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Emma Heaney, "This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation" (Pluto Press UK, 2025)
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The New Books Network.
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Welcome to New Books Network My name is Clayton Gerard and my pronouns are he, him. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Emma Haney, author of the new book this Watery Four Essays on Gestation. This Watery Place addresses political, theoretical and social questions which are situated between the particular historical moment of author Emma Haney's pregnancies of any individual pregnancy and the trans historical 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. So thank you so much for being here with me today, Dr. Haynie. This is such an important and timely book that provokes necessary questions for us to grapple with in this moment of violence and suffering. And so, to get started before we dive into the actual book, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners and sharing a little bit about who you are. Sure.
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B
Thanks so much for arranging this conversation, Clayton. I really appreciate your work on this. I'm a scholar of comparative literature of the long 20th century, trans studies, and Marxist feminism. I've written a book, published a book called the New Woman about the installation of the medical model of trans femininity in literature and philosophy across the 20th century. And I edited a collection of recent works in trans studies called Feminism Against Cisness. I teach courses in these areas in an MA program. I'm engaged in anti colonial, queer and trans feminisms through public writing and political and community work. And I'm interested in a broad range of writing practices, the writing of letters to my friends, writing fiction and writing essays stemming from these interests. And I'm also a parent and a family member and a community member in my, you know, where I live in Queens, So that's me.
- [03:47]
E
Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for introducing yourself and just being here for this conversation. I introduced it as like, such an important book in this moment of violence and suffering and turmoil. But it's also a very beautiful book with very, like, lively provocations for us to reconsider what it means to be living in this moment. So I'd love, if you wouldn't mind, to just dive into this book by starting with how it came about for you.
- [04:15]
B
Sure. I love telling this story. So the line of thought that culminated in the book started in around 2019, when I began pursuing pregnancy and eventually moved to fertility treatment and IVF and a medical protocol with doctors and so on. So this process, fertility treatment, medicalized reproduction, involves a lot of focus on reproductive organs and structures. So just like looking at your ovaries and uterus on sonogram screens and having doctors describe them and evaluate their functioning. So, for instance, like, one of these moments was the fertility doctor I was working with pointed to a sonogram image of my ovary and said, right there is the scar that was left last month when you ovulated an egg. And for periods of time, you get daily blood tests that track the levels of various hormones, estrogen, progesterone, et cetera. You read daily reports, along with the nurse you're working with, of those of those blood tests. And so all of this sort of attention to the biological and chemical world of my body provoked two profound conceptual reorderings for me, or clarifications. First, the realization that so much of what is happening in your body all the time is not available to you. You don't know about, you know, is not available to your sense of self. And this helped me to think about the way that the sort of daily sense of the body is disconnected from these operations of organs and tissues. And second, as I was more and more exposed to the inside of my body and encouraged to think about my body in these quantified terms as test results and levels and the fact that bodies are objects became more and more meaningful to me. And this wasn't a sort of degrading realization. You know, there's a long tradition of talking about the objectification of women's bodies as mutually exclusive with self respect or the need to, like, push back against objectification. But to me, to think about my body as an object that I could make decisions about, that I could modify. This really sustained me through the grueling aspects of this process. And by grueling, I mean both, you know, the at times daily transvaginal ultrasounds that I had, but also the hours spent waiting on hold to beg insurance companies to pay for treatment and so on. So this idea that the body is an object that you can manipulate was very important to me and very impressive and instructive to me. So I was having these thoughts and I posted something on social media about how I wanted to write about how medical conception, medicalized conception, informed my understanding of the false ideology of cisness. And a bunch of people replied with sweet encouragement. But I really wrote it because the Marxist scholar and writer Mackenzie Work offered to read and respond to the draft. And she did, and it was very helpful. And then that was why I wrote it. And then it was published because the black studies and literature scholar Autumn Womack listened to me talking about these ideas at a friend's birthday and took the essay to her editor at Asterisk Journal. So I mention this because, you know, women taking my thoughts seriously is how everything I've done has ever happened. And so I want to, you know, make that public and encourage us all to be doing that for each other all the time. So the essay is called Is a Cervix My Year in the Stirrups, meaning the stirrups on a medical bed used to position the body to do a pelvic exam. And the whole essay and the title are a provocation to terfs who were, at the time I was writing, publishing a lot of pieces that rolled their eyes at terms like menstruators and people with cervixes saying, you know, I'm not a person with a cervix, I'm a woman. And it was just the kind of disaggregation of terms that these terms made available. Menstruator, people with cervix, et cetera, gestators, et cetera. It was just this disaggregation that was so clarifying and useful to me in understanding my experience of. Of medicalized conception. And so TERFs were so busy claiming that the capacity for pregnancy was the basis of a social category, of the social category women, and affirming this link was the content of their politics. So the essay was a way of saying, if you want to talk about cervixes, if these structures are so supremely meaningful, so politically meaningful, then say anything about them, about cervixes, which they can't and don't. And I can and did. So that was the motivation and the sort of conceptual work and the material conditions for the writing of that and publication of that essay. And then my editor at Pluto Press, with whom I wrote the book, David Shulman, gave me a contract based on that essay.
