What's Queer about Water?

Jeremy Chow's The Queerness of Water is a surprising, often demanding, but always interesting contribution to queer environmental humanities and queer eighteenth-century studies. This monograph (Chow's first) finds fascinating, marginal moments in canonical texts including Robinson Crusoe (1719), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and Frankenstein (1818), in which water erodes not just physical matter but the sexualized, gendered, and racialized categories congealed upon it. Water can do this because it was never only an agent of imperial transportation. If the ocean has seemed “the primary conduit by which colonialism materialized” (21), this book reveals instead the more complicated capacity of water both to subtend and contest imperial violence with a violence all its own.The introduction in which this forceful thesis is theorized begins with the necessary question: “What's Queer about Water?” The book's answer is that what water chiefly undoes is the typology of masculinity concretized in eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies: in its wake, “white, colonial heteromasculinity and its attendant hetero-reproductive norms are ruptured, disrupted, and waylaid” (4). Chow extrapolates from here in committed dialogue with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mel Chen, and a roster of queer eco-critics, yet initially his proposition for “water's queerness” rests heavily on queer theory's touchstone vocabulary, which warrants a more interrogative, subject-specific working through. This unfolds in Chow's progression from a routine presentation of queerness as resistant to static norms to a sharply anticolonial theorization of how “water's queerness induces the reconfiguration of the male colonist's relationship with self and other through irremediable violence that disorients constructs of masculinity” by carving out a stream for the “potential nonheteronormative relationalities and sexualities that snake their way through an eighteenth-century canon” (10–11). Violence is the axis on which water and imperial masculinity converge, where new relations are compelled, and Chow is thoughtfully alert to the vital variability of violence: its opportunity but also, and always, its threat.The ambivalence of watery violence winds its way through four chapters, providing a consistent and situated keynote. After the introduction's readings of two poems—William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762) and William Diaper's Nereides: Or Sea-Eclogues (1712)—each chapter takes up a novel or two from the eighteenth-century canon. The chapters also refine water studies into more precise, permeable forms, so that Robinson Crusoe is paired with a stormy sea, Gulliver's Travels (alongside John Gabriel Stedman's nonfictional Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam [1796]) with rivers, the Gothic novels Vathek (1786) and The Monk (1796) with water torture, and Frankenstein with Arctic and glacial ice. Refusing to homogenize water as the great blue yonder recalibrates the “blue humanities” with more local sites of study; it also reattunes attention to the texts in which such sites emerge as crossing points where ontological and epistemological certainties lose their fixity and start to flow.Brought to the center, these out-of-the-way moments—what Chow calls eighteenth-century culture's “fluid fringe” (4)—distort the whole by which they are surrounded, so that critical adjustments to different figures of water ripple out in a panoply of incisive rereadings of otherwise familiar texts. Material and metaphoric, the force of water thwarts Crusoe's colonial management by confounding empire's subject/object, civilized/wild binaries, as it does Gulliver's hermetic masculine body, subject to cross-species violation at the river's messy threshold. The Gothic weaponization of water may reinforce biopolitical control of transgressive bodies, yet Vathek and The Monk nonetheless reveal how desexualized variants of masculinity pressurize the heterosexual economy from which they are excluded. And if sacrifice has typically purged violence from community by outsourcing it, ice as a scene of confrontation and agent of blockage in Frankenstein refuses this outlet to reveal instead the violence within the divided heart of society, inciting alternative attachments.These claims are supported by persuasive theorization and rigorous close reading. The intervening sections, or intermezzi, between chapters are less rewarding. They discuss later media—Adrienne Rich's “Diving into the Wreck” (1972), Planet of the Apes (1963) and its 1968 film adaptation, The Little Mermaid (1837) and a 1913 sculpture, and DC Comics's Mr. Freeze (1959–1997)—layered into relation with the eighteenth-century texts. According to Chow, these interstitial pauses “demonstrate a long, durational tide” beyond discrete periodization and enfold cultural objects into political projects of “pedagogy, praxis, and activism” (26). While I'm not convinced that translocating an historical period's preoccupations is the best demonstration of their relevance, this interweaving is clearest when Chow writes poignantly about reading Rich's poem with students in and alongside the damaged environment of the Susquehanna shoreline. Other examples, though, read less as explicit engagements in the world beyond the university than they do suggestive prompts to revisit popular tales and figures. What this enables for eco-activism beyond the important but limited first step of reimagining human/nonhuman entanglements is left in the air.The Queerness of Water is also bracingly styled. And deliberately so: Chow confesses being primed to “anticipate and steel [him]self for a recurring ‘gotcha’ question” (22), whether that's about the confluence of the physical world and the textual symbol or the queering of the nonhuman. I understand (and respect) Chow's exuberant diction to be, in his words, as much a “part of [his] queer grammar” as this determined confrontation with the borders of established knowledge (27). Frequently, though, I stumbled over the three-way collision between scrupulous textual analysis, stock phrasing of ecological enmeshment and queer antinormativity, and an idiosyncratically mannered, even “whims[ical]” style (26). This might be a result of Chow's calculated contestation of readerly expectations—he's enough of a self-conscious writer to make it so—but for this reader at least, it didn't quite pay off. Although I have some reservations about the framing, the argument and its elucidation in The Queerness of Water is sustained, lively, and challenging. What it amounts to, as Chow writes in the conclusion (where he reads the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters [2009] with the 2017 film The Shape of Water), is an opening up that might exchange corroded certainty for care: if water overwhelms what was there before, perhaps what it gives is a new way, a queerer way, of looking after and finding pleasure in what gets revealed when the waves have retreated.