Where is the Leisure When Walking with a Baby? Unruly and Leaky Bodies

This chapter engages with corporeal feminism to explore postpartum mothers’ experiences of walking with newborns, focusing on the concepts of abject and leaky bodies. Grosz's view of bodies as intersections of cultural and biological forces offers insight into how postpartum bodies challenge conventional ideas of bodily integrity. Kristeva's concept of the abject, especially within the maternal context, sheds light on how the postpartum maternal body disrupts norms through processes like breastfeeding in public spaces. Drawing on (auto)ethnographic data and interviews with postpartum mothers, this chapter reframes walking with a baby beyond physical and mental wellness, towards an understanding of shared embodiment. It emphasises the intra-active, co-constitutive experience of “walking with” a newborn. The chapter reveals the leisure experience in this context as one filled with contradictions, deeply rooted in the embodied and often messy realities of postpartum motherhood and the intimate, physical bond between mother and child. We argue that, despite societal pressures and her own physical challenges, a mother pursuing leisure activities can be seen as a powerful act of defiance.