The Still Unfathomed Trans+Oceanic

• Main Author: Jefferies, Daze
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholars Commons @ Laurier 2022
• Subjects: trans; sex work; fishy; history; ecology; Newfoundland; Fine Arts; History of Gender; Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual; and Transgender Studies; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol19/iss2/3; https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1642&context=thegoose

For centuries, violence against mermaids has coexisted alongside slippery sexualizations in much of Newfoundland’s folk and popular cultures. This is demonstrated most grievously in colonist Richard Whitbourne’s 1620 text, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland. The fishy reality of simultaneous disposability and desirability also mirrors the life histories of trans women and sex workers in the capital port city of St. John’s. Imagining mermaids as trans and sex-working ancestors in a province that has been structured by ecologies of fish trade, this work of research-creation drifts through precarious survival in the North Atlantic.