TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Long before Hans Christian Andersen and Disney made the mermaid a global pop cultural phenomenon, merpeople existed in Black and indigenous cosmologies. Today's Western capitalized stereotypes of mermaids are rooted in racialized concepts of beauty and femininity that have their origins in the context of colonization. But the figure of the mermaid as a ‘boundary object’ (Helmreich 2016) certainly has critical potential. As a hybrid between woman and fish and between culture and nature, she is a ‘monster’ (Braidotti 2000) and that challenges binary thinking. I want to discuss artists who imagine mermaids in relation to Queer Ecology and hydrofeminism (Neimanis 2017) in order to subvert the image of the mermaid to question heteronormativity, sexism, racism, ablism, and human supremacy. Old, black, disabled mermaids, mermen and transgender merpeople queer traditional ideas and help to break down the boundary that stands at the beginning of all hierarchically conceived dualisms, namely the boundary between humans and other animals. As Donna Haraway (2016) states, “queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation”. As configurations of animal drag (McCartney 2024) queer mermaids illustrate the interconnectedness of all life forms. While myths and fairy tales about mermaids teach that it rarely goes well when you fall in love across species, artistic storytelling conveys ideas of radical tolerance for alterity and cross-species forms of kinship through the embrace of the monstrous. While becoming mermaid mirrors the human longing to come into contact with the more-than-human and to escape from a disenchanted terrestrial life, becoming a queer mermaid is highly political and criticizes modes of thinking based on division, extractivism, and anthropocentrism. It exposes the links between colonial dispossession, the disregard of sexualized or racialized others, the devastation of the environment, and the reification of other animals.