Embodied geographies of domesticated water: transcorporeality, translocality and moral terrains

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops ideas of hydro-geographies at the scale of everyday embodied experiences to better understand the relationships between migration, household sustainability and ethics. Framed within a feminist visceral approach, the article attends to the embodied dimensions of domesticated water. We draw on insights from the concepts of transcoporeality, translocality and moral terrain to illustrate how responsibility to domesticated water is felt in and through working arrangements of technologies, bodies and ideas about water and domestic life. Fifteen Iranian immigrant women consented to participate in a sensory ethnography. The visceral analysis outlines embodied insights into the very material ways participants understand themselves, places and obligations to water and others. As participants spoke about how domesticated water moves across bodies, attention is paid to how the permeability of boundaries is made felt, or not. We focus on how visceral relaxation and disgust may close or open moral gateways, respectively. This article contributes to the consideration of the politics of household sustainability and how embodiment offers possibilities to rethink domesticated water as more than a commodified resource.