"Cripping the Mermaid: A Borderlands Approach to Feminist Disability Studies in Valerie Martin's 'Sea Lovers'"

The borderland is at the heart of mermaid mythology; the various gulfs generated between sea and land shape character arcs, drive conflict, and engender complicated resolutions. In the most widespread mermaid narratives, an aesthetically pleasing sea woman attempts to exchange her fins for legs in order to find love (wholeness) on land. Her admission into terrestrial life bears a heavy price. In most versions, she must sacrifice some essential part of herself, usually her voice. In the early Danish tale, her changed form "will mean continuous agony" as each step "will feel as if she is treading on a blade sharp enough to make her bleed" (Kingshill 16). The crossing, too, presents obstacles: that in her quest for her beloved, the mermaid's beauty will not overcome her inability to speak; that her secret body might be revealed; and that she herself will be sensationalized in the public gaze. Other elements facilitate her cross-border movement—her exceptional mobility in water saves the prince who will become her beloved, and her female embodiment facilitates her easy acceptance by society, a nameless body emerging from the sea. Her hyper-femininity and relative dis/ability, therefore, both enable and complicate her experience of crossing. The narrative conflict is thus rooted in representations of bodies coded by borders and entrenched in hierarchies of privilege tied to gender and ability. In this regard, the mermaid figure, whose reach extends well beyond her Little Mermaid fame, is a particularly intriguing site of analysis to deepen the understanding of feminist disability studies. Furthermore, the mermaid's inextricable link to a number of borderlands—environmental, generic, disciplinary—points to a more expansive role for border studies in framing feminist disability analyses. The blurring of disciplinary borders is fundamental to feminist disability studies. Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes this field as one that "integrates" disability into feminist theory in order to "augment the terms and confront the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences" ("Integrating" 3). This broad objective calls for new ways of reading and viewing in order to "crip" the spaces of feminist inquiry, thereby "transforming," according to Robert McRuer, "a system of compulsory able-bodiedness" in pursuit of "imagining bodies and desires otherwise" (32). Neither strictly dealing with embodied experiences of sex-gender or impairment-disability, nor entirely absorbed or abstracted into gender or disability theories, feminist disability studies consequently declares itself a theoretical-material borderland. As Todd Ramlow notes in "Bodies in the Borderlands," "forging alliances across seemingly monolithic and mutually exclusionary fields/markers of difference [is] made possible by the direct experience and broader implications of life in/as the borderlands" (175). Since feminist disability scholarship is fundamentally rooted in the borderlands, it follows that activating a more comprehensive, deliberate relationship with border theory can enhance the field through a combined attention to liminality, hybridity, narrative, and identity.¹

Drawing deeply from her experience growing up on the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border, Chicana scholar-activist Gloria Anzaldúa describes the borderlands as

[T]he lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal."

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In the preface to the first edition of Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa notes that while her work concerns the U.S. Southwest, the concept of borderlands applies widely and transcends the strictly literal. Therefore, Anzaldúa spatially locates the borderlands, while concurrently transcending geography...