Modes of thermoregulation

This personal essay explores the partly autonomic, partly behavioural process of thermoregulation in relation to everyday life. Queer feminist and materialist life writing regularly examines how socio-economic systems and cultural norms relate to the desiring self. I build on this tradition by reflecting on how experiences of extreme heat and cold can influence thermoregulatory processes and seed new desires. Although the non-human meteorological elements of heat and cold feature in a narrative representation of a formative decade in my adult life (24–34), this piece does not adopt a strong post-human or eco-sexual stance. Rather it questions whether the messiness of human desire, combined with our animal need for thermoregulation, can collude with the variabilities of weather in queerly anti-imperalist forms of ecological embodiment. What takes this life writing beyond the human is the attempt to document the possibilities in the human-weather relation: the human potential outlined here cannot be separated from the aliveness of the body and the energetic force of the weather.