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E
Nice. Thank you so much for sharing that story. And I love how you really highlight the community effort that it took to write this book and how that in itself reflects a lot of the topics and provocations that you include in your writing. So to get a little bit more into the details of the book, a central framework, as we can tell from the subtitle of the book, is gestation. So would you mind telling us a bit about what gestation is, how you're working with it as both a concept and an experience, and how you're thinking about gestational politics across these essays and the different, like, political and conceptual provocations that gestation provides. Sure.
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B
Thanks. So the book defines gestation as the physical making of a person. And there's a phase of this process that takes place in a uterus, for mammals at least. And then there's a longer phase that takes place as the lifelong accretion of care into the physical stuff of the body. So by this I mean the fact that a the physical stuff of the body is produced through the procuring and arrangement of calories into serving of calories into edible food, the maintenance of a clean, warm, comfortable place to live and rest, the production of neural pathways through studying together, beginning with the process of reading together. These are all the ways that the work of tending makes the physical stuff of the body after the period of uterine gestation ends at birth. So this is the more. The broader, more capacious conceptual parsing of gestation that I work with in the book. And 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. So just to sort of map what that means, this gradual disarticulation, a neonate is touching your body for most of the day when you're caring for them, right. Physically, There's a substantial chemical feedback between the body of a neonate and that of a caretaker. What Sophie Lewis theorizes, using the concept of chimerism, this idea that you're chemically influencing each other's, you know, hormonal composition, your nervous system, the nervous system of the caretaker, is minutely calibrated to respond to the every need of the neonate. And your body is remade in your practice of care for them. And this is the level of picking them up and the sort of gestures that are representative of this time remake your sort of muscular structures and so on. So in this sense, there's a mutual gestationality that characterizes both uterine gestation and this longer project of gestational care. So this relation, for me, vexed the idea of separateness and individuality. So I theorize claims made about separateness of the. The separateness of the fetus in abortion legislation in Essay 1, based on this thinking, right? The idea that all of this emphasis on when a fetus could be feasibly extracted from a uterus and, you know, allowed to thrive in the world is a sort of libel against the fact that the body of a. Of a fetus is inseparable from the body of a gestator, and that then even after birth, the body of a neonate and the body of a gestator or the body of a caretaker, I should say, are connected, right? That they're mutually constitutive and not separate. So that's the sort of way that gestationality shows up in essay one, and then in the second essay, which is an elaboration of the essay that I just discussed as the origin of the book develops the idea of body modification that I was talking about, gestation in this essay is mostly about how the experiences of uterine gestation, labor and birth, recovery from these experiences underline the constant change that occurs to the structures and chemicals that supposedly provide a fixed ground for sex assignment. And gestation and postpartum are only sort of, you know, part of this larger changeability, like one's chemical and hormonal profile changes every month, regardless of whether you're, you know, injecting hormones or pregnant or in postpartum your body changes all the time. But gestation and postpartum are periods of time when this change is very marked and very obvious and where you're more attentive to it because you're thinking, you know, you're perhaps observing your body more minutely. So that's the way that gestation is sort of approached as a question of embodiment and experience of embodiment. The third essay is the Hydraulics of Provision uses descriptions of breastfeeding to craft a theory of provision against a theory of labor. So the activities and the literal biological mechanisms that produce breastfeeding, which are sort of very minutely described, provides a way of thinking about a social relation based on mutuality and mutual care that provides a paradigm for thinking about the activities of the postpartum period, which in turn, so against a sort of idea of you're serving the child by breastfeeding them, it talks about how the reality of breastfeeding is much more mutual and much more and just different than a paradigm of one person provides and the other consumes. And this grounds a theory of a way of thinking about social activity not as about, as about production and consumption, but about mutual provision. So in that essay, gestation is productive of theoretical concepts that you know are important and meaningful far beyond the sort of particulars of gestation and postpartum. And then the fourth essay is about how the shock of experiencing that reordering of social activity and the sharing among people who've experienced that reordering, who've, you know, come into the project of caring for young children, how comparing those experiences is productive of a larger political galvanizing and understanding that is against death, against war, against genocide, against all of the large scale priorities of societies that are organized by capital accumulation and war.
- [16:46]
E
Yeah, thank you for that overview. It's so helpful to just hear you speak about it a bit systematically and develop this idea and the provocations that gestation provides, like I said, as both a concept and an experience. And I'd like to start going through the book, starting with the preface. And you mentioned in the preface an urgency to record your thoughts, feelings and understandings in the postpartum period that most accounts of pregnancy don't actually speak to the profound embodied experiences taking place through gestation. You say the gestational sensorium, the feeling and gestures proper to the work of keeping a child alive and well, both in utero and in mundo, offers a total antagonism against the endless child killing state of war. End quote. Can you speak to what is different about this account, because it was written in this postpartum period and details the lived experiences of gestation as you encountered them. Sure.
