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Paper short abstract

Mermaiding is a growing cultural phenomenon of extreme freediving while wearing mermaid tails. This paper explores how practitioners journey across the globe to swim as something other-than-human,encountering whale sharks,seals,and other ocean beings in adventures that blur myth and lived reality.

Paper long abstract

Mermaiding is a contemporary cultural phenomenon where people engage in extreme freediving and performance while wearing monofins. Beyond the practice in local pools and lake waters, many self-described merfolk journey across the world to dive in saltwater environments, often seeking encounters with marine life. In these travels, strange things certainly happen at sea: humans appear as their oceanic selves, swimming alongside other beings in spectacular adventures that blur the boundary between myth and lived experience. Based on ongoing ethnographic research, this paper explores how mermaiding turns the ocean into a site of strange encounters between beings. Some of these beings are manifested through human bodies disciplined in breath-holding and transformed through years of aquatic training. By diving without breathing equipment, relying only on a monofin and the held breath, merfolk also invite risk into play, heightening the intensity of these encounters. I argue that mermaiding re-enchants our relationship to the sea, a sea which has always been a realm of wonder and danger in its own right. By diving in mermaid form, practitioners transform myth into an embodied, sensed experience, aiming to dissolve boundaries between human and ocean being. In these adventures, the ocean body is no longer a backdrop but a companion to be met, bringing mermaids into voyages of both discovery and peril. And like sailors of old, these merfolk then sail back to shore, carrying the tales of oceanic adventure to tell among human worlds.