Literary Lures
What drew us to this piece
Jessica
I have always loved mermaids and always wanted to write about them. I am finally starting work on a book about contemporary (21st-century) mermaid narratives. My friend, Mark Marino, brought this particular mermaid narrative to my attention… and I was, well, hooked. Last year, during the tumult of Covid, I knew I wanted to participate in the ELO conference– to be part of the community I adore and admire– even as I was grieving the fact that the conference would be virtual. Mark proposed putting a panel together, and I told him that, at the moment, I was only thinking about mermaids; I was submerged. He suggested that we pursue a similar approach to what we did with Jeremy Douglass, when we collaboratively wrote Reading Project– i.e. take a single work of electronic literature and invite different scholars, working from different theoretical positions, to approach it. I knew immediately that I wanted to hear from Melody Jue, whose Wild Blue Media was shaking my terrestrial based and biases world, and my new colleague at SDSU, Diana Leong, whose work on race and environmental humanities was changing the way I thought about mermaids: Are they always white? Nope! Are mermaid stories about larger, ecological contexts and situations? Absolutely. I wanted to learn new ways to approach a figure/symbol/image/sign that I always loved but never truly understood.
Diana
I am a newcomer to both mermaids and electronic literature, but thanks to the enthusiasm and expertise of my collaborators Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino, and Melody Jue, I became fascinated with how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” utilizes multiple mediums to “recode” the story of the mermaid. My approach to this piece was formed out of two discoveries: a July 2020 incident in which the words “racist fish” were spray painted onto Copenhagen’s famous “Little Mermaid” statue, and the growing body of scholarship on race and the digital humanities. While race is a relatively new concern for both mermaids and e-lit, I was struck by how “FISHNETSTOCKINGS” evokes the operations of racial fetishism through its oceanic setting, mermaid silhouettes, and disruption of gendered expectations. As they recode the mermaid’s identifying features (e.g., gender, species, narrative history), participants must subtly and simultaneously reckon with the racial histories that converge in the mermaid silhouette, or more precisely, in the silhouettes-turned-stereotypes. In this sense, “how” the mermaid becomes newly meaningful (i.e., a re-negotiation of mermaid stereotypes) becomes inseparable from and integral to “what” it means (i.e., the shift in the viewer’s perspective). Thanks to my brilliant colleagues, I am excited to explore further all that e-lit has to offer to studies of race and power.Mark
As has happened in the past, my colleague and friend Jessica Pressman led me to this piece. Well, she led me into the waters. With her fascination, both scholarly and personal (assuming those two parts of a person can be separated, like a mermaid from her tail), she pointed toward these enduring and multiform myths. We both shared an interest in the oceans and ecocriticism. But I had a personal interest in the object of study,In the summer of 2014, my family and I had the pleasure of visiting the green screen lab where artist Joelllyn Rock was working on this fantastic creation. I had already participated in the work over Twitter as one of the people submitting lines through the various hashtags [hashtags] of the piece, but I had not had a chance to experience the wonders of submersion and immersion in it. Sort of like reading about the ocean but never getting to go in for a swim. And when I saw it: Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! My children loved it, too, perhaps a more perfect age for experiencing the wondrous interaction with the digital undersea creatures. They can be seen in the video documentation.
So when we had the chance to pick a work for ELO 2021, FishnetStocking came to mind. And, as before with William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope, our group dives brought us to treasures untold.