The concept of weathering, developed by Astrida Neimanis with Rachel Loewen Walker (2013) and Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2018), can help us think about the ways autistic people relate to the climate, including the oppressive socio-political climate.
As a noun, weathering refers to the alteration of rocks by exposure to climatic or atmospheric agents. The word can also be used as a verb (to weather), referring to the act of resisting or enduring an event. According to National Geographic (2022), ‘water, ice, acids, salts, plants, animals and temperature changes are all agents of weathering’, but it should also be noted that the erosion of geological soils and their interaction ‘with plants, animal remains, fungi, bacteria and other organisms’ leads to the formation of arable land and the development of plants. The concept of weathering is therefore a testament to the ways in which ‘nature’, in the broadest sense, affects bodies, both geological and living, but also how these bodies resist and survive nature, and may even flourish in it. In this sense, it captures what might be defined as the process of creating a climate more or less conducive to the emergence and maintenance of particular forms of life.
Weathering evokes Stacy Alaimo’s (2018) material feminist concept of transcorporeality, which focuses on the material co-constitution of living bodies with environmental, climatic, chemical and technological ones. Our bodies, affected by climatic phenomena like floods and hurricanes, are more-than-human, or perhaps posthuman: they are made and undone by nature, but also made of nature. Echoing this idea, Neimanis and Hamilton (2018) remind us that ‘bodies, places and the weather are all inter-implicated in our climate-changing world ‘ (p. 80). Similarly, Neimanis and Loewen Walker have used the concept of transcorporeality to emphasise the co-constitution of bodies with and through the climate. Interestingly, the term ‘climate’ is understood very broadly here, taking on a posthumanist, both meteorological and socio-political meaning.
In French people who engage in small talk are sometimes said to ‘talk about rain and good weather’ (parler de la pluie et du beau temps), and it is not uncommon for people to actually talk about the day’s weather to fill moments of silence. Autistic people, who are not known for their interest in such kind of small talk, don’t necessarily talk about the weather, but feel it internally, anticipate it to organise our day, plan our outfit or our music playlist, study it in the form of a specific interest, find a vocation in it, and so on. We often show a genuine interest in the weather and sometimes identify with it.
A quick search on Twitter results in a diversity of examples of transcorporeal proximity and identification of autistic people with the weather. One autistic woman, Emma Mitchell, takes up the idea of neuronal weather, ‘linked to endocrine changes’, which makes her experience autism sometimes as ‘mild and tolerable’, sometimes as a ‘relentless storm’. Someone answers by mentioning the concept of ‘autistic weather’, while another describes how temperatures that are too hot or too cold make them ‘grumpy’ and confuse their brain. Here, the external weather finds a deleterious transcorporeal echo in the inner climate. For others, the noise of the rain prevents them from focusing on anything else and makes them feel ‘too autistic for this climate’. As we can see, the weather also appears as a source of pleasure or suffering: in this case, the autistic person perceives their bodymind as a climatic phenomenon, one that is largely impacted by the external climate.
But weathering also refers to a practice or tactic: ‘to weather means to pay attention to how bodies and places respond to weather-worlds which they are also making’ (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2018, p. 81). With the concept of de/acclimatisation, I refer to strategies – like un/masking – through which autistic people express their agency as both vulnerable and resistant subjects and fashion a world of meaning that is as habitable as possible. When the external climate has become too unbearable and it is no longer possible to acclimatise to it, autistic people experience particular forms of vulnerability. This dissonance between the autistic weather-body and the unbearable climate denaturalises the socio-political norms that shape this very climate: to deacclimatise often means to expose the unjust and oppressive nature of the contemporary climate.
Not everyone experiences the climate in the same way, and some enjoy more privileged access to acclimatisation, including through weathering technologies like air conditioning. Besides, the socio-political climate does not affect all autistic people in the same way. In a climate of systemic police racism and violence against Black people, unmasking in public space – i.e. creating a safer climate for oneself – is not always a safe option. In this context, paying more attention to the most marginalised autistic weather-bodies can help us weather more just and habitable worlds for all.
References
Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Trans-corporeality.’ In Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (ed.), Posthuman glossary, London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 435-438.
National Geographic. ‘Weathering.’ Updated July 1, 2022, accessed June 30, 2023. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/weathering.
Neimanis, Astrida, and Hamilton, Jennifer Mae. ‘Open Space Weathering.’ Feminist Review, 118(1), p. 80-84.
Neimanis, Astrida, and Loewen Walker, Rachel. ‘Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality.’ Hypatia, 29(3), p. 558-575.
This blog post is based on a publication, ‘“Le personnel est climatique”. Les corps-météo autistes et le posthumanisme féministe entre météorisation et (dés)acclimatation’ for Sextant: Revue de recherche interdisciplinaire sur le genre et la sexualité (2025). To read more (in French), click here.
Leave a comment