New Books Network: Emma Heaney on "This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation"

Release Date: November 22, 2025
Host: Clayton Gerard (he/him)
Guest: Dr. Emma Heaney

Overview of the Episode

This episode features Dr. Emma Heaney discussing her new book, This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation (Pluto Press UK, 2025). The conversation delves into how gestation—a process often sentimentalized and mystified in societal narratives of motherhood—can be rethought as a political, social, and theoretical phenomenon. Heaney explores the embodied realities of gestation, its role in challenging dominant structures like cisnormativity and wage labor, and its significance in moments of state violence and war. Through personal experience, theoretical insight, and critical reflection, the episode unpacks how gestational experiences expose the neglected infrastructures of care that sustain life.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction & Author Background

• Emma Heaney’s Scholarship and Community Roots
  • Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, trans studies, and Marxist feminism. She’s the author of The New Woman and editor of Feminism Against Cisness (02:53).
  • Her academic and personal life is interwoven with anti-colonial, queer, and trans feminist community work in Queens, New York.
  • Quote:

    "Women taking my thoughts seriously is how everything I've done has ever happened." — Heaney (08:44)

2. Genesis of the Book

• Personal and Community-Driven Origins
  • The conceptual threads began in 2019, during fertility treatment and IVF, where intense focus on the body led to new insights about embodiment and social identities (04:14).
  • Heaney highlights the collective labor of writing, emphasizing encouragement and critical feedback from women scholars and friends.
  • The essay “Is a Cervix: My Year in the Stirrups,” originated as a provocation against TERF politics, centering bodily specifics rather than abstract essentialisms (08:44).

3. Defining Gestation: Concept and Politics

• Beyond Biology—Gestation as Ongoing Care
  • Gestation is not limited to pregnancy, but is the “physical making of a person,” both in utero and through the accretive care that follows birth (09:56).
  • Heaney theorizes a “mutual gestationality”—care of the self and care of others as deeply intertwined, challenging notions of separateness and individuality.
  • The four essays in the book explore:
    1. The inseparability of bodies in gestation (especially in abortion politics)
    2. The changeability and constructedness of bodies (against cisnormativity)
    3. Breastfeeding as a model of mutual provision, not just labor
    4. The political consequences of caregiving in a world dominated by violence and war
  • Quote:

    “The process of caring for a child is always the gradual disarticulation of their body from yours. And this is true whether you gestate that child or not.” — Heaney (09:56)

4. Writing Postpartum—Embodied Urgency

• Writing in the Postpartum Window
  • Heaney describes postpartum as “a profound derangement of the senses,” marked by physical vulnerability and intense emotional states (17:51).
  • The urgency to record fleeting embodied experiences was shaped by the knowledge that this state is temporary and difficult to revisit outside of its immediacy.
  • Structural challenges—lack of time, labor demands—mean most parents struggle to record these experiences, leaving a gap in literature (23:50).

5. Postpartum Anxiety as Political Feeling

• Material Politics of Care and Survival
  • Heaney links postpartum anxiety to a political awakening:

    “Postpartum anxiety is a political feeling. It's the refusal to contain your newfound realization that your personhood extends beyond your skin to the individual person who has occasioned this realization.” (25:34)

  • The scarcity and expense of baby formula (and broader supply issues like SNAP and WIC cuts) reveal the neglect of life-sustaining infrastructures in the US (27:36–32:39).
  • The episode connects these conditions to policy failures and the weaponization of necessities in contexts of war and austerity.
  • Memorable Quote:

    “The way in which the most sort of obvious ways that people are kept alive are not at the center of any sort of political conversation is really shocking.” — Heaney (32:54)

6. Essay One: Reproductive Politics & Fetal Separateness

• Challenging Sentimental Narratives
  • The essay critiques legal and legislative frameworks that treat gestator and fetus as adversarial, separate entities, advocating instead for politics centered on mutual aid and social reproduction (36:04–41:44).
  • Heaney insists that care work—often devalued or sentimentalized—should be reclaimed as meaningful, collective, and at the heart of political theory and action.
  • Key Point: Don’t cede the terrain of “life and care” to oppressive forces; reclaim it for genuinely collective, material politics.