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B
So the postpartum window is unlike any other. Amboyer called it a profound derangement of the senses that you undergo. And this is a result of day and night no longer being distinct. Right. You're waking up every two hours to feed a newborn. Many people are activated by extreme anxieties during this time. I was discussing this period with a friend the other day, and she said right after Em. Her baby was born, she always wanted to be like this. And she made a gesture like she was tenting her body over the baby. And that was something. That exact gesture, that exact impulse to make that gesture, to use your body to tent the child, is something that I write about in the book. I became very activated by the notion that an object would fall on the baby and crush the baby. And this was, you know, something people often have, like, invasive thoughts, like repetition of, the baby will be dropped, the baby will be dropped, or the baby will be crushed or suffocated or whatever your particular horror story is. Many people cry all the time right after giving birth. And I write about that, about the sort of. How peculiar it was to be crying all the time. Also, the way your body is healing is very specific. There's a lot of pain, there's a lot of weeping of liquids out of many parts of your body, and there's a sort of cessation of that particularity over time. Your baby sleeps for longer periods, your body heals. But for many years, often endocrinologically and physiologically, you. You know, especially if you breastfeed, there is a maintenance of this. Of a somewhat different physical state of affairs. And so, you know, you might experience that whole period as a cessation of logic or as a time in which you literally can't think or. Or in which reason departs from your. From your faculties for a period of time. But it's also a very ins. That the vulnerability and the recognition of vulnerability, which really stems from the exposure to the tininess to the. To the breakability of a tiny body is also very instructive. I found. And my. My friends who I spoke with about this found because, of course, the child is very vulnerable. And your sense of that is good sense. Right. And the sort of way that that experience can open up to a recognition of fragility, of life more broadly can be instructive, not just a sort of, you know, thing to be recovered from and then forgotten and so I'll say that I wrote the book over the period of two years after my second child was born. And in the morning hours before my kids woke up from 4:00am to 7:00am and you know, from. So I gestated the first baby, had the first baby, breastfed the first baby, then immediately gestated the second baby, had the first baby and breastfed the second baby. So the period I was writing was the sort of end of that long four year period in which my body was involved in the acts of gestation and provision. And then I sent the manuscript in and I got the proofs back and I was reading the proofs and in the interim between when I finished it and when I received the proofs, I weaned my second baby and was involved in. In a period where a measure of separation that marked the end of the postpartum period occurred. And I couldn't imagine writing that book, even though it was only six months previous, I couldn't imagine writing that book in my new state of bodily and relational affairs after a very short window. And so something about the experiential quality of that care, of that proximity, of that process was, you know, when the baby became a toddler was over. And so I felt that, you know, that I felt when I was writing it that there was an urgency and a sort of experiential quality that was forming how I was thinking about things. And then that was confirmed when it felt like a text that was at a distance from me even a very short time after my baby got more. Right, more independent. And I'll say that when I say that I couldn't find an account that resonated for me, which is why I wrote the book, because I didn't see it. I didn't have one that I resonated with. The reason why is because the conditions of labor for new parents are very difficult and it's very difficult to find the time to write a book. And so I just want to say that also.
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Yeah, I appreciate you so much speaking to that and it like even though I've obviously never had this experience, but like I've been really interested for example in like disability and mat studies because they take a similar kind of approach that some of these bodily and mental experiences and emotional experiences that we have that are often, you know, portrayed as just a aberration of like your normal functioning can be fruitful sites of engagement and like a really true contending with the materials and politics and conditions around us. And that's something that I've such appreciated from this book is you really show how generative and provocative these experiences can be and not to just discount it as like, oh, you're just like your body's going through so many changes during this time. But there may be some actual like insights and instructive experiences that can be gained from this. And I want to continue along with this thread to talk about another aspect of your preface. So you say, quote Even as it washed over me, I felt that 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. This state is the refusal of the reality that your constant vigilance can't save all the children. End quote. I think the Context of this statement in your discussion around accessibility of baby formula is such a strong indictment of our current political realities and what it means to confront, you know, the challenge of living and, you know, caring for life in this moment. Can you share a bit more about the connections you're making here between this political feeling of postpartum anxiety and gestational sensorium and the actual material politics we have to navigate?
