This chapter traces breath in mothers’ stories about bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic to contribute to a theorization of breath and breathing as feminist politics (Ahmed, 2010; Górska, 2018; Irigaray, 2004). Drawing on feminist new materialist thought that recognizes breath as intra-active phenomena (Barad, 2007; Górska, 2016), we configure breath as a mode reflection and attention to the material politics of living through crisis. We argue that breath is a material force that shapes lived experiences by materializing mother subjectivities that indicate inequalities around who bears responsibility for protecting children in crises. When the agency of the material world is acknowledged, smoky and virus-filled air eludes human control, leaving mothers to experience what one participant characterized as ‘mum-guilt’ over their ‘failure’ to prevent children’s exposure to the effects of smoke and COVID-19. A new materialist orientation to breath disrupts notions of human exceptionalism that scaffold notions of women having sole or primary control over the health and wellbeing of their (un)born children. Instead, women are recast as an inextricable part of a complex web of material relations where responsibility is materially distributed and not individually held. At a theoretical level at least, this conceptualization releases participants from ‘mum-guilt’ by recasting this responsibility to the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire. The book is underpinned by an interview-based project undertaken in 2020-2021 in South Eastern Australia. The research explored the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019-2020 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. It is also informed by interviews with experts on bushfire smoke and/or reproduction, including clinicians, architects and air quality scientists. Making an original contribution to social theory, the authors draw together ideas from feminist technoscience studies and queer theory about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises. They explore the diverse relations between climate crisis, kinship and reproduction; embodiment and breathing; biosensing and air quality; and Pyro-reproductive futures. The book has a distinctly Australian flavour, but is nonetheless global in its themes. The arguments apply in many ways to other climate-related disasters, such as floods and wildfires in other parts of the world.
All of the parents in our study were caring for a newborn during the bushfires and/or the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises threw up intense challenges as ‘families’ were articulated in particular ways by health and other governmental authorities. ‘Families’ were often connected to ‘homes’, as if they are the same thing. New terms, such as ‘care bubbles’, had to be invented to acknowledge that this is often not the case and new rules were invented about who was close enough (emotionally and legally) to be allowed to be physically co-present in homes they do not legally share. How did pregnant women and parents of newborns seek help in extreme and unprecedented environmental conditions? How did formal and informal pregnancy, birth and postnatal care change in this period? In what ways does climate crisis make more people aware of the challenges of kinship and of the need to think again how we understand kin, including kinship with the more-than-human? Responding to these questions, we draw inspiration from Donna Haraway’s work on response-able and inclusive futures, and related writing on queering kin-making possibilities beyond heteronormative nuclear family reproduction in the context of both reproductive justice and ecological crisis
Mainstream scientific and critical accounts of climate crisis, including those describing the Pyrocene and the Anthropocene, typically fail to consider reproduction and kin, even when ‘overpopulation’ is understood as an important factor in the unfolding emergency. Feminist analysis of these debates also tends to remain rather abstract in its attention to reproduction, with key scholars suggesting that we ‘make kin, not babies’ in order to address these issues. Focusing on people who were ‘making bushfire babies’ in the terrible Australian summer of 2019–2020, we argue that the material details of reproduction in climate crisis must be brought to light, and should become central to ethical and political debate going forward. Climate crisis is already seriously reshaping reproduction and kin; we must find ways to articulate and act upon their complex entanglements.
