Embodied Thermal Insecurity and Counter-Hegemonic Heat Mapping

Abstract

Lived experiences with urban heat are often rendered invisible, shrouded under the cloak of neoliberal resilience discourse and sanitised heat mapping and messaging. This is particularly tragic for disadvantaged at-risk populations in white, settler colonial contexts where heat tolerance is worn as a badge of honour. Here, drawing upon semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions in Perth, Western Australia, and with feminist emphasis on the embodied, the everyday, and bodily difference, we illustrate how corporeal thermal insecurities among rough sleepers, people with disabilities, and across intersectional disenfranchisement immobilise and dehumanise. By employing the logic of structures of violence to thermal suffering, we reveal how housing and energy precarity exacerbate entrenched racism and normalised discrimination. Our aim is to expand current debates on heat action plans (HAPs) and cool refuges by examining what “better weathering” could mean in practice, via the materialities of heated urban bodies (HUBs) and to demonstrate how such counter-hegemonic heat mapping serves as a corporeal critique of the neoliberal resilient subject.