Sweat studies. Bodies and environments beyond ‚thermal neutrality‘

This talk will discuss one specific bodily reaction to heat stress: sweating. Thermal comfort research and the dominant understanding of thermal modernity is defined by the absence of freezing and sweating; the body is liberated from the task of thermoregulation which is delegated to the thermostat in modern architecture. I will argue that sweating is a particular provocation to thermal modernity because it undermines the rational subject, shifting the sensorium from the visual to smell and thermoception. The history of sweating is a highly gendered, racialized and classed story of devaluation of the ‘lower’ senses, the ‘animalic’, and the loss of thermal control over the body. Drawing on Karen Barad, I will suggest the notion of thermal intra-subjectivity in order to address the new modes, aesthetics and politics of sweating that will probably intensify with the environmental and energy crises of the present.
 
References:
  
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
 
Heschong, L. (1979). Thermal Delight in Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 
Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot & Cold. Durham: Duke University Press.
 

 
@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary
 
In this talk, I would like to address one specific form of heat-stress: sweating. I will argue that sweating is a social practice rather than a mere biological fact. A practice though, and that usually isn’t the result of the result of conscious rational decision, but of thermoception, the thermal regulation work of the body. Thermal information is never neutral. It always reflects what is directly happening to the body. The thermal nerve endings aren’t temperature sensors, but sensors for heat flows. Instead of simply indicating temperature, they registrate how fast the body loses or gains heat. So thermoception is a sense of difference: thermal environments and objects are being sensed in their relation to the body temperature.
 
Thermal comfort research assumes a stable thermal equilibrium and a direct connection between the deviation from the minimum load of the heat balance effector mechanisms, like sweating and thermal comfort vote. The more active temperature regulation is needed, the lower the thermal comfort. Subsequently, a research field of determining the ideal standardised indoor temperature emerged in order to avoid sweating and freezing. As I will argue now, we need a critical sociological perspective on sweating and, as I will try, intersectional take on sweat studies. With different examples from race, physical labour and gender, the connection of race and heat, and race and sweat is deeply inscribed in the history of anthropology and Western epistemologies.
 
In the context of heat and sweating, it becomes clear that we cannot assume the prior existence of mutually independent entities. But the bodily boundaries and properties of things can only be determined through their relation in the process of becoming – here of melting and mingling. Thermal intra-subjectivity then, is an environmental and atmospheric mode of connection through exposure that reorganises the relation between subject and object. And importantly, this happens through a shifting of the senses and the sensorium through heat.
 
Sweating here is a racialized form of thermal violence, and not only in the case of the sweat box, but also later as a practice of interrogation in jails and police stations. And here the material practice of sweating that destabilises the boundaries of the self is linked to racist knowledge and climatic determinism, where black bodies are constructed to be resistant against heat and sun on the one hand, and particularly receptive for it on the other. Thermal violence is neither defined by a particular technology nor by exposure to extreme temperatures. It is the manipulation of a body’s capacity to mediate heat. The concept is helpful in order to address, I think, also environmental power relations and the uneven distribution of vulnerabilities.
 
So, I will now turn to another aspect and the connection between sweat class and gender: The worker’s body is a perspiring body exposed to the environment without protection and not enjoying the comforts of external thermal regulation. That regulatory work and the associated extra efforts are passed on to the individual body. In contrast to the physical work of blue-collar workers, lift and carry and strain and sweat, white-collar jobs are characterised by the promise of freedom from sweating. The pristine white colour represents the dream of purity of the American white middle class, untamed by desk work. The fully air-conditioned office is the ideal place where the standardised guidelines for thermal comfort apply. However, this promise of tempered self-control cannot do away with sweating. It is simply another type of pressure and sweat that accompanies many white-collar jobs.
 
The social shame associated with the smell of sweat has a strong gender dimension as well. Bourgeois politics of purification involve the imperative of personal hygiene with the white middle-class woman literally embodying control of cleanliness and dirt.
 
The social organisation of sweating is embedded in powerful regimes and constellations of thermal violence, but cannot be reduced to it – because this notion of thermal violence is a very broad notion and similar to the notion of slow violence or structural violence, or sometimes also called ecological violence.
 
The phenomenon of sweating is so informative for the debates on climate and Anthropocene as well, because it manifests the loss of control, which can be understood as an intraactive effect of fluctuating and extreme temperatures. On the local level of sensory perception heat unfolds ambivalent effects between acceleration and paralysis, expansion and limitation. Control is not something that is repressively imposed from the outside, but is written into the thermal and intra-subjectivity process itself in multiple ways. So, what does this mean for living in thermal extremes or in heat waves?
 
With the climate crisis, global inequalities are deepening and calling for new ways of living in the heat. In Southeast Asia and in the major cities of the Arabian Gulf, temperatures are sometimes well over 40 degrees Celsius for months, sometimes 50 and according to forecasts soon 60. The intense solar radiation heats the sea so much that the air is tropically humid at the same time. Due to the high water vapour content, the dew point approaches or exceeds body temperature. This means that the human body would no longer be able to cool itself through sweating. And, there is some research about how colonial ideas about hot climates as a cause of socio-economic underdevelopment have shaped the politics of thermal modernity with the implementation of cities as models of an air-conditioned nation inventory.
 
The idea of thermal modernity with its promise of well-tempered comfort available at all times, is currently cracking more and more. And, some questions related to that are if in the light of ecological crisis and sweating could become a practice that rejects the notion of thermal neutrality and with it the colonial and misogynist devaluation of the sweating body, or which new constellation of thermal intra-subjectivity and thermal violence could emerge. Could there be new politics and aesthetics of sweating?