A queer ecology of the sea: reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves *

Abstract

This essay goes beyond previous criticism of imperialism and gender roles in The Waves to argue for the ecological potential of the novel’s experimental aesthetics. While the novel mourns the lonely, limited lives that empire and patriarchy produce, it counters those losses by offering a mode of being and relating that takes its cue from the sea. More than merely representing the seas, The Waves thematizes and self-consciously performs its writing and reading practices to create a world of sensuous, non-hierarchical relationality. The Waves both produces and dissolves empire by naming its violence and imagining its undoing.