Mothers’ Agency and Responsibility in the Australian Bushfires: A Feminist New Materialist Account

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article employs new materialist theory to the accounts of women who were pregnant, giving birth or parenting new-borns during the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. As feminist scholars we are concerned with the inequitable responsibility accorded to women during this time to limit their (un)born children’s exposure to smoke. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) relational ontology we trace how (non)human phenomena like ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of ‘the good mother’ work intra-actively to establish conditions of possibility in relation to mother’s agency and responsibility in this crisis. Via in-depth interviews with 25 women, we discovered these coagulating forces meant many experienced feelings of ‘powerlessness’ and subsequent ‘guilt’ at their inability to prevent smoke inhalation for their (un)born children. To challenge this burden of responsibility, we (re)configure conventional notions of ‘agency’ and ‘responsibility’ within a new materialist frame. When agency is understood as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, responsibility for the air shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world’s differential becoming. We extend this thinking to consider human response-ability and agency in relation to the climate change that has been attributed to causing the fires.