7. Essay Two: Medicalization, Cisness, and Gender-Affirming Care

• Embodiment and Modification Across Cis/Trans Lines
  • Heaney experiences and discusses how hormone treatments, surgeries, and bodily modifications are unremarkably available to cis people undergoing fertility treatments but fiercely gatekept for trans people (42:32–52:01).
  • The book exposes how sexed body modifications are normalized for cis people (e.g., IVF hormones, surgical repair, menopause treatments), while politicized and restricted for trans people.
  • Quote:

    “CIS people don't need to produce a diagnostic account of their relationship with their body as a prerequisite for attaining sex-changing medical services, which is a privilege.” — Heaney (41:44)

  • She calls for solidarity, curiosity, and the democratization of bodily autonomy.

8. Essay Three: The Hydraulics of Provision

• Rethinking Labor and Mutuality
  • Examines breastfeeding not as extraction or depletion, but as mutual, co-dependent, and responsive (54:32).
  • Mutual care renders the work of provision less alienated than wage labor—its arduousness is made bearable through immediacy, meaning, and connection.
  • The chapter imagines a society organized around mutuality and social reproduction rather than extraction and accumulation (59:56).
  • Quote:

    "The necessity of mutuality allows me to see the ways that so much of what is difficult about neonatal care and childcare is difficult because our society is not organized around these things." — Heaney (54:32)

9. Essay Four: War, Vulnerability, and the Gestational Sensorium

• Gestation, History, and the Politics of Life and Death
  • Heaney describes how caring for her child through illness coincided with witnessing war’s violence on children in Gaza (62:09).
  • Through “gestational sensorium,” proximity to her own child’s vulnerability activates a recognition of global violence, clarifying the connection between personal and political histories.
  • The essay considers how experiences of care and fragility can motivate political opposition to violence, death, and the state’s abandonment of life.
  • Quote:

    “Looking at images created a mental confusion for me, where the face of my suffering child looked so much like the face of this suffering child... reality seemed to be confused, but in fact was perhaps clarified.” — Heaney (62:09)

10. Theoretical Influences and Method

• Beyond Citational Scholarship
  • Heaney discusses her evolving relationship to theory, referencing Marx, Freud, Selma James, Angela Davis, and psychoanalytic thinkers.
  • Ultimately, the force of lived experience pushed her to center direct, experiential writing over citational, theoretical frameworks—a choice that shapes the unique style and substance of the book (71:17).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Mutuality of Gestation:

  "The process of caring for a child is always the gradual disarticulation of their body from yours." (09:56)

• On Political Feeling and Vulnerability:

  “The way in which the most sort of obvious ways that people are kept alive are not at the center of any sort of political conversation is really shocking.” (32:54)

• On Medicalization and Gender:

  “CIS people don't need to produce a diagnostic account of their relationship with their body as a prerequisite for attaining sex-changing medical services, which is a privilege.” (41:44)

• On Breastfeeding and Mutuality:

  "There has to be care of the producer of the factory, as I say, and also mutuality between the two people involved in this... The actual necessity of mutuality allows me to see the ways that so much of what is difficult about neonatal care and childcare is difficult because our society is not organized around these things." (54:32)

• On Gestational Sensorium and War:

  "The gestational sensori grants me entry into the totality that is history." (62:09)

Key Timestamps and Segment Guide

• 02:53 – Emma Heaney introduces herself, outlining her academic and activist background.
• 04:14 – Origins of the book in Heaney’s own fertility treatment and reflections on embodiment.
• 09:56 – Defining gestation as both biological and social, mutual process; implications for individuality.
• 17:51 – Writing under postpartum urgency; the embodied and fleeting reality of new parenthood.
• 25:34 – Postpartum anxiety as a political feeling; reflections on formula scarcity and societal neglect of care.
• 36:04 – First essay: Legal fictions of fetal separateness and their political effects.
• 41:44 – Second essay: Pregnancy, medicalization, and the politics of gender/sex modification.
• 54:32 – Third essay: Breastfeeding, mutual care, and economic hostility to provision.
• 62:09 – Fourth essay: Gestational vulnerability, caregiving, and witnessing violence amid war.
• 71:17 – Heaney on writing, theory, and future projects.

Closing & Takeaways

Heaney’s work forcefully reimagines gestation not as a private, sentimental, or purely biological act, but as a deeply social, political, and theoretical process that uncovers the neglected conditions of care which sustain life. The episode foregrounds the urgent need to center care, solidarity, and mutual provision against the backdrop of state neglect, death-driven politics, and social hostility to dependence. Gestational politics, as articulated by Heaney, invite listeners to rethink bodies, communities, and political priorities toward the affirmation and sustenance of life.

“Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions.” — Emma Heaney (76:20)