Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores Italian novel Sirene by Laura Pugno, where the mermaid becomes a hybrid figure of dystopia, climate catastrophe, and posthuman possibility. Drawing on myth, manga, and dark fairy tale, the novel critiques anthropocentrism and reimagines humanity through watery, feminist lenses.

Paper long abstract

Mermaids are hybrid creatures around whom a rich lore has proliferated for centuries. On one side, we find pretty, Disneyfied, commercialized versions—The Little Mermaid, Splash—and on the other, the darker, more mysterious mermaids of Homer’s Odyssey or Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. In this latter tradition, mermaids embody essential human ambiguity (Easterlin), drawing us into realms of uncertainty and uncanniness.

I would like to focus on one of these darker fictional appearances: Sirene, a contemporary speculative novel by Italian author Laura Pugno. In Sirene, the mermaid becomes a disturbing figure within a dystopian, climate-ravaged world. The novel reads like a dark fairy tale, drawing from Greek mythology and Japanese manga, where the mermaid is entangled in a post-apocalyptic scenario marked by disease, exploitation, and cannibalism.

Yet the mermaid is not only a symbol of catastrophe. Through her hybridity and liminality, she becomes a cultural signifier of environmental transformation and posthuman possibility. Pugno uses the mermaid to explore our relationship with water, the ethics of survival, and the deconstruction of anthropocentric and earth-centric worldviews. The novel also engages feminist and political concerns, using the mermaid’s watery essence to unsettle stable categories of identity and ethics. In Sirene, the mermaid leads us into an uncomfortable but necessary reflection on the darkest sides of humanity and the potential for myth to illuminate speculative futures shaped by ecological collapse and posthuman reimaginings.