Ambivalent heat: Summer, climate emotions and the lived experience of extreme heat in Rio de Janeiro

This article examines summertime in Rio de Janeiro as an ambivalent climatic-affective condition: a season of informal opportunity and cultural belonging, animated by desired warmth and rendered increasingly hazardous by the extreme heat intensified by climate change. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study conducted in Rio de Janeiro between 2023 and 2025, it centres on three focal heat diaries produced by women informal outdoor workers through WhatsApp voice notes, photographs, videos, and written messages, while using selected excerpts from a wider cohort to situate recurring patterns of thermal experience. Bringing affect theory, feminist political ecology, and critical heat studies together, the article develops ambivalence as an analytic for understanding climate emotions beyond frameworks that treat affect primarily as anxiety, grief, resilience, or behavioural motivation. The analytic distinguishes three linked forms of ambivalence, affective, material, and governance, and shows how each is produced through gendered mechanisms of menopause, bodily respectability, and care. The analysis shows that heat is lived simultaneously as harm, livelihood, cultural value, and attachment: embodied through commuting, care, sweat, and bodily respectability; structured across the life course by reproductive transition, care responsibilities, and informal labour; and normalised through unequal infrastructures and responsibilised governance. The article contributes to debates on climate emotions and heat adaptation by showing that adaptation cannot be understood apart from the affective attachments that make exposure endurable, meaningful, and politically easier to sustain.