Autore: Pisapia, Carolina
Titolo: The Wordless Modesty of Watery Languages: Marine Creatures, Trans-Species Encounters, and the Little Mermaid’s Reversed Desire
Periodico: Textus
Anno: 2025 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 86 - Pagina finale: 106

What might watery languages teach us about how to connect with each other? In a variety of contemporary cultural productions (Joseph 2021; Vaz 2010; Despret 2021), sea depths and their inhabitants stand as the object of a melancholic, solastalgic, or even utopic desire (Albrecht 2005; Consigliere 2020; Halberstam 2020; Muñoz 2009). Connected to the envisioning of a future of “better social relations” (Grebowicz 2017), this desire resonates with posthuman feminisms and speculative fiction (Gumbs 2020; Neimanis 2017; Despret 2021). Katherine Vaz’s short story “What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body is Gone” (2010) replaces the Little Mermaid’s desire for humanness with the longing for a watery posthumanity. No longer a patriarchal silencing of women’s voices (Warner 1999), the wordlessness of watery languages allows communication where human representationalism fails (Barad 2003) and draws a way out of the individualistic thresholds of human social relations.




SICI: 1824-3967(2025)2<86:TWMOWL>2.0.ZU;2-G
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.7370/117974
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.7370/117974

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