- [27:36]
B
So the point about baby formula that you mentioned here is that in the book I tell the story about the first time that I left the house after my first baby was born and I was in this state of reality. Concern over difficulties that we were having, establishing a breastfeeding routine that could keep her weight where it needed to be. And I, and I, so I left the house and I walked to the, to the pharmacy to get diapers and I went into the, the baby aisle, which I'd never really been in before. And there were the, and this was in 2021. All of the baby formula in the aisle were fitted with anti theft devices and they were also very expensive. The tubs of formula were between, you know, were around 30 to $40 a tub, well mid 20s to mid 30s. And I, I was so devastated by this, by this emblem of the, you know, of the priorities of the society we live in. This idea that, and this was before everything in pharmacies was, was put under lock and key. This was one of the first substances that was, that were anti theft devices were, were installed, at least in my Rite Aid. And so the, the provocation there, or the exact shape of the political feeling wasn't something that sort of naturally sprung from a hormonal reorganization of my body. What the political feeling was provoked by the fact that I'd spent seven days minutely attuned to how difficult it is to help a neonate thrive, how vulnerable to dehydration, to hunger, to harm a neonate is. And to see a sort of indication of the broader ways in which that fact is not central to the social in this country was devastating to me. I learned something new about what's required to capacitate early life. And that knowledge made me see how that is not a priority, that there's no expression on, or there is, but there is no focus on the level of social on that question. And this was underlined for me when later there was a widespread contamination of baby formula across the country by a bacteria that had been introduced at a, a factory in Michigan and you couldn't buy baby formula. And then also I was going back to work. And I, you know, I had my own private office at the university where I worked, so I was able to pump and save milk. And so I didn't need to rely on formula. But many, many people, most people do need to rely on formula for. And, you know, just the fact that, that children can't consume anything else for the first six months of life, all of these basic facts that are immediately not only known to you, but central to your days, central to your understanding, infused the, the, the lack of attention. You know, the, the baby formula shortage. People were saying, oh, this, you know, we should do something about this. But nothing was done about it. I mean, you would go from place to place and, and the formula was not on the shelves. And what, what were people supposed to do, right, who had to rely on it because they, to wage work and their kids were in care. I wanted to demystify the idea of motherhood generally as necessarily sort of biologically productive, of a new kind of sympathy, a new kind of expansiveness to the actual political content of my experience. And, you know, and I was talking to all of my friends who were also managing childcare, who are also managing going back to work, who are also, you know, pumping at work, who are fighting for space at work to pump. All of these real material realities to the sustenance of neonates were important political questions that were revealed not as a result of some biological capacity, but as a result of the recognition of the material conditions of the care of the very young for me and for my friends. So that's what that I was thinking about there.
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E
Yeah, thank you so much for talking through that. I, it's really interesting because I had never really come to terms with the fact that infants up to 6 months can't subsist without like, breastfeeding or baby formula.
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B
Isn't that funny that, that, that had never been introduced. And I, can I say up and until I was feeding a child, I did not know that. It is a very strange reality. And I just want to say one more thing about that, which is, as we're recording, we're looking at SNAP benefits being cut off at 48 hours across the country because of the government shutdown. And people all over are scrambling to prepare for that, who do mutual aid stuff, who are involved with food pantries through religious organizations. All of this. And this is the same thing to me, right? It's the, 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. Again, there are some, you know, members of Congress, et cetera, who are hand wringing about or not, who are appropriately concerned about that's a snap being cut off. But it's not considered a political liability that would motivate coordinated, immediate extreme action. So the inattention of our social structure to life is what I was thinking about, right?
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E
For sure. Yeah. I was thinking that same thing because in this moment, you know, it is the government shutdown, but at the same time we've had months of funding cuts to like local WIC offices like women, infant and child, you know. Yeah, supplements. And like also just the ways that it's been weaponized in war and genocide and like the idea that something like formula that, that a baby, only a baby uses and has to have to survive can be weaponized in such a way is just wild to think about. And it really does provide a lot of traction to the gestational politics you're pushing us to think about. And I want to follow through with this thinking about the first essay and kind of how you talked about like the sentimental or like enchantment nature surrounding motherhood or like the, you know, illusion of motherhood as just like a sentimental and enchanted time. Instead of actually dealing with the material politics like your first essay, Fetal separateness takes to task these quote unquote invented moments of quickening and viability that have framed American reproductive politics. Yet in your account, quote, the undecidability between the self and the other is the lesson of gestation. So how can we, or how can heeding the lessons of gestation as an embodied experience change the frame through which we engage with reproductive politics in a more expansive and life supporting way.
