and horizontal relations with the more-than-human as unexpected material intra-actions enable their posthuman being and becoming. Furthermore, those communities lie beyond the grasp of the reproductive futurism that has been adduced as a feature of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s controversial utopia Herland.