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Paper short abstract

In her novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming, Kirsty Logan writes waterscapes where performativity, queer identities, and raw elements meet. Rooted in Scottish folklore, selkies become the intersection between human self-discovery and nonhuman lives that call the unruly seas their home.

Paper long abstract

Scottish novelist Kirsty Logan’s queer retellings of folktales engage in speculative reimaginings of selkie myths intertwined with issues of environmentalism and sapphic self-discovery. In her two, loosely connected novels The Gracekeepers (2015) and The Gloaming (2018), Logan constructs aquatic spaces in two distinct ways in relation to the human protagonists. The first type is marked by the littoral performativity of a flowing circus and professional mermaids. On these stages, some drowned, others floating, the protagonists find themselves in fluid spaces that allow for hidden identities and a soft exploration of non-normative selves. Yet, Logan still locates these places of true self-fulfilment in water, however, in waters away from prying human eyes. In the absence of a human audience, interspecies and more-than-human kinship finds its ways into the story through allusions to selkies. The sea itself is neither reduced to its imagery of freedom nor to its dangerous depths. Rather, the sea is represented as an agent in its own right that has no regard for humans. Logan’s depiction of nature, in particularly the sea, is multi-layered. By interweaving selkie folklore with environmental concerns and individual self-discovery, littoral spaces are more-than-human, diluting anthropocentric views of the ocean by poetically painting its dangerous and untamed space as indifferent to human action.