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The Mermaid’s Tale: Ultraliminality and Feminist Futures in Aquamarine (Allen 2006)

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Abstract

The mermaid remains a popular mainstay in contemporary girls’ visual culture, continuing to be particularly influenced by the legacy of Disney’s enormously popular film The Little Mermaid. Contemporary girls’ media culture tends to reimagine the mermaid as a more agentic and empowered heroine than in Andersen’s canonical rendition of the tale, but many of these mermaid tales continue to centre on the romance and on attaining male approval. What sets Aquamarine apart is its representation of heroines who band together to actively critique and reject some of the limited rituals of girlhood inscribed in the earlier text. I am interested in what shifts are enabled by this displacement of the romance in the representation of girlhood rites of passage. I return full circle to the teen screen fantasy of ultraliminality that I explored in the second chapter, considering how the sparkling, flexible zone of the ocean provides a field of possibilities where the heroines collectively imagine and pursue feminist futures together.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Athena Bellas

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Bellas, A. (2017). The Mermaid’s Tale: Ultraliminality and Feminist Futures in Aquamarine (Allen 2006). In: Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64973-3_6

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