- [36:05]
B
Yeah, and I think there's, you know, there are, there are long traditions of people doing this, of people, you know, working to get sort of basic attention to social reproduction in state apparatuses. That's why we have wic, you know, that's why we have, you know, state level health care coverage for children in many states and also in, you know, in non governmental sector and I don't NGOs but also like just the ways that all the time in every community there are people helping each other be fed, helping each other endure the, the difficulties and the changes in life that are necessary when one is pregnant. Helping with the care of the very young in and beyond biological family units like this is what is actually preventing the broad disinterest and increasing divestment of the state from the work of life, preventing it from being as ruinous as it might be. And so I think that building on that, on those practices and advocating for those practices is the way that this gestational politics proceeds. I mean, this chapter is mostly about an indictment of legal and legislative imaginary that thinks about gestation as this, like, legal question of the rights of two individuals battling each other and thus installs the gestator and the fetus as separate entities at odds with each other, one who wants freedom, the other who wants life. And sort of adjudicating where, you know, I mean, this is literally the legal framework adjudicating the balance of interest of the state in the potential life of the fetus versus the liberty rights of the gestator. And many people have to play on that field. Many people have tried to plan that field to maintain access to abortion care, even as that care was whittled away for decades and then made very precarious through the Dobbs decision. And so no shade or, or sort of disrespect meant to people who have to make arguments in those terms, either in the courtroom or, you know, in the legislative context or in the, in the advocacy context. But what the chapter or the essay asks us to consider is that there are more and better ways of thinking that can operate unconstrained by the, by those concerns that I've just mentioned. And, and the way of thinking that it proposes is, you know, looking at all of the social activities that support the wellness and feeding and leisure and development of various kinds of all people as the center of political activity. And so this looks like engaging in mutual aid activities and in the, you know, the sustenance of labor organizing that can make workers lives more in their control, such that they can choose to spend time supporting a friend, supporting a child, supporting an elder. But to view all of these activities through the lens of life making and life affirming and to not be and not to cede the ground of those goals and those principles to politics who sentimentalizes them and evacuates them of meaning by associating them with the wealthy and the white and the straight. And so, yeah, just thinking, for instance, about how Elon Musk or Russ Douthit or Amy Coney Barrett talk about the number of children that they have and how this sort of claim underrides their sense that they are the ones who care about children, that they are the ones who care about connection, that they're the ones that care about sustenance, of collectivity, while the policies that they champion and enact make those things ever more difficult for almost everyone, right? For the way that attainment of economic stability such that having children seems, or having more than one child or whatever seems possible is less and less possible for almost everyone. The way in which our days are squeezed by high rents and wages and commensurate with with the sustenance of daily life. Not ceding the ground of thinking in these terms to people who are working against the realization of collective life is really important, I think.
- [41:44]
E
Yeah, for sure. And I want to go on to speak about your second essay which is titled Is the Cervix Cysts in reference to the earlier article that you mention as inspiring this book. In this essay you discuss some of the medical and non medical medical body modifications entailed in pregnancy and physical gestation gestation as commonly accepted forms of gender affirming care. You say, 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. So how has this impacted your understanding of the body as a psychology of choice and what cisness is actually enacting in this process?
- [42:32]
B
Yeah, so again, you know, prior to these experiences that I that form the observations of the book, of course I knew that CIS people can get prescriptions for hormones to, you know, counteract the possibility of testicular cancers or prostate cancers return to deal with the unwanted effects of menopause, to pause puberty that a clinician or a parent or a child themselves feels has come too early. You know, there are many, many reasons that CIS people are allowed to modify their bodies. But the centrality of such sexed body modifications to the process of medicalized concept pregnancy, birth and postpartum really emphasized this to me. In part because it was happening to me and in part because how uniform it was across the experience. Right? So I took hormones, injected hormones into my body every day in order to attain pregnancy. And then I took hormone pills in order to maintain the pregnancy for part of it. And then as I write about in, as in the opening anecdote to this chapter, after, you know, as a result of both births I had a perineal tear which required surgical, you know, reconstruction. And so from the process of conception and medicalized conception through these processes, I thought more and more about the idea that the body is available for elected modifications. And this clarified for me how profoundly damaging terf claims about the common sense relation between a sort of static female body and a universal female identity are. Right? Because an ovary is not a static fact with a universal meaning, right? It's an organ that changes and that can, you know, exist in a body for one's whole life without really affecting how one thinks about their body. Right. So the experience helped me to think about these parts of my body not as sort of touchstones of identity, but as tools that were at my disposal whose functioning I could control to some extent that I could manipulate. And this made me think more about this claim that TERFs make that feminizing experiences sort of emerge from these bodily structures in some universal, uniform way. And this. So I was having these thoughts already. And almost from the beginning, I was in conversation with friends who. And discussing these experiences, including friends who. Whose. My relationship with them was very much strengthened by the. The conversations that I'm about to describe. So I was in conversation with trans femmes who were using the same hormones that using and also having vaginaplasty and, you know, surgical procedures that involved a lot of evaluation of their bodies and imaging and discussion and potential outcomes and discussion of relation between hormonal changes and physiological changes. And there were a lot of CIS women who'd had various hormonal and surgical treatments, as well as a lot of support from people who'd done IVF and had pregnancies and births, you know, who are guiding me through this whole process, which, again, was.
- [46:24]
E
Was.
