New paper: Geographies of an Expecting Body

Véron O. (2026) Geographies of an Expecting Body: Spaces and Emotions of Pregnancy, Emotion, Space and Society, 59, 101167.

I am glad to share a new research article recently published in Emotion, Space and Society.

Drawing on four years of journalling across two pregnancies and births, this article develops gestation as an emotional and atmospheric geography. Building from feminist work on embodiment, affect, and reproduction, it treats pregnancy as a spatial practice lived through home, weather, clinical thresholds, and writing. Methodologically, journalling is mobilised as a feminist practice of inquiry that generates concepts from within embodied experience. Empirically, the paper traces three spatial dynamics: first, dwelling and atmosphere, where home operates as a parallel womb that shelters and constrains, and seasonal darkness and cold attune the body; second, ambivalence and pain, where ownership and estrangement, endurance and despair co-exist, making suffering a mobile disturbance of space–time; and third, clinical rupture, where late-pregnancy risk discourses and institutional design reconfigure autonomy as care, softening yet sustaining authority. Postpartum is approached not as aftermath but as reverberation, as bodily marks, attachments, and memories rework gestational space and pain becomes narratable. Conceptually, the article foregrounds ambivalence and non-coherence as analytic grounds for emotional geography, showing how fear, relief, tenderness, and fatigue operate as spatial forces. Gestation thus emerges as an intimate yet political geography that shelters, disrupts, ruptures, and echoes across body, place, and time.

Keywords:
Pregnancy; Emotion; Ambivalence; Atmosphere; Embodiment; Feminism; Autoethnography