Hydro Emotions and Water as a Landscape of Emotional Vulnerability

Sheeba Roshini T.

Women’s Christian College, Chennai. parkshemin30@gmail.com

Abstract

While twenty first-century posthumanism places its emphasis on technology and cyborgs, narratives in the field of blue humanities remain an under-theorised field of study. Inside the sphere of blue humanities too, the exploration often sticks to the blue medium’s capacity for trauma, labour and exploitation or climate crisis. Scholars of this field often overlook, how this materiality can intervene in the embodiment of human experiences. Mari Selvaraj, in his film, Bison Kaalamaadan, illustrates characters whose affective emotions are oriented around water and blue landscapes, making them a posthuman or more-than-human entity. Drawing on the concept of hydrofeminism by Astrid Nemanis, the analysis of how Kittan’s, the protagonist, silences become an affective void filled by the ebb and flow of water is studied. Following Brian Mussumi and Rosi Braidotti, the psyche of Kittan and other characters are understood in association with their relation to water. In the film, water is not merely a background or a representation of the Anthropocene emotions, but rather a shaper of Kittan’s subjectivity. The empirical focus here becomes analysing the blue medium as an affective element and the blue spaces as inducing subjectivity and emotions rather than a static presence in the background. This diverts blue medium narratives from being epistemological and containable to an artistic narrative of intimately affective, invasive and necessary. This makes us understand how the nonhuman world constantly shapes humans’ subjectivities. 

Keywords: Affective blue mediums, Emotional landscapes, Subjectivity, Narratives, Trans-corporeality.