Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality

Abstract

In the dominant "climate change" imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories-in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad-to describe our relationship to climate change as one of "weathering." We propose the temporal frame of "thick time"-a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past-in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially "in" it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world. INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A NEW IMAGINARY OF CLIMATE CHANGEIf there is something like climate change, perhaps it takes this form: not only a mutation of this climate (warming, depleting, becoming more volatile) but an alteration of what we take climate to be. (Colebrook 2012, 36) Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. August. Spruce trees at Swallowtail, root-toes curled around the rocky outcrop in a resigned sort of precarity. Made to coexist with the credence of the Fundy weather, these timbered lives are permanently swayed, their strong backbones constantly giving way to the wind. The weather-archive of their multiply ringed existences has stories to tell: of a hurricane's landfall, or the eye of a maritime gale; of coastal droughts, and semidiurnal tides, and the Atlantic sun filtered through sea smoke and autumn fog and the clear-eyed blue of nothing at all. How has the hot breath of the earth, the battering of its rain, the reprieve of its gentle snows shaped my own sinews, my gait, the ebb and flow of my own bodily humors? Duration, spread across my skin with the slow sweep of the seasons. Like these trees, we are all, each of us, weathering.Although framed in a language of urgency and impending crisis, "climate change" has taken on an abstract quality in contemporary Western societies. Melting ice caps and rising sea levels are "perceived as spatially and temporally distant" (Slocum 2004, 1) from our everyday lives. This distance is related to the time scale and global reach of the problem, but also stems from scientific discourses that "produce vast quantities of sometimes contradictory, abstract statistics and data" (Duxbury 2010, 295). Commentators repeatedly note that climate change has become "difficult to comprehend or connect with in an appreciable way" (294). Claire Colebrook has argued that we suffer from a "hyper-...

Gender and climate change

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“…Academics have written experimentally including using poetry (Kostera, 1997), biography (Rhodes, 2001) and even very different modes of representation such as textiles (Rippin, 2013). In the field of sustainability, Neimanis and Walker (2014) incorporate their own creative writing into their academic texts while Phillips (2015, forthcoming) has drawn on the poetic writing of Hélène Cixous as a way of overcoming physical and emotional alienation from nature. Such writing has the potential to disrupt and challenge the discourses of conscious purpose of most managerial and academic engagements with corporate environmentalism.…”

Re‐Writing Corporate Environmentalism: Ecofeminism, Corporeality and the Language of Feeling

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