Presentation short abstract

Contemporary Scottish storytellers are engaged in an explicitly transgressive exercise in critical disorientation, reimagining shared cultural histories and rewriting centuries-old folktales to center modern sociopolitical concerns related to power, identity, injustice, and more-than-human selfhood.

Presentation long abstract

For half a millennium, the selkie — a supernatural being, part-seal and part-human — has held totemic status within Scottish storytelling communities. As a creature that explicitly challenges and transgresses culturally-reinforced binaries — human/animal, land/sea, surfaces/depths, living/dead — the folkloric selkie is often subjected to acts of extreme violence, degradation, imprisonment, and killing at the hands of human characters.

Oral storytelling represents a particularly adaptive form of cultural expression, with audiences and storytellers engaged in rituals of narrative co-creation, applying new textures, values, and morals to the tales in real time (Zipes 1997). In recent years, young Scottish storytellers have drawn on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) theories of queer phenomenology as an (often explicitly) transgressive exercise in critical dis/orientation (Turnbull and Platt 2022), reimagining shared cultural histories and rewriting centuries-old folktales to center modern sociopolitical concerns related to power, identity, injustice, and more-than-human biopolitics. This presentation explores these recent structural, tonal, and narrative evolutions within Scottish storytelling communities, examining:

(i) The contemporary queering of selkie tales — reframing rigid binaries into watery, relational spectrums, embracing “the quivering tension of the in-between” (Neimanis 2012).

(ii) The transition from liminality to marginality — how threshold-crossing bodies, geographies, and identities are subjected to objectification, erasure, and carnivalization (Alaimo 2008; Shields 2013).

(iii) The grey seal as pest, poltergeist, and posterchild — how the seal’s historically transgressive relationship with human settlements has resulted in centuries of cultural fascination and distrust, including wide-scale culls and ongoing debates over the “killability” of seals (Lambert 2002; Haraway 2008).