Forget Modesty – Here Comes the Tail: Abject Bodies, Post-Humanistic Philosophy and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<span>Clearly influenced by Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytics of abjection and a feminist, post-humanistic philosophy of multiplicity and becoming in the wake of Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, Larissa Lai uses the abject and abjection – defined by George Bataille as ‘the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things’ – as key tropes in </span><em>Salt Fish Girl</em><span>. Lai’s negotiation of abjection is, however, not limited to the diegetic world of her novel. As a writer who also publishes critical work on minority writing and the politics of representation, Larissa Lai has commented on </span><em>Salt Fish Girl</em><span> extensively and in a way that disrupts conventional textual boundaries. Accordingly, this article not only addresses Lai’s depiction of abject bodies and processes of abjection within her novel, but also the astonishing amount of paratextual comment the Asian Canadian author has produced while self-consciously circulating her own body as an Asian abject defined by the discourse of Canadian state multiculturalism. It takes a closer look at the political implications of the highly ambivalent, queer narration, the abject textual body comprised of the novel’s text, and the enormous ‘tail’ of its verbal and performative authorial paratext.</span>
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".