- [46:25]
B
Was totally foreign to me, like, was totally. As I'm sure it is to almost everybody who goes through it. I didn't know what. What this was or how to do it. And. But people did and they told me and it really helped. And then there was. There were also masks and trans men in my world who were doing pregnancy stuff. And what I needed in order to understand and ex. And really experience my pregnancies was the aggregate of these kinds of support, both the giving and the getting of this kind of. Of sharing of experiences. And there was a commonality here, not because we were all having the same procedures or had the same organs or, you know, not because there was uniformity, but because there was over. There were overlapping elements that were then, like, connected and productive of solidarity. And so these. So this experience of all of the different ways that. That these experiences were connecting to other people's and could be clarified in discussion with them renewed my gratitude that people had crafted these words like menstruator and gestator that were the site of so much aggression and mirth from TERFs. It was really was this disaggregation that there are different bodily experiences that very rarely overlap perfectly but are rather points of contact between different people, even if people have the same organs and roughly the same chemical profiles. People experience these things differently. So it's not a question of uniformity. It's a question of curiosity and solidarity and support. And also another thing that really was impressive to me through this process was just the fact of being medicalized. And, and these were medicalizations that I greatly wanted and felt so lucky that my union negotiated health insurance covered and allowed. So it's not medicalized when it's sort of like I'm being medicalized against my will. But it was, you know, a fact of putting on a paper apron like every day. Right. A fact of having ultrasounds, a fact of getting blood drawn in large amounts every day. Right. These, the sort of prosaic quality of medicalization reflected the prosaic quality of these procedures. You know, like people are. We're invited to think that ivf, for instance, the implantation of an embryo into a uterus is some sort of big conceptual ethical issue, or that trans surgeries are a profound meditation on the difference between men and women or whatever. Right. But really they're just a set of medical protocols and medical skills that have been developed over time and that should be available to people if they want them and need them and that don't, you know, that don't require people to theorize them as abstractions. Right. The material life of this medical care reinforced this notion of the necessity of making medical services available and not gatekept and the ease with which, even though there were difficulties, the ease with which I was given things that are being withheld from my trans sisters and siblings was productive of a great deal of anger in me. So when I was get, when I was having the embryo transfer that resulted in my first child's birth, the texts who were attending me were talking about having cheeseburgers for lunch and that it was, I loved that so much. The idea that this was just something that they could do, something they could help me with that was part of their life, it wasn't a big profound thing for them, was very meaningful to me. And so I, yeah, I think that the sort of biggest takeaway from that chapter is the necessity of making public how available and how ungate kept many sex modifications are for people and the political insistence that that should be available for all at a time when, as you know, there is legislation proliferating around the country that is making that gatekeeping even more stringent and you know, denying at this point, trans related pediatric healthcare for kids, often with carve outs for intersex kids who can have hormonal and surgical procedures done against their will in early childhood, in the same legislation that's making the desired and elected modifications of puberty blockers impossible for kids. So I wanted to to intervene in that, to clarify that contemporary reality in which sex modification is not, well, first of all, not something that is only pursued by trans people, and something that is not often gatekept for CIS people.
- [52:02]
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- [53:20]
E
Yeah, thank you so much for speaking to that. It's so refreshing to have that kind of re centering and reframing that you're talking about because these are on the one hand prosaic medical practices that are just part of people's everyday and administering or processing and such. But then on the other hand, it becomes such a site of intense and controversial political, identitarian and like ethical issues that mainly serve the powers that be. But I do want to talk a little bit more about the material conditions in politics that you're drawing on in your third essay, the Hydraulics of Provision. In this essay you conceptualize breastfeeding as modeling how life giving activities might be rescued from the labor relation. Can you talk about how breastfeeding as an activity through which, quote, care of the self becomes care of the other, end quote can reframe questions of of supply and demand and extraction and alienation. And what do you make of the fact that the economic world is hostile to these necessities of provision?
- [54:33]
B
Yeah, so the argument in this chapter is that breastfeeding, you know, often there are all these sort of metaphors in popular sort of leftist discussion, but also in Marx, in Capital, about the sort of. About sucking and about sucking being the sort of paradigm for depletion for, you know, the way that capital vampires, the lifeblood of labor, et cetera. And so I wanted to perform a sort of reorientation to that mechanics through the reality of breastfeeding, which is that, you know, if a person who, a person who's lactating doesn't consume enough calories, doesn't sleep enough, they will stop lactating, you know, and if there isn't a sort of mutual project of breastfeeding between a child and a lactator, that also just won't work. There has to be collaboration. The stimulus of sucking also produces on the chemical level, in terms of the hormonal process through which milk is produced and then, and then released from the apparatus of the breast. So there has to be care of the producer of the factory, as I say, and also mutuality between the two people involved in this, in, in lactation. And so this for me was just a example of a larger principle of the activities that go into sustaining neonatal and early childhood life, which again, everybody, many people listening to this will probably say, I feel depleted, I feel bled out by the process of childcare. I do not identify with what you're saying about mutuality and, and care for the self. Like that would be profoundly alienating, I think, to many people who do this work. But what I want, and of course I, I know what they mean and I experience these things myself. But thinking about 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, right? Our world, our society is organized around squeezing the time that you have to care for yourself and for each other into morning before 8am, night after 6am and the weekend, right? And I mean, even for people who, like myself, have relatively, have relatively extremely easy conditions of labor. As a university professor, you know, so I was only with my first child, I was only out of work for three weeks before I went back to teaching. And I want to remember the possibility of those weeks. And then I was for a whole semester with my second one. So I want to remember how, how even in the difficulty of. And there was some difficulty, although much less than after I went to work when there was profound difficulty. But in those weeks, I wanted to notice the difference in the feeling of arduousness, of it being consuming of this work, meaning the. The stuff that you do to keep a newborn alive. It felt arduous, it felt consuming. It felt newly saturative of my entire life. But it didn't feel alienated. It didn't feel like, why am I even doing this? To what end am I performing this labor? It felt very immediate and very comprehensible as a why. And so. So I want to use these experiences, the biological facts about breastfeeding and the qualities of this kind of care, to have a sort of aspiration horizon for what social activity could be and to advocate for the importance of social reproduction as a site and an object of politics. Something to be protected, something to be fed, something to be valorized, something to be, you know, worked to be generalized. Something that can be everybody's privilege and everybody's occupation in the sense of occupying them. And that this requires a reorientation of social relations around mutuality and mutual care.
