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 centre debates about reproductive healthcare around the viability line, the fantasised moment when any foetus 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 centres the embodied realities that are often mystified in the sentimentalising of motherhood, a process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labour 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.