Dr. Jennifer Cho Contributes Article to Special Issue of Women's Quarterly

Dr. Jennifer Cho, AAST Senior Lecturer, contributed an article to the special issue of Women's Quarterly (WSQ). Since 1972 WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality. Its thematic, special issues combine psychoanalytic, legal, queer, cultural, technological, and historical work to present the most exciting new scholarship on ideas that engage popular and academic readers alike. The general editors of this peer-reviewed, biannual journal are Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Talia Schaffer at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Dr. Cho’s article is titled “The Kiss and the Cut”: Reassembling the Techno-Orientalist Clone through Multispecies Grief and Intimacy in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.’ This article queries the revision of techno-Orientalist tropes in Larissa Lai’s 2018 novel The Tiger Flu, focusing primarily on how Lai repossesses the figure of the Asian female clone and imagines her as a formidable site of radical feminist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist knowledge in a time of planetary erosion and pandemic. Dr. Cho posits that Lai breaks the lineage of techno-Orientalist formations through the survivalist impulses of the Grist Sisters, a species of bioengineered clone factory workers, who move towards abolition from capitalism and compulsory heterosexuality by developing autonomous practices of reproduction, organ transplantation, and inter-generational storytelling. Through the Grist Sisters’ physical and symbolic acts of interdependent reliance and survival, Lai forges multispecies intimacies and embodiments as exertions of a radical politics of care that includes Asian American “women.” Further, Lai’s future world-building centers the multispecies grief of the Grist Sisters as a potent expression of feminist solidarity.

Read the full article here.