Intense Embodiment and Women’s ‘Weather Work’ in Motorcycling

This article aims to develop the underexamined lived experiences of ‘weather work’ via the motorcycling ‘weather world’, addressing the embodied and sensorial learning ways of knowing. Drawing on a phenomenologically inspired approach, I explore the haptic senses of heat and cold via heightening understandings of weather work, aiming to provide key conceptualisations of phenomenological mind-body-world nexus through auto/ethnographic data. This attempts to extend the small, emerging and under investigated literature that utlitises sociological phenomenology to examine the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experienced as a woman on a motorcycle. Key themes that were identified as salient: temperature work, touch, and skin wetness perception. These themes offer novel insights into the intersection between gender, embodiment, and sensorial experiences in motorcycling, enriching sociological phenomenology with a nuanced understanding of the ways ‘weather work’ shapes and is shaped by lived, gendered practices.