Combatting Gender Based Violence (GBV): A Posthumanist Re-reading of Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road

Long gone is the day of overarching heteronormativity, and yet the gender identities that do not follow the normative gender roles face violence in every aspect of their lives. Both the Science Fiction novels - Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road (2014) - centralise female protagonists with different desires that disrupt the gender binaries and pave new ways of resistance to patriarchal symbolic order. The near-future narratives of the two novels provide a global perspective of the phenomena to point out the interplay of intersectionality that affects the weaker Other. This research paper, therefore, undertakes the aim to inquire into the various forms and entangled layers of Gender Violence (GBV) that are represented in the novels, and in doing so, this paper also tries to deconstruct gender essentialism in different ways. Moreover, this paper attempts to locate the root of Gender Based Violence (GBV) and means of combatting the same in speculative settings. By doing a posthumanist re-reading of the novels, this research paper, therefore, proposes to represent hybrid identities in interaction with future technologies and ultimately aspires a post-gender world that aims at co-evolving and bridging differences.

Keywords: Post-gender, Feminist Posthumanism, Technology, Intersectionality, Gender-Based Violence