Swimming with the Trouble: Queer Love and Hydrofeminism in Deborah Levy's "Hot Milk" (2016)

Abstract

Deborah Levy’s salty, ruminative novel Hot Milk (2016) follows a young woman, Sofia, as she travels from England to Almería, Spain in search of a cure for her mother Rose’s many ailments. Sofia begins swimming in the Mediterranean, where she is repeatedly stung by medusas who have, she learns, grown abundant from overfishing (3). These medusas sting her “into desire” (72) and into a queer sexual awakening, acting not only as material agents but also as symbolic, rebellious creatures that recall the monstrous Gorgon of Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), which is excerpted in the novel’s epigraph. In this essay, I argue that Hot Milk looks back to a cultural and literary tradition of writing about the “sea cure,” but with a key ecological twist: what happens to the sea cure when the ocean itself is sick? Thick with medusas, polluted by gasoline spills, and flanked by dunes of cement powder (23,167), the Mediterranean acts not as a salubrious backdrop for Rose’s healing, but rather as a dynamic force that interacts with the bodies of Sofia and her lovers Ingrid and Juan as they swim in its waters and that, like the characters of the novel, is marked by its own ailments and afflictions. Considering this, I argue, expands our understanding of “sickness” or impairment as a designation and pathologization that flows across both human and nonhuman worlds in Hot Milk. In this way, the novel troubles an idealized cultural and literary trope of the restorative seaside by depicting, instead, watery communities of both human and marine life reckoning with anthropogenic harm.