This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation

by Emma Heaney

What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two or more while listening to lawyers, judges, pundits, and politicians center debates about reproductive healthcare around the viability line, the fantasized moment when any fetus 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 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.

160 pages, Paperback

Published November 20, 2025

About the author

Emma Heaney is an assistant professor of English at William Paterson University

Reviews

[Jordy Rosenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a work of singular genius that analyses the fetishism of families and the secret thereof in the only way possible: by bringing us to the heart of it - affectively, narratively - thus to expose there the family’s sublatable core and revolutionary proposition: love of the stranger.

[Diane Klutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation is a rigorous, unsettling, and deeply original work that refuses sentimentality in favor of embodied, political, and ethical clarity. Emma Heaney writes from lived experience while continuously pushing beyond it, situating gestation within historical continuities, material labor, and structures of power that are often rendered invisible.

What makes this book especially compelling is its insistence on holding multiple realities at once: intimacy and violence, care and abandonment, private sensation and global catastrophe. Heaney’s prose is attentive and exacting, capable of moving between affective immediacy and sharp theoretical insight without collapsing one into the other.

The essays challenge dominant narratives around motherhood and reproductive politics by centering gestation as labor one shaped by cisnormativity, wage structures, and the ongoing conditions of war. Rather than offering resolution, the book opens space for sustained thought and discomfort, which feels both intentional and necessary.

This is a significant contribution to contemporary feminist theory, critical family studies, and writing on embodiment. Readers interested in theory grounded in lived sensation will find this work both demanding and rewarding.