Paper short abstract:

This paper explores nappy-free infant rearing practices in Britain and Pakistan and highlights how the gendered burdens of sustainable management of homes and environments are also classed and raced, highlighting intersectionality’s critical insights in the un/wellness of the world.

Paper long abstract:

This paper excavates the haunting image of the estimated 300,000 disposable nappies that are thrown to landfill every minute globally, an image that haunts not only because of the environmental costs to come but also by a disavowal of the costs that are already here. In global health and environmental discourse, mothers are targeted with sustainable solutions for managing infant waste and are encouraged to adapt how children are raised in unwell worlds. In this paper I explore nappy-free infant rearing practices in Britain and Pakistan, contexts that are starkly different yet deeply connected. In southern Britain, white middle class women sought to develop nappy-free parenting as a capacity to help them pursue deeper parent-child intimacies and to lessen the environmental cost of reproductive decisions. The parenting guidance to which they turn positions ‘Third World’ women as experts in this practice, whose skills have been denigrated by Euro-American parenting cultures. By contrast, poor women in Punjab, Pakistan, maintain nappy-free parenting as a strategy for facing economic constraints and environmental challenges such as heat strain. They deride middle class women’s use of disposable nappies but simultaneously envy them for the greater comfort they can provide for their children. The paper builds on literature on the gendered burdens of sustainable management of homes and environments, but also argue that these burdens are also classed and raced, highlighting intersectionality’s critical insight to incongruent privileges and disadvantages in the un/wellness of the world.