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About
"This book will be recognized as one of the major interventions of the decade" Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
"An astonishing achievement written with the propulsiveness of a novel and the diagnostic precision of the best historical materialist analysis" Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
"A fierce and luminous revelation" Anne Boyer, poet and author of The Undying
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, 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 a teacher and writer living in Queens, New York City, with her two children. She is the author of The New Woman and the editor of the collection Feminism Against Cisness.
"An astonishing achievement written with the propulsiveness of a novel and the diagnostic precision of the best historical materialist analysis" Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
"A fierce and luminous revelation" Anne Boyer, poet and author of The Undying
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, 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 a teacher and writer living in Queens, New York City, with her two children. She is the author of The New Woman and the editor of the collection Feminism Against Cisness.
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Reviews
"'Quite simply the articulation of communism I have been waiting for. In theorizing the profound and universal freedom immanent to the hydraulics of provision, Heaney rescues gestation from pregnancy, and sets not only feminism but also Marxism on its feet. This book will be recognized as one of the major and most vital interventions of the decade'"
Sophie Lewis, author of 'Abolish the Family'
"'A fierce and luminous revelation, This Watery Place proposes gestation as a common and necessary infrastructure of militancy. Written from the postpartum season's immense derangement of the senses, Heaney's thought carries across the rubble of the pandemic era, moving from gestation to the miracle of the newborn stranger, who, appearing everywhere, calls us to unmake and remake collective life.
Anne Boyer, poet and author of 'The Undying'
"'An astonishing achievement. This 'worker's inquiry' into the labor of gestation is written with the propulsiveness of a novel, the vulnerability of memoir, and the diagnostic precision of the best historical materialist analysis. I gasped at the brilliance of Heaney's argumentation more than once; and I often found myself wanting to stop and cry at the beauty of a particular sentence or paragrap
Jordy Rosenberg, author of 'Confessions of the Fox'