This talk stages an intervention in one of the most influential stories told about feminism—that of its progressive waves—such that its discursive legacy becomes reconfigured by modalities of racial capitalism. Moving past the familiar image of surface waves crashing on the shore, I consider the oblique presence of the internal wave as a renewed paradigm for narrating feminism, especially as an oceanic manifestation that has evaded the grasp of human perception. I offer a brief reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep to show how this conceptual submergence of the wave metaphor displaces frames of knowing predicated on human exceptionalism. In a gesture of speculative worldbuilding, the text narrates a different story of the feminist waves: one that arises from a gathering of Black and queer forms of being acculturated to the depths of the sea.

Yanbing Er is Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, Feminism Enchanted, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.