Pregnancy and Fur Babies

The female body, both human and non-human, is often subject to critique and control within social discourse. Pregnancy both challenges and reinforces dominant narratives around idealized body standards. This critical autoethnographic account details the author’s experiences as a doctoral candidate navigating the perinatal period whilst living with non-human kin. The author employs feminist posthumanist theory and the concept of situated joy to re-imagine what it means to become within a multispecies household, held in tension with the social discourses and structural inequities that surround us. The article and writings resist linear notions of time and space to weave together two different accounts from pregnancy interspersed with current (as of December 2024) moments of joy: (1) the question of “fur babies” and dogs’ liminal status within the household, as well as the gendered expressions of parenthood; and (2) explorations of discourses around human and dog female-coded bodies against the embodied becoming of multiple “bitches,” three dogs, one cat, and their humans.