This Watery Place

What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two or more while listening to lawyers, judges, pundits, and politicians center debates about reproductive healthcare around the viability line, the fantasized moment when any fetus could be extracted from the uterus and survive? What form of subjectivity is produced by the recurrent practice of scrolling through photographs of children crushed in war while a baby sleeps beside you, indistinguishable from the dead children in expression and bodily habit?

This Watery Place departs from author Emma Heaney’s experiences to address these questions, which are situated between the particular historical moment of her pregnancies, of any individual pregnancy, and the transhistorical continuities of the sensations, emotions, socialities, and conceptual provocations that have long accompanied gestation. The book centers the embodied realities that are often mystified in the sentimentalizing of motherhood, a process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labor of gestation and care, and, indeed of children. As a result, gestation is revealed as a process against cisness, wage work, and the death cult of war.