Chapter 2. Transcorporeality in 21st-century mermaid tales

Abstract

This chapter takes its cue from the dominant presence of the mermaid trope in 21st-century media culture. It opens with a sampling of contemporary mermaid figurations, which are driven by the desire to break out of the Romantic paradigm as shaped by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and its various Disney adaptations. This paradigm is premised on a heteronormative love plot, with a rigid gender binary and a persistent emphasis on the superiority of humans over more-than-humans. In 21st-century adaptations, it is the other way around, but a mere reversal of a hierarchy does not suffice for breaking out of a binary system. The chapter concludes with a close textual analysis of Lampje by Annet Schaap, a Dutch children’s novel that projects a world in which humans, animals, and things intra-act with each other on an equal footing, moving beyond human exceptionalism.