Sweat speaks: Stories of embodiment, emotion, and erasure on a heating planet

Abstract

Sweat permeates our human lives, yet it is a bodily reality whose functions and meanings we are often conditioned to avoid, minimise, or hide. In taking sweat as its lens of analysis, this work reasserts the significance of a transboundary agent whose narrative interpretations are frequently sanitised and simplified. Here, sweat itself is recognised as a vital storyteller, emerging through tangible bodily choreographies of effort and exertion, emotion, social and cultural identity, and a warming planet. This contribution is situated at the broad intersection of sensory studies and feminist environmental humanities, and works to demonstrate sweat's political and theoretical utility in connecting everyday embodied experiences with the systemic drivers of social and ecological injustices.