Beyond Queering: "The Shape of Water"

I would like to think queering has no boundary. It is a conceptual framework set up for radical openness and inclusiveness. It attempts to resist and challenge the normative structure of traditional heterosexual coupling and kinship. While a lot of queer studies and literature focus mainly on human, the rigid boundary between human/non-human still remains. “The Shape of Water” then is here to queer our understanding of companionship by showing us a romantic story between a human and a merman.

Human/non-human romance is nothing new in literature. Popular movies like “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Avatar” are examples which transgress the norms of human-to-human romance. Maybe bestiality, despite its controversy, is more common than we thought.

I find “The Shape of Water” fairly similar to Tony Kushner’s contemporary queer play, Angels in America. They both have similar story settings which deal with gender/sexuality, politics, national identity and the Cold War. The only difference might be “The Shape of Water” focuses mainly on the queer romance between a human and a non-human instead of homosexuality. Critic Alice A. Kuzniar believes beastiality and homosexuality are similarly "queer" because they both “[reorient] companionship and kinship away from the normative strictures of heterosexual coupling and the traditional family’ (“I Married My Dog” 207). This idea becomes evident in the movie when Elisa’s bestiality is paired up with Giles’s homosexual narrative. Therefore, the theme of bestiality in the film can be seen as a deliberate rhetorical technique used to challenge our understanding of love, gender and sexuality.

While it sounds like I am legitimising bestiality, queering the non-human can help us reflect on our identity in the past and possibly in the future as well. For instance, black people were once considered as a different “species” and were strictly forbidden to date white people during the apartheid. This shows maybe the categorization of “species”, like gender/sexuality, is also socially constructed and therefore can be challenged and changed. If so, our queering process might have started long before Warner and Butler. With the advance of technology, biological engineers can ‘interbreed’ species by fusing their DNA. This soon might happen to humans as well, and queering the non-/human is just one-step-further to think critically about our identities in the possible future.

“The Shape of Water” is a paradox itself. Since water is shapeless, fluid, it can adapt to any shapes of the containers. The title implies how the audience should perceive the movie with a “queer eye” like “water”: fluid and mouldable. So let’s be water, and keep our open-mindedness in the world which is also fluid and ever-changing.