What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two while public discussion of reproductive healthcare centers around the viability line: the fantasized moment when a fetus could feasibly be extracted from a uterus? What happens to the psychology of parents who spend years scrolling through photographs of children crushed in war while babies sleep beside them, indistinguishable from the dead children in expression and bodily habit?
Emma Heaney addresses these questions in This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation (Pluto Press, 2025), situated between the particular historical moments of her pregnancies and the transhistorical continuities of sensations, emotions, socialities, and conceptual provocations that have long accompanied gestation. She focuses on the embodied realities that are mystified in the sentimentalization of motherhood, a political process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labor of gestation and care, as well as of children. As a result, gestation is revealed as a process against cisness, wage work, and the death cult of war.
Emma Heaney is the author of The New Woman, the forthcoming The Ghost Cousins, and the editor of the collection Feminism Against Cisness. She lives in Queens, New York City.
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