Breath, Breathing and ‘Mum-Guilt’

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.