- [59:57]
E
Yeah, for sure. And I so appreciate how you really took. Took the body seriously and bodily processes and almost taking that as a model for how we can organize these activities of care and relation differently than, like, our current economic conditions are set up to, like you said, to just squeeze in the labor or, you know, the work of care into the breaks between, you know, the quote, unquote, real labor and real job, you know, and that, like, reaction, repositioning these discussions into talking about, like, what it means to live and care for life and be in a body that is living. And also caring for life is so important compared to, you know, the disjuncture with everything around us demanding our constant attention and effort and activity. And so I really appreciate, you know, thinking about this aspirational horizon that you mentioned and. And contending with what kind of remodeling would be necessary if we're actually centering life compared to centering the pursuit of capital and commodities and consumption and such. So lastly, the fourth essay discusses war. And this is a very intense subject, but it's so important, as we're both Americans. Our participation in the war workforce, our consumerism, our tax dollars, all of these contribute to what's become an endless perpetuation of war across the world. And so in this essay, you talk about embarking on the activity of researching all of the wars the US has engaged in throughout your lifetime. And this essay refracts your research with your own experience of parenting and caregiving during ongoing wars. And you say, quote, the gestational sensori grants me entry into the totality that is history. Can you expand here on what the politics of gestation mean for you in this context and what provocations the experience of gestation has provided for you?
- [62:10]
B
Yeah, this is sort of the most difficult observation to talk about without falling into these sentimental narratives. I mean, there's a long history of sort of suggesting that women are more peaceful or that, you know, that people associated with gestation, that that automatically leads to a more anti death political orientation to the world, which of course is not true, but. So the essay didn't start with some grand theory of the relation between the experience of gestation or the experience of neonatal care and the history of war that surrounded my life and, and provided the often hidden context for an everyday that didn't need to look squarely at that reality because it was happening far away, right in the four decades, four plus decades of my life. What this essay started with was the experience of my baby having a very common condition, bronchiolitis, which 20% of babies experience. She experienced it every month for her second year of life after she started experiencing routine viral infections which involved her bronchioli, the smallest forks of the lungs, becoming inflamed and congested, and gradually her. Her diaphragm and the muscles that surround the lungs being inadequate to pull breath into her lungs. And so this is a, you know, it was why many children used to die. It was how, you know, Marx's first baby died. So a sort of intimacy with that process, with what it looks like for a child to lose breath, to be activated and attuned to the symptoms of this, to the progression of this, to the different protocols for responding to it. This experience for me, this education for me was imbricated with the viewing of the bodies of children being dug out of crushed buildings in Gaza, of children who were starving, of children whose bodies were not able to be cared for, or who were crushed and killed. And the essay emerges from the way that looking at images, at these images created a sort of confusion, a mental confusion for me, where the face of my suffering child looked so much like the face of this suffering child. Their habits of body, their ways of moving their limbs, the expressions of their faces were so similar that I experienced profound psychological response to this, where reality seemed to be. Seemed to be confused, but in fact was perhaps clarified, where this vast, this vast population of people who had died as a result of choices made by people in power in the course of my lifetime, was more available to me than it had been previously, was more specific, was more real. And so the chapter grows out of, you know, and again, this was not an experience that I had alone in my apartment. This was an experience that I held in common with many people, both parents and non parents, people of all ages, people who were experiencing the. The newly available visuality of this era of American war, the way in which the sort of parasocial was breaking down as we knew more and more about the specific names, the specific lives of people that were experiencing genocidal violence in Gaza in relation to the people that we cared for. Right. There was a sort of, yeah, a demystification of what violence is, of what it looks like, of what it feels like, of what it feels like as an ongoing everyday experience. And not, this is different than the experience of pictures of war on the sort of visual vocabulary and the sort of descriptive vocabulary that come from newspapers or come from the nightly news. It was a much more proximate feeling, much more comparable feeling way of understanding this violence. And so many people that I know, so many people that I spoke to in so many people that are the people that I speak to on a daily basis in the last years have this proximity of the violence of war on their mind. Always as a sort of baseline. When you say how are you? The response is always. My friend says it as my bubble's okay, by which he's communicating to me that his family members are not sick, that they're, you know, that nobody's lost a job, that things are functioning in the home in a way that's supportable. But he's also communicating that both he personally and people in general are not okay. And this is just a sort of way of living that has been for many people always the case. The, the precarities and the violences have been less mystified and less submerged for many people than they have been for me. And I feel like the number of people for whom that daily experience, the daily experience of violence is more and more top of mind. And the way in which this experience attached to the vulnerability of the postpartum period, to the vulnerability of the neonatal period, to the vulnerability of children was very impressive for me and very impressive for my friends and loved ones. And so that was the force behind this final chapter.
