A genealogy of fish women and other imagined identities: “The mechanics of fluids” in Larissa Lai's <i>Salt Fish Girl</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fluidity invigorates a utopian home in Chinese Canadian author Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002). In the novel, the fishlike lesbian couple cyclically returns to their aquatic habitat between mortal reincarnations: from last‐century colonial South China to near‐future bio‐capitalistic Canada, where they recurrently experience displacement. While previous studies interpret the titular Salt Fish Girl as a rebellious figure due to her saltfish stink in all her human incarnations, my study does not consider malodor for its disruptive qualities. I propose that the saltfish smell signifies less a symbolic marker of rebellion than a sign of displacement. Naturally, fish do not reek in their homely waters; fish stink once caught and die ashore. Fish heroines, therefore, emerge as diasporic figures, representing those who experience a permanent sense of displacement on earth because of their ethnicity, gender, and more factors. My study shows that in Lai's novel, fluidity constitutes a symbolic habitable space for imagining more than the reified identities within the real‐world gender binary, ethnic categories, national rhetoric, and even “humanism.” While both Chinese and Canadian landscapes in Lai's depictions prove unlivable for ethnic queer women, my study explores the fluid habitat where the fish heroines can be constantly reborn before they vengefully land on earth.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 it