The Genders of Waves

Seeing the sea as a feminine force and flux has a long history in the crosscurrents of Judeo-Christian thought, Enlightenment philosophy, and natural scientific epistemology. This essay examines how ocean waves have been similarly gendered female, and also flips that inquiry, asking how women's collective agency has been figured through wave metaphors, notably in discussions of U.S. feminism. I examine how such depictions of waves have called upon and naturalized a gendered symbolism but may these days—particularly in the age of attention to the "nonhuman"—be coming undone, rendering gender newly "at sea."