- [69:45]
E
Yeah, thank you so much for speaking to that, especially considering such difficult topics of, you know, war and genocide and just the awfulness that's happening across the world. But I do really, I've said this a few times now, but I do appreciate the centering that you're doing on care and life and how this is embodied in the process of gestation and the concept of gestation. And your book is kind of a testament of leaning into that and questioning, like, how can we we live our lives as a way of like proliferating these caregiving practices, these caregiving and life giving embodiments and these ways in which we invest in others and invest in socialities and communities that, you know, in turn create these kinds of works as you've gestured to, you know, your community has been part of the writing of these essays, the development of these thoughts and the enactment of these politics. So I really appreciate you sharing that with, with us today and speaking to this work that you're doing in this book. And before we wrap up, I wanted to just leave a open space for you to share about anything that we haven't gotten a chance to speak about in this interview. But also, even though this book is just coming out, are there any new projects or, you know, things you're doing that you want to tell listeners about or want them to be on the lookout for? For.
- [71:18]
B
Yeah, I can say what I'm working on now, which are two projects. One is both in the sort of scholarly realm of my life. One, I'm writing a book about the literary well, that takes its occasion anyway for making a larger point from the fact that there's a common literary structure in the emergence of the gay literary canon of, of depictions that twin a gay character with a trans feminine character. And much of the sort of operation of these depictions is about the gay character trying to work out what their relation is to trans femininity, to femininity, to the existential provocations that they're seeing in their own gender difference. And so I'm using that literary trope to talk about the historical process through which gayness and transness were disarticulated from one another as conceptual, as concepts in the 20th century, and the way that that process was formed by material realities, by economics, and also by ideas about race. So that's one project I'm working on and then I'm editing a collection which draws I'm just starting to solicit essays for a collection called Provincializing Cisness, which is about all of the sort of ways that sex, gender systems, socialities have operated without reifying the idea or not based on the idea that assigned sex, that two mutually exclusive and Mutually compatible kinds of bodies provide the basis for social roles. And so that's. Yeah, these are the projects I'm working on. And I guess the one thing that I do want to say about the book that we didn't get to, that we couldn't have gotten to because it's not present in the book, is the way that. And it's sort of related to my. The relation between my scholarship and this kind of writing is the way that ideas from Marx, from Freud, from feminists like Selma James and Angela Davis, from other psychoanalytic thinkers like Winnicott, like Melanie Klein, sort of provided some of the. Would often attract my attention as, oh, what I'm talking about when I talk about this or that concept is this or that concept in one of these thinkers. And I would sort of begin to write about these things in a sort of citational practice in relation to these thinkers. But then the force of the experience would demonstrate to me that the thing I was trying to say was not exactly the thing that the theorist that I was working with was trying to say. And so I would sort of. Of return and revise trying to write directly about the. Taking the concepts from the things that I and my friends were experiencing without circuiting them through a philosophical or scholarly framework. And this is a sort of quality of the text that I think is interesting, but not apparently in the text itself, because those revisions were excisions of the things that I thought were what I was trying to say.
- [75:18]
E
Yeah, for sure. And just to, I guess, echo that and my appreciation for it. It's so refreshing to see these kinds of concepts and experiences discussed in a way that's not just caught up in the current conversations, but kind of trying to respond to the. The issues of the moment and what it means to be alive in this moment. And it may just not cleanly fall along the lines of attachment or family systems theory or those different things. And you carve out space for us to try to spread our wings a bit in trying to think about those things and enact those things. So thank you so much for this conversation for joining me and talking about this new book, listeners, if you haven't already been convinced. This Watery Place for Essays on Gestation by Emma haney, I would 10 out of 10 recommend as it's just coming out. But thank you so much for joining me and for sharing this book with the world.
- [76:21]
B
Thank you, Clayton. Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions.