AustLit

'Last year we had a baby, an event that impelled us, literally and figuratively, toward a new body of knowledge. For the duration of the pregnancy - a temporality marked by both abstract and concrete milestones, periods of sickness and hormonal ecstasy, anxiety and optimism, and the intense, relentless, often absurd process of initiation into the bureaucracy of 'health' and the baby industrial complex, or what we came to refer to as Big Baby - we read. We read about gestation, labour, birth, breathing, perineal massage, public health, hospitals, postpartum recovery, baby names, baby equipment. We watched birth videos and listened to birth podcasts. We both work as academics who teach at an art school and so, while we went through the pregnancy, we not only read, we also wrote and taught. We wrote about bodies and the ways they are mediated in contemporary capitalism, we taught courses on the pornographic spectacle, we thought about the gendered and racialised production of subjects, and we studied the violent processes of settlement and the crucial but difficult work of unsettling history.' (Publication abstract)