Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature by Jennifer A. Kokai (review)

In the late 1930s, female performers of the Aquacade in New York—having been hired only after their legs had been measured to make sure they were adequately long—were asked to swim with their heads above water in order to keep their hair and makeup intact while hiding their athleticism. These “mermaids,” who were encouraged to “swim pretty” to conform to conventional gender roles, lend the title for Jennifer Kokai’s discussion of the complex intersections of gender, race, consumerism, spectacle, and nature in a study of aquatic performances in the United States over the past century. Swim Pretty argues that because aquatic spectacles within water parks shape cultural understandings and perceptions of water, they significantly impact how we choose to engage with oceanic environments.

Provoked by her own experiences of unquestioningly enjoying the Weeki Wachee Springs Park in Florida as a young girl, Kokai critiques the cultural messages of aspirational beauty that the mermaids convey: blond, white, heteronormative, and feminine, with the sole goal of marrying the prince. Her study offers a unique look at the trajectory of the development of aquatic spectacles through a chronological timeline from the late 1930s through the twentieth century to the present day. Each chapter focusses on one of four water parks in the United States: the Aquacade, Weeki Wachee, Aquarena Springs, and Seaworld. Kokai establishes her argument around race, gender, and nature in the early example of the Aquacade, and then offers varied nuanced iterations of this in relation to each specific site.

The fantasy worlds conveyed by the water parks tell well-worn, nostalgic stories that portray women and people of color as consumable objects, while simultaneously constructing troubling accounts of human mastery over nature and of our dominance over other species. These narratives of human control over nonhuman performers are exposed as a dangerous fallacy in the final chapter, in which Kokai examines the phenomenon of female trainers (described by Kokai as “modern merpeople”) “swim[ming] pretty” with apex predators, with tragic results.

Kokai begins her analysis with the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and argues that the water spectacles engage with an aesthetics of descension, what she defines as a counterpoint to the aerial feats being performed by planes and other aeronautical technologies (an aesthetics of ascension) during the same time period. While virtual aeroplanes in the Futurama display allowed audiences to “fly over” a city of the future, Kokai posits the appeal of Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a “girlie show based in water” (21), as an alternative to these contemporary and progressive displays in the air. Rose’s assertion that “the public is disposed towards water” (21) was correct, and even Salvador Dali’s display “The Dream of Venus,” a surrealistic funhouse, included tanks of water with topless mermaids. Kokai argues that Dali’s work—through its combination of water attraction and surrealistic depictions of threatening sea creatures such as lobsters and eels, as well as symbols of vagina denta (as opposed to more controllable ocean creatures)—attempted to use aspects of femininity to illustrate a wider social critique. However, “The Dream of Venus” (which later became “20,000 Legs Under the Sea”) was ultimately unsuccessful due to the fact that it did not conform to the entertainment/education format of the other water attractions and created a “grotesque nightmare” rather than a nostalgic and placating experience. Kokai suggests that Dali’s “frightening” and “unknowable” alternative vision might have opened up an elite, experimental art form to a more general audience and significantly changed the dramaturgy of aquatic spectacles today had it been more popular at the New York World’s Fair.

Kokai categorizes the parks in terms of the types of water: natural (she acknowledges that this term is problematic, but uses it to refer to bodies of water that are geologically occurring features); tamed (waters that humans have augmented or manipulated...