Floating
Among our project group, the idea of floating—immersing our more-than-human bodies of water back into the sea to experience its aqueous multiplicity unmediated—had long been a topic of conversation. Within feminist embodied phenomenology, the bodily logic of gestation aligns with ethics. Luce Irigaray, though not explicitly invoking the term “gestationality”, explores themes such as the maternal, the placental, and the intrauterine to emphasize feminine materiality as the foundation of enabling another’s existence. Similarly, the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément envisions the generous, diffusive, overflowing feminine body as a challenge to phallogocentric frameworks. These thinkers draw on the amniotic waters of the maternal body to demonstrate how physical sensibility underpins ethical relationships.
Rather than reinvoking heteronormative, reprosexual biologisms, however, we sought to return to the belly of the North Atlantic waters—not as passive observers but as beings becoming-with the sea. This “watery thinking” defies binary distinctions: inside/outside, land/sea, human/nature. Water becomes the mode of thought itself: I breathe the moist air into a body shaped by waters once cycled through the Sea-Sami poet’s great-great-great-grandmother, through billions of cells, through my sweat and yours—evaporating, raining, saturating soil and rivers, merging with the ocean, mingling with the excretions of countless beings. Not to romanticize our gestational existence or bind environmental thought to preserve “nature” for human survival, but entering the waters of Romsa/Tromsø reminds us of the entanglements of oil, fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, and organic matter that constantly circulate back into algae, fish, and humans – more-than-humans.
By early October, summer’s record-breaking air and water temperatures had passed. Once 19 degrees in August, the water temperature had dropped to seven, demanding meticulous preparation. Dressed in dry suits with woolen hats and mittens, we spent an hour squashing ourselves into gear designed to keep us alive for 20 minutes in these frigid North Sea waters. Angus and Siri adjusted the sound devices to capture the underwater and aerial acoustics, while we, clad in red, black, yellow, and turquoise, ventured from the Polarmuseum into the sea. Tourists gathered at the museum’s railing, filming us. I became aware that, as a humanities scholar, I’m unaccustomed to this kind of attention, and I found it oddly seductive.
My suit became a vessel, my body soft and buoyant within.
The shoreline, a small patch left undeveloped between the museum’s exhibition space and its administration building, was littered with algae, plastics, and jellyfish. Before entering the water, I inhaled with Kati Roover “10,000 years worth of continuum in this one salty breath.” A sudden awareness of time coursed through me, energizing me momentarily. I longed to merge with the water body. Yet, as I waded in, a hole in my dry suit let the sea in early. I was wet before I was knee-deep—a poignant metaphor for the ocean’s persistence.
Once fully immersed, I felt a strong sense of belonging. The waves slapped unpredictably against my hood, recalling the sensation of being in a boat’s belly. My suit became a vessel, my body soft and buoyant within. Yet, the biting cold soon overtook the experience, creeping from the back of my head into my thoughts. It hurt but compelled me to linger, defying expectations—a sensation akin to floating during pregnancy (as described by Ami Karvonen and Maija Mustonen in Aquatic Encounters), though wilder. I wondered how it would feel in the warmer waters of June or July.
Silje eventually pointed at her watch, clearly urging me to get back on land, cautioning against the indifference cold water can bring. Reluctantly, I left the embrace of the sea. As Lucia helped peel away the dry suit, it felt like a second birth—a strange sense of connection and liberation, more profound than the act of shedding plastic layers should elicit.
What had happened?
Reflecting on the experience, guilt mingled with awe. I felt acutely aware of the privilege inherent in donning a suit to engage with the waters. Yet, I also remembered Gabriella Palermo’s reflections on the “turbulent materiality of the sea,” informed by Édouard Glissant’s notion of the abyss as tied to the Middle Passage. The ghosts of history—those presences-absences—emerged as visceral sensations, not abstractions. As Palermo writes, these absences have subjectivity, agency, and a perceptive regime that renders them de facto presences. The turbulent sea became a method to confront planetary troubles, slapping against my skin, seeping through the breaches in my protective suit, and compelling me to reckon with the troubles, spectral histories, and entangled futures it holds.
By Katrin Losleben
Further readings and resources
- Bopape, D. S. (2022). Lerato laka le a phela le a phela le a phela/ My love is alive, is alive, is alive.
- Glissant, É. (1990/1997). Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham: Duke University Press.
- Karvonen, A. and Mustonen, M. (2024). “Floating”. In Khodyreva, A. (A) and Suoyrjö, E. (eds). Aquatic Encounters. A Glossary of Hydrofeminism. Helsinki: Rooftop Press, 104-111.
- Neimanis, A. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275415.
- Palermo, G. (2022). Ghosts from the Abyss: The Imagination Worlds in the sea-narratives of Afrofuturism. Lo Squaderno, 17(2), 39–42.
- Roover, K. (2024). “Saltwater”. In Khodyreva, A. (A) and Suoyrjö, E. (eds). Aquatic Encounters. A Glossary of Hydrofeminism. Helsinki: Rooftop Press, 248-257