Aquatic Transformations, Flexible Subjects, and Environmental Change in Contemporary Filipino Speculative Tales

Tales of twentieth century interspecies transformations—of humans turning into fish, worms, and other grubby, slippery, aquatic beings—appear throughout contemporary Philippine literature, indexing the conditions of life in a time of environmental destabilization, industrialization, and extraction. This essay reads moments of aquatic transformation in three contemporary Filipino stories: “Sunset Hair” and “Sanded Soles” from Maria Romina Gonzalez’s short story collection Welostit: and Other Stories (2003) and Maria Elena Paterno’s “The Girl Who Turned into a Fish” (1997). I read these stories as speculative tales that stage twentieth-century shifts in national water management policies over the bodies of women protagonists. In Maria Romina Gonzalez’s short stories, the Southeast Asian girl becomes a site that absorbs the destruction created by systems of hydropower and enclosure in Southeast Asia. The ways that girls transform in service of a changing environment reveal that the burden of uncertain ecological futures is lodged into the bodies of women, the underclass, and the poorest of the poor. Next, the essay turns to the publishing history of “The Girl Who Turned into a Fish” to offer an alternate reading of living in ecologically unstable times. Whereas sf might broadly stage a struggle between globalization and existing lifeworlds, this essay argues that aquatic transformations in Filipino speculative tales reorient the reader’s focus to the agency that people who are embedded in these landscapes have and ask us to see ecological destabilization through their eyes.