Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018) is a science fiction novel set in a futuristic Vancouver where two women come together to battle the systems of exploitation that threaten their survival.
Elizabeth Dizon will receive her M.A. English in 2021 with a specialization in Digital Humanities. Her Master’s Research Project, “Looking for the Ghosts of Women’s Liberation’: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu,” incorporates both a traditional approach to literary scholarship in the form of a research paper and an experimental foray into open access scholarship via a web project. Her web project, Reading The Tiger Flu, is available here.
Dizon’s research developed out of a course taught by Dr. Jennifer Henderson titled “Critical Perspectives on Canadian Feminism: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation.’” This course looked at the ways contemporary cultural consciousness and scholarship views and remembers the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Turning to one of the movement’s most radical feminists, Shulamith Firestone, and her manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970), this project considers how elements of Firestone’s utopian imaginary has been both reconstituted and disavowed in Larissa Lai’s speculative feminist novel, The Tiger Flu (2018). A case study in inherited feminist histories, this project seeks to demonstrate how today’s social and political conditions of possibility remain contingent on our claims to the past, particularly the women’s liberation movement.