in moonlight, blue

here, i began with a few linked observations: the role of smell in racializing/racialized Othering -> the association of racialized Otherhood with 'backwardness' [excess memory, inconvenient memory] -> the ascription of ugliness, disease, and unsightliness to this memory, which, in a world dominated with highly medicalized understandings of difference, would demand a "cure." The presence of people like Miranda (SFG's main character) mars, within the parlance of the book, her city's access to a happiness contingent on her family's erasure/assimilation. Mars, messes up, makes a mess of. With this particular word use in mind, I bring in the Ugly Laws, which already disproportionately targeted not only disabled people, but racialized and impoverished disabled people - who, like Miranda, were a site of visible friction between the false optimism of white/abled capitalist society and those it crushes.

then, we go into the second screenshot, where i expand the conversation into one that touches on cure as a solution for disgust at Others. The Memory Disease within SFG is emblematic of a eugenicist ideology that links race, geography, and disability as shared sites of unsightliness/ugliness/disgust that must be eliminated at all costs. I illustrate that, within the text, what Lai has done is very cleverly link pungent signifiers (not only durian, but also smells like iron/blood, which gesture toward wars and genocides that the state also wants erased) to the demand for violent, curative medical intervention, which also, in its way, becomes a micro/interpersonal way of upholding state power and protecting the concept of whiteness/able-bodiedness (and heterofuturism, which isn't here but elsewhere in my analysis).