The classic science fiction film series Alien envisions reproduction as a violent collaboration between technology and biology, breaking traditional paradigms of gender, corporeality, and species boundaries. The Xenomorph’s reproductive mechanism operates through an automated biological drive. It parasitizes human hosts regardless of gender, thereby reducing the host body to a mere container and reproductive machine. This non-normative reproduction reveals a state of genderlessness or post-gender, constructing a queer maternal-fetal structure. Focusing on the fourth film in the series: Alien: Resurrection, this paper explores, on the one hand, how technology reshapes and alters the perception and behavior of bodily existence, and how the mechanism of the body, reconstructed through technological and reproductive violence, challenges the phenomenology of embodiment. On the other hand, the paper examines the peremptory reshaping of Ripley’s body through cloning technologies and the mutation of the Xenomorph Queen’s reproductive mechanism, ultimately resulting in a hybrid, fluid existence—a posthuman assemblage, which is capable of reconfiguring itself in response to environmental or internal tensions. Nevertheless, the paper emphasizes how this reproductive mechanism and Ripley’s multifaceted identities destabilize the normative binary structures of gender and reproduction, pointing to a queered marginality and vulnerability. This not only blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, the human and the alien, and gender and subjectivity but also redefines the materiality and expressivity of the body. Drawing on queer gender theory, media analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage,” this paper situates the Alien series within broader discourses on the ethics of technology. It reinterprets how sci-fi narratives transcend the boundaries of biology and technology, gender and body, creating multidimensional and fluid posthuman imaginaries.

In September 1935, Lin Yutang published an English article titled "Feminist Thought in Ancient China" in T’ien Hsia Monthly, where he introduced three men, he considered ancient Chinese feminists: Yu Zhengxie, Yuan Mei, and Li Ruzhen. Among them, Lin highlighted well-known scholar Yuan Mei, portraying him as a social pioneer advocating for women's rights. Writing for Western-educated Chinese intellectuals and English speakers in China, Lin’s works and translations mediated China and the West, facilitating traditional Chinese knowledge flow worldwide and shaping perceptions of China. Lin’s feminist view notably influenced Sinologist Robert van Gulik. In the postscript of The Chinese Gold Murders, van Gulik discussed how he incorporated Lin’s article in his conceptualization of Judge Dee’s progressive stance on women’s voices in Chapter Fifteen. Many scholars have similarly regarded Lin as a cultural bridge between China and the West and accepted his characterization of Yuan Mei as a feminist. However, Goyama Kiwamu’s research concluded that Yuan Mei’s literary thought stemmed from his haose (lust for man and woman), in which Yuan objectified both men and women as subjects of sexual desire. Yuan Mei used to say that reading a good poetry sentence is like watching a beautiful lady. According to Kiwamu’s research and Yuan Mei’s works, Yuan's opposition to foot-binding, advocacy for women’s rights, and critique of Confucianism do not stem from feminist ideals but due to Yuan’s sexual desire, thus leading to his patronage of women. This raises critical questions: why did Lin portray Yuan Mei as a feminist? What motivated him to interpret Yuan’s thoughts in a feminist fashion? Despite the distance between Yuan’s writings as well as actions and feminist ideals, why did Lin Yutang cast a feminist light on Yuan Mei and introduce Yuan Mei as a pioneering Chinese “feminist” to English readers in the 1930s?

This research investigates a Chinese television drama adapted from a novel by Yi Shu, a distinguished Hong Kong novelist, titled The Story of Roses (玫瑰的故事). The study aims to elucidate the inherent tensions and challenges associated with postfeminism in China. It analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of this drama online to demonstrate that shifting intimate relationships, evolving political, economic, and technological conditions within the media industry, and broader social transformations have fostered postfeminist subjectivity in Chinese television. Specifically, in line with neoliberal transitions, women confined to domestic and private spheres are increasingly portrayed as responsible for their own circumstances. This research seeks to examine the construction of the postfeminist subjectivity of the female protagonist Huang Yimei through her romantic relationships. It also investigates how The Story of Roses has embedded and perpetuated the entrenched hierarchical division between productive and reproductive labor, thereby constructing the myth of postfeminism in post-socialist China workplace. Furthermore, this study outlines a framework of feeling for contemporary Chinese women who aspire to achieve autonomy, independence, and social status within Chinese society.

In societies where human and non-human collide to remap the experience of being, queer literature has been particularly active by reappropriation simulacra as a resistance power to the “polishing” of spaces. Queer literature embraces ambivalence and affect, for they disrupt linearity. While virtuality is usually understood as a non-affective technology enabled through specific devices, I propose to read queer novels as “virtual spaces” in that virtuality itself is the remapping of spaces beyond the human to tackle binarity through the complex entanglement of affect, environment, and precarity. Two novels approach queer precarity through non-human fragmentation: Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022), which narrates the story of a non-binary person overcoming family trauma and boundaries through an osmosis with trees to allow another identity, and Camille Cornu’s Photosynthèses (2024), which tells of a non-binary person dissolving boundaries of humanity through an transformation with plants to fragment identity. Drawing on theoretical thinking by Preciado (Dysphoria Mundi), Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), and Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology), I will analyze the ambiguity of fragmentation: its precarity in front of a constantly absorbing normativity, its virtuality for a remapping of identity, its environmental multiplicity through queer temporality. As a way of opening for discussion, I will argue that the meditative resistance of these texts further highlights the necessity of remapping Comparative Literature beyond binary studies and for an unstable—precarious—method of reading virtual spaces.