Becoming Mutant

Reimagining human-nature relationships in the climate change era conjures mutants, creatures from the deep that help surface modes of becoming for a drenched world of rising tides, plastic oceans, and soaked cities. Re-imaging deep, embodied relations with watery ecologies, then, also involves attention to speculative climate fictions (cli-fi) and the potential worlds they help fathom. Cli-fi renderings of climate disaster provide critical insight into possible alternative arrangements of power, meaning, and ontological status. As such, this article explores the depths of the 1995 cli-fi film Waterworld, offering an ecocritical analysis of how the film’s mutant imaginary might help us fathom how to flourish amid floods and contest the very human forces/forms that shape them. In Waterworld, the authors find queer elemental bodies collaborating with ecology and embracing their inherent impurities. This classic cli-fi film provides an important touchstone for a future in which dominant petro-masculine approaches to pelagic place are found to be drowned, dead ends. This article amplifies how mutant corporeal formations and elemental agencies in Waterworld swirl together to submerge systems of power and privilege and drench binaries. Ultimately, Waterworld’s queer ecology helps morph what and how it means to live in a flooded future as speculative seascapes seep into everyday contemporary climate life.