| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation combines interdisciplinary theories from the blue humanities and monster studies to explore how anglophone North American works of feminist speculative fiction use the figuration of the “she-monster” to cultivate more mutual and material relationships with oceans in the Anthropocene. It builds on DeLoughrey’s term “submersion stories” (2015) to argue that new feminist posthuman ocean imaginaries are emerging in response to the distance and mastery of the masculinist alien ocean narrative that dominates Western science fiction. Using monster methodologies inspired by cultural studies (Hellstrand et al. 2018), I contextualise and analyse a diverse selection of feminist speculative texts across genres and media which feature marginalised characters rejecting anthropocentrism, forming coalitional alliances, and transforming into monsters through close encounters with oceanic otherness. These texts’ embrace of difference, I argue, represents a “sea change” in Western conceptions of the human grounded in the “master model” dichotomy of nature/culture (Plumwood 1993), requiring readers/viewers to imagine possibilities for more “response-able” relationships to more-than-human worlds (Haraway 2007). The three chapters focus on Joan Slonczewski’s ecofeminist utopian novel A Door into Ocean (1986), Guillermo del Toro’s romantic Hollywood creature feature The Shape of Water (2017), and a collection of transmedial Afrofuturist mermaid stories including Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep (2019) and Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014) as submersion stories that successfully keep alive a utopian impulse of transformation in resistance to the current dystopian trend in mainstream popular culture. | en_US |
