ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a pleasurable aqueous ethics of exposure might emerge, with the help of “monsters.” Photos of mermaids swimming with manatees, mixed with statements and stories, help image how fiction and reality swirl together for shaping ethical concern. Sinking to encounter sea-creatures in the “low” culture of popular cinema provides one sort of exposure to posthuman ethics. Elisa’s freakish experiment with a river creature offers a “queer paradigm of desire” that embraces irreverent, “creative variations” of ethical affinities that stress affective proximity. Elisa’s embodied transgression of the human/river-creature binary evinces malleability and diversity in the ways we might feel out the shape of water and the shape our water is in. Elisa and the river creature stand at the edge of a harbor, in the pouring rain, saying goodbye. Elisa is under no illusion that a life under the sea is possible.
