Mambu! Breathing protest: Atmospheric trauma and maternal activism in Central Java

Abstract

This article examines how environmental harm is lived, narrated, and politicized by the Mothers of Nguter, a grassroots women's movement protesting hydrogen sulfide emissions from a rayon factory in Central Java, Indonesia. Drawing on interpretive feminist ethnographic analysis of interviews, court observations, and field notes collected between 2022 and 2023, I explore how toxic exposure is articulated through an atmospheric and sensory vocabulary centered on mambu! (stench). The article advances feminist psychological understandings of trauma by conceptualizing environmental harm as atmospheric, collective, and relational rather than solely intrapsychic. Participants describe disrupted breathing, children's recurring illnessess, nocturnal vigilance, and repeated institutional dismissal. Trauma emerges not as a singular psychological wound but as a condition saturating air, domestic space, and intergenerational futures. Simultaneously, maternal activism transforms atmospheric distress into political agency. Through environmental monitoring, storytelling, legal testimony, and collective organizing, the Mothers convert embodied suffering into shared knowledge and public claims for accountability. Maternal care operates as both psychosocial vulnerability and political infrastructure, challenging technocratic denial and asserting women's sensory authority as environmental evidence. By foregrounding atmospheric, embodiment, and maternal labor, the article contributes to feminist psychology debates on trauma, environmental justice, and the politics of care under industrial development and state neglect.