The Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai’s

futuristic novel Salt Fish Girl imagines a mythic femininity that persists even amid its attempted suppression by transnational globalisation. Lai uses myth as a redemptive layer of experience, but does not do so in a modernist way that would elevate absolutes. She uses myth in a critical way that accepts the epigenous as equally a part of the texture as the original. In this way, Lai’s novel is relevant to discourses of transfeminism, and can liberate transfeminism from just being a term that literally denotes transsexual identity politics, to a broader spectrum of discourse in which the experience of transgendered people can inform feminism generally. Applying a transfeminist analysis to the novel also elucidates how Lai makes connections between Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian experience that bridge longstanding differences in a common stand against transnational exploitation. ‘Transfeminism ’ is a word that has gained a great deal of currency among women’s and queer communities. Yet the concept of transfeminism has not found much of a home in literary criticism or theoretical discourse concerning literary texts. In perhaps the most lucid definition of transfeminism, Emi Koyama (2006) asserts that transfeminism is “a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation as intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women and beyond”. Yet, even after Koyama’s lucid definition, there seems a fundamental uncertainty about whether transfeminism is specifically a feminism for transgendered women, a feminism that seeks to include the experience and discourses of transgendered women as a fully enfranchised part of the feminist spectrum (see Heyes 2003), or a feminism that defines the ‘trans- ’ prefix in a maximally heterogeneous way, focusing on transnationalism and transgendered articulations of identity in understanding the cultural formations at play in the identity of women in the twenty-first century. This article analyses the Canadian postcolonial feminist

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