Special Affects: Mermaids, Prosthetics, and the Disabling of Feminine Futurity

I’ll tell you about the mermaidSheds swimmable tail   Gets legs for dancingSings like the sea with a choked throatKnives straight up her spineLancing every stepThere is a priceThere is a priceFor every giftAnd all advice

—Adrienne Rich, “Quarto”

In February 2009, the world was introduced to Nadya Vessey, an Australian double amputee with a seemingly spectacular narrative of personal transformation. Television New Zealand’s (TVNZ) Close Up, the news program that first covered the story, introduced their segment “A Mermaid’s Tale” on Vessey with the following lines:

It’s a fantasy isn’t it, for many little girls, to be a beautiful mermaid, gracefully swimming through the water, splashing her tail. But when an Auckland woman sent a casual email to the film producers of the Weta Workshop, she never dreamed she’d one day be doing just that. In what’s thought to be a world first, the double amputee now has a mermaid tail to help her swim.

(2009)

The story, in brief, goes something like this: after being questioned on a beach by a curious child who had observed her removing her prosthetic legs, Vessey playfully fibbed that she was a mermaid. A competitive swimmer, Vessey subsequently became taken with the idea of having a functional mermaid tail and submitted her request to the Weta Workshop, a special effects company whose film projects have included The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. Viewing the project as an interesting challenge, the Weta Workshop accepted Vessey’s request and a team of designers immediately set to work assembling the complicated prosthetic. Describing the process on their website, the team explains that “[e]very aspect of the tail has been custom made to Vessey’s body using a blend of 3D modeling and milling technology, combined with Vi Vac vacforming, and a polycarbonate spine and tail fin” (3-Fins 2015). The result was a visually stunning and mechanically impressive piece of wearable technology, which Vessey modeled in several photo shoots.

The story soon became a minor news sensation, with pictures, videos, and descriptions of Vessey-as-Mermaid circulating on various websites and blogs—each with their own colorfully exaggerated headline. One website, for example, declared: “Mermaid dream comes true thanks to Weta” (Calman 2009). Another hyperbolically reflected: “From Double Amputee to Mermaid? Famed movie director gives woman new life” (“Agreyson” 2011). Inspirational language like this is, of course, standard fare in human-interest stories involving disability, and many of the online comments posted in response to TVNZ’s Close Up segment extended this logic of charitable rescue or courageous overcoming. Scripting Vessey into a familiar “pity” narrative, the public understands her to be dependent on the charity and benevolence of others, lacking the physical adaptations necessary for her own continued survival.

And yet there is something undeniably queer and crip in the incongruous narratives of feminine and disabled futurity that converge uneasily around Vessey’s adult mermaid embodiment. Following the work of Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer, I intend the term “crip” to signify in this context both as a defiant refusal of the able-bodied norm and as a recognition of the performative nature of compulsory able-bodiedness as it inspires an endless series of failed repetitions. In what follows, I argue that Vessey’s own playful relationship to her mermaid prosthetic makes the usual inspirational narratives and the affects they are meant to generate impossible to sustain. The result is the production of two related but distinct versions of camp sensibility. While Vessey’s own clear commitment to artifice, stylization, and novelty makes her readable as a crip-femme dandy with a keen camp eye, the stubbornness with which many commentators persisted in equating Vessey’s story with inspirational narratives of overcoming adversity makes the news coverage itself readable as naive camp. By considering the news media’s staging of the Weta Workshop’s gift to Vessey alongside queer theorizations of “temporal drag” and crip critiques of children’s charities, I suggest that the media’s...