JUST KEEP SWIMMING?

Abstract

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. Our tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality.

Keywords:

• blue humanities
• queer ecology
• queer form
• hydropoetics
• pool
• ecosexuality

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For frameworks that motivate the blue humanities, see John Gillis, Steve Mentz (“Toward a Blue Cultural Studies”), Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Stefan Helmreich, and Hester Blum.

2 See, for example, John Charles Ryan, Joshua Bennett, Catriona Sandilands, and Édouard Glissant on hydropoetics.

3 Our use of “educated hope” invokes the work of queer of color theorist José Esteban Muñoz who, drawing from Ernst Bloch, called for “a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves” to sustain queer futures (207).

4 After a period of exile following her public coming out on Ellen in 1994, in the 2000s, US mainstream media positioned DeGeneres as an iconic lesbian figure. As a White woman who represents corporate and commercial success, she provided a version of queerness that did not threaten the heteronormative versions of success that Halberstam critiques. In recent years, she has become a failed queer figure for many, though not in the ways Halberstam celebrates, because of the abuse, harassment, and discrimination she perpetuated in the workplace.

5 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, public pools were sites of de jure and de facto racial segregation, often enforced through White terror and violence. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this exclusion morphed into the private pool as many White families fled integrating cities and invented the suburbs. See Jeff Wiltse and Cathy Park Hong for social and poetic histories of these dynamics, respectively.

6 See Chris Wiant and Erika Englehaupt who dispel pool myths, especially as they play into concerns over chlorine use, hygiene, and public health.

7 While we create a network of only four works, the ripples of this project invite further diving. Consider queer cult films, such as Get Real (1998), Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015), Beach Rats (2017), Getting Go (2019), Ammonite (2020), and Luca (2021), as well as graphic narratives such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), Marnie Galloway’s In the Sounds and the Seas (2016), Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series (2016–), Molly Osertag’s The Girl from the Sea (2021), and Kat Leyh’s Thirsty Mermaids (2021), all of which invite textures of queer pooling.

8 This radical dissociation from heteronormative bonding coincides with Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young’s “queer bonds”: forms of queer sociality that “come into view through the isometric tension between queer world-making and world-shattering, naming a togetherness in failures to properly intersect, the social hailing named by recognition as well as its radical occlusion” (223–24). See also Chase Gregory on how queerness signifies directional pulls (and bonds) that structure the field of inter- and intra-generational queer studies.

9 While we recognize the polyamorous and polymorphous queer possibilities of these human/nonhuman unions, we also note how they reinforce marriage (and the protections it provides) as the basis of legal recognition and interpersonal accountability. Like Lisa Duggan, we too understand “marriage as a much too narrow and confining status to accommodate our elaborate, innovative forms of intimacy, interconnection and dependency” (n. pag.).

10 For other queer ecological readings of Goodbye Gauley Mountain, see Nicole Seymour and Jeremy Chow.

11 Edelman uses this term to describe an anti-social thesis that rails against the heteronormative logics in which reproduction is always the valuation of sex, futurity, and progress.

12 This number is based on information offered by Redfin as of September 2022. See “Granada Hills Housing Market.”

13 Roderick A. Ferguson argues that “the decisive intervention of queer of color analysis is that racist practice articulates itself generally through gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sexual differences variegate racial formations” and traces its theoretical genealogy to women of color feminisms (Aberrations in Black 3).

14 While Juliet Takes a Breath is fictional, Rivera has discussed how she borrowed from her own experience of moving to Portland to pursue an internship. While it is important to recognize the text as fiction and to avoid eliding Rivera’s aesthetics with her autobiography, we mention this to draw attention to the racism, sexism, and homophobia that plague the publishing industry. See Audie Cornish.

15 Rafia Zakaria uses the term “white feminist” to refer to

someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played and continue to play in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all of feminism and of all feminists. (ix)

According to The Trans Advocate’s Cristan Williams, within feminist and trans discourse, the term “trans exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF) “refers to a very specific type of person who wraps anti-trans bigotry in the language of feminism,” often aligning their so-called radical views with extreme right-wing rhetoric (n. pag.).

16 The satirically serious hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen was started by feminist writer and activist Mikki Kendall on Twitter in 2013 in response to the “feminist” fragility of Hugo Schwyzer. See NPR Staff and Kendall.

17 Notably, another moment of queer intimacy is facilitated by water in Juliet Takes a Breath when Juliet has sex with Kira, another love interest, in the shower (Rivera 211–12).