Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature

Abstract

This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into another layer of ‘force field of differentiation’ (Alaimo, Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi, Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) works as praxis and provocations for thinkings and doings.