Fishy Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of De/Objectifying Fish

This article discusses how fish are imagined in and beyond Western popular culture. Activists and scholars with an interest in marine conservation have argued that it is difficult to mobilise for fish welfare due to their alleged lack of charisma and sentience. Expanding these existing studies on fish ethics, this article argues that in order to understand why few people seem to care for fish, we need to critically interrogate how fish are constructed in popular culture. Methodologically, the article develops its argument based on ethnographic fieldwork with actors who resist popular representations of fish from under water. I draw on 10 qualitative interviews with subsea activists and conservation divers, as well as 18 months of participant observation at and in the Baltic, the North Sea, and the North Atlantic, using snorkelling and scuba technologies, during which I encountered various species of fish. Based on this fieldwork, I discuss three hegemonic fish imaginaries in Western popular culture, which present fish as either décor, monsters, or biomass. I argue that what runs through all three representations is that fish are not only objectified as “lively capital”—a fate they share with other more‐than‐human animals—but rendered as lesser‐than‐animal. In consequence, popular representations of fish serve to legitimise their industrial extraction by equating fish with a wider inventory of oceanic “resources” and “raw materials” like oil, wood, or minerals. By contrast, the people I accompany in my fieldwork encounter fish in radically different ways.