At this stage in my career and life, I am shifting gears.. or, to use a more apt metaphor, swimming in a different direction. After 40+ years of loving mermaids– and collecting stories, images, and kitsch from around the globe– I am finally starting to take seriously the role of mermaids in my life and mermaid narratives in our collective imaginary.
Yep, I am finally writing “my mermaid book”!
I’m just getting starting, but here’s what I’m thinking:
The 21st-Century Mermaid Craze
We are in the midst of a mermaid craze, and my book explains how, where, and why. Everywhere you look—from literature to film, social media to fashion, digital art to commodity kitsch—mermaids are there. Yet, we lack serious (and certainly scholarly) attention to how and why mermaid tales mean so much to our digital, global world. This is especially troubling when we recognize that recent mermaid narratives defy expectations of alabaster skin and blond hair, Christian ideals of female sexuality and heteronormative romance, and other genre conventions solidified by mermaid imagery in the wake of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837). Today’s mermaids are Black and Brown, sexually fluid, powerful in their relationships to Nature, and grounded in indigenous knowledge. They present alternatives to life under neoliberal capitalism, white patriarchy, and digital surveillance culture. These mermaid tales reflect our most pressing anxieties and concerns: about racial and social justice, climate change, convergence and algorithmic culture, and more. These narratives span global readerships, multimedia formats, diverse aesthetic modes, and registers of affect and attachment. They deserve critical attention because they have much to teach us about our quickly changing culture and environment.
If you have suggestions for reading, viewing, collaboration, etc. please reach out!
How I’m working: mostly in public, following Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s urging in Generous Thinking (2021): “For scholars to begin to forge connections with those readers, we must be willing to demonstrate our love for our work, to open our reading processes to others, to invite them into open exchange with us, to engage them directly in the hows and whys of our approaches to our fields. Creating an environment in which the public might begin to care about our work demands that we do at least some of that work in public” (131).
In this spirit, I am learning, sharing, collaborating in public– and in process– the following ways:
—I collaborated with Mark C. Marino and Diana Leong on a Scalar-based “book” titled “Entanglements” about the digital literary installation piece, FishNetStockings by Joellyn Rock for The Digital Review (Fall 2022).
—I wrote about contemporary Black mermaid fiction in the open-access journal The Conversation: “Disney’s Black mermaid is no breakthrough – just look at the literary subgenre of Black mermaid fiction” (December 2022)
—I spoke about Oceanic Media Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany in a conference on “Poetry in the Digital Age”– “Audioliterary Poetry Between Performance And Mediatization,” May 11-13, 2023 at Hamburg University
— I gave a talk on an all-mermaid panel (!) at Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) + AESS 2023 Conference. July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
–I wrote “Hooked on Mermaids: Recuperating Personal Passion as Scholarly Research” for the minnesota review (101): 113–122 as part of a “Special Focus: Mobilizing Creativity, Part 2.” (November 2023)
–I edited a special cluster for ASAP Journal titled “Our Mermaid Craze”. Read my short introduction to the cluster HERE. (April 2024)
-I published an article on 21st Century mermaid narratives as a rich site for eco-criticism and Environmental Humanities… with @SirenTV as my main example. “Siren: An Allegory for the Anthropocene and Example of the Contemporary Mermaid Craze” published by ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. (May 2024). PDF HERE
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because I am a teacher-scholar in the CSU model and system, I taught a class on Mermaid literature, so that I could learn from my students in ENGL 305: Literature and the Environment– Mermaids….. (Fall 2023 and Spring 2024). So fun!!