Weeki Wachee Girls and Buccaneer Boys: The Evolution of Mermaids, Gender, and "Man versus Nature" Tourism

{ 67 } \ Weeki Wachee Girls and Buccaneer Boys The Evolution of Mermaids, gender, and “Man versus Nature” Tourism —JENNIFER A. KOK AI In 1956, science writer Horace Loftin worked to dispel the myth of the mermaid in the Science News­Letter: “Instead of being petite and curvaceous,” he wrote, “the mermaid of actuality is tub-like, and weighs from 600 to 2000 pounds.”1 Mermaids, he believed, were based upon the sea cow, or manatee, as the American variant is most commonly known.Even in 1956,Loftin wrote worriedly about the hunting and extinction of manatees, using their ties to mermaids to advocate for their preservation. He stressed their “inoffensiveness” and their similarities to human mothers:“to nurse, the mother sits up with her head and shoulders above water, holding a baby to her breast between her flippers.”2 Loftin’s scientific analysis is that“mermaids,”usually imagined as women, are based upon sightings of these female manatees, with breasts bared above water, nurturing children. The last time I saw a manatee up close was in the mid-1980s; it had found itself in a lake at the Florida tourist attraction Weeki Wachee, “the city of the mermaids.” The lake, fed by spring water, lay between the old-fashioned theme park portion, with bird shows, glass-bottom boats, nature trails, and, most importantly , an underwater show featuring “real, live mermaids,” and the newly adjacent water park Buccaneer Bay. This visiting manatee, who may have represented the origins of the concept of mermaid, served as a visual link between two kinds of mermaids, the graceful women of the park’s history, who tamed { 68 } JENNIFER A. KOK AI the water, and the swimmers racing by on slides made by domesticating the water. This article is about three kinds of mermaids and mermaid performances as tourism. Specifically, it is about Weeki Wachee’s underwater theatre and how it has changed from when it opened on October 12, 1947, to today. During this time, the park evolved from a site popular for water-based performances emphasizing femininity, heterosexuality, and passive spectatorship to participatory performances predicated on active, aggressive, and athletic displays at a newer water park. Mirroring this, the idea of “mermaid” in popular culture has expanded from the idea of attractive, unobtainable women with long, flowing hair and physically hybrid bodies to include world-champion swimmers who rip through the water like fish. Over time, the appeal of the park and its performances have changed. Despite these changes, the social concerns of what constitutes “family friendly” tourism in the United States, as demonstrated by newspapers, documentaries, short films, and other participants in the larger cultural discourse, have remained remarkably the same, largely centering on the spectacle of contained, white, heterosexual female bodies for a presumed male audience. In charting the evolutions of the park, I demonstrate how tourism uses performance to perpetuate certain notions of gender and identity. These often subtle methods are frequently shrugged off as “good clean fun,” yet these performances reach more people and have a potentially far greater impact than the traditional theatre ever could. Mermaids: The Beginnings of the Tail The figure of the mermaid seems to intrinsically draw upon novelty and kitsch, something that is certainly true of Weeki Wachee. The park’s most famous predecessor , for example, is probably the 1842 display of the Feejee Mermaid by legendary showman P. T. Barnum in his American museum. The mermaid was originally created by a Japanese fisherman, who sold it to an American sea captain , and it eventually found its way to The American Museum in New York.3 With typical panache, Barnum created an elaborate press campaign complete with fake naturalists, bogus lectures, and illustrated pamphlets of petite, curvaceous beauties.According to Barnum’s autobiography, the“mermaid”was actually made of a monkey’s body attached to a shark’s tail. Whatever it was, drawings and reconstructions make clear that it was hideous, nothing at all like the graceful pictures in the ads promised, and although curiosity initially brought audiences in, the display had no longevity. As folklorist Steven Levi recounts, { 69 } wEEKI wACHEE gIRLS AND BUCCANEER BOYS “Barnum’s monthly profits more than doubled the first...