Tag Archives: week2

Week 2 Readings Post

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I managed to create a system for my annotations that my brain can comprehend but it might look crazy to everyone else, which often happens. I thoroughly enjoyed chapter 1 of Merepeople compared to the introduction. At the beginning of the chapter, I enjoyed the small story just showing how weak men are about keeping their emotions in check that a carving is bringing out these human natural emotions. The hypersexualization of the mermaid and his hunger / temptation makes it uncomfortable from an outsider point of view that isn’t a desperate man. I was uncomfortable with the narration while reading it, just the objectification was wild and had me cringing about how this man was acting! Unhinged deacon at its finest. I wonder if there are texts out there about a woman having sexual desire for a triton..? But, considering that Christianity and their leaders were trying their hardest to denigrate femininity, I wouldn’t be surprised that it was destroyed or hidden deep. Later in the chapter on page.51, the details were clear on how tritons were perceived, which was more conservative than their counterpart. I had this thought that popped up during our lecture this past Tuesday, that since mermaids are a reflection of humans.. Creating the narrative around mermaids is a soapbox for Christian leaders to passively ruin femininity. An indirect way of criticising women and their feminine attributes. If the church is on a mission to ruin femininity, why isn’t it a sin considering that Mother Mary is a woman too? And my last question that has been bothering me is that on page.40, why would scholars assume “vagina” as another meaning for the fish held by the mermaid? I don’t understand the reasoning for this metaphor. Like the mirror/comb, vanity, but what does the dang fish mean? 

This is how I sum up my takeaway from this week’s reading: in the name of “goodness”, there is plenty of evil doing.

What Distinguishes Merpeople from Humans?

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The question about what distinguishes us as humans has puzzled many scholars throughout the history of mankind. When talking about the history of merpeople, the question of what is a human and what is an animal is often worried about. In addition, mermaids and mermen are hybrids that stand between animal and human. More than even hybrid mermaids, they stand between what is normal compared to what is monstrous. This idea of human is an important matter in what we classify hybrid studies and in monster theory- human, they reveal how we define ourselves by facing the new.

The idea of what it is to be human is a question that has also been discussed throughout the ages. In the Introduction chapter of Merpeople: A Human History, author Vaughn Scribner references a historian Erica Fudge who says the following: “Reading about animals is always reading through humans … paradoxically, humans need animals in order to be human.” Scribner writes about another historian, Harriet Ritvo, who made a statement about how when establishing the definition of humanity, the individuals who make the determination matter more than the subject, based on who or what carries out the assessment. When we view the perspective of those who inhabit the combination of having human-like and inherent sea and water qualities, we are better able to understand that the myths, stories, and divisions that have been built around this group to represent deeper human concerns and issues.

Monstrous entities within Western culture such as merpeople have challenged the way human-animal boundary is perceived. While merpeople are partly human, do they contain all the essential qualities that make humans who they are? These include, reason, dignity, and even spirituality. Or, were their animal traits socially lower on the “natural order,” and due to this their human superiority is reinforced? All these questions have made people reconsider what it truly means to be a human, and the way natural order actually is supposed to work.

The study of merpeople shows how the dividing lines of what dictates humanity are continually uncertain. Our sense of human identity purely relies on what we define as human, nonhuman, civilized, or wild, and that the human domination of nature is not absolute.