Feminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering

Abstract

ABSTRACT Big infrastructure responses to climate change seek to protect the heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo. In contrast, this article develops a theory and method of practice-led research to facilitate better weathering. In so doing the article contends that a transformative feminist response to climate change needs alternative, collective, feminist infrastructures. The feminist specificity of the infrastructure proposed here