Strange Weather Narratives and Embodiment

Like the nameless character in Kevin Jared Hosein’s Commonwealth award-winning story “Passage,” we are not going to make it out with our bodies intact and we have come too far to turn round from the necessity of engaging the complex implications that arise between the weather and our bodies. “Climate crisis” is one such implication that this article explores. It turns to strange weather events narrated in Hosein’s story and in news media. Taking guidance from Hosein’s narrative and reading news narratives through an interpretive disability studies framework, the article reveals the tangled relation between conceptions of the body and the environment that allows for second thoughts on what scientifically based climate crisis discourse is not providing. This reading reveals that the ways of knowing crisis need a critical, imaginative reworking. The analysis suggests that by grappling with the interpretive complexity that is now our strange weather can we better understand and less easily perpetuate the crisis that we have produced. Such grappling requires attending to how bodies (dis)appear in weather narratives produced by bureaucratic-scientific rationality.