This Watery Place

‘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’

‘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. This is a work of total antagonism against the grim proposition that the cruelty of the present is the only possible world’

‘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 paragraph. But I didn’t stop, because the desire to know what new prismatic formulation would kaleidoscope into shape, pushed me on. If you have wondered whether a genuinely dialectical auto-theoretical project is possible, it is. Although maybe only Emma Heaney can write it’

Emma Heaney is the author of The New Woman, the forthcoming The Ghost Cousins, and the editor of the collection Feminism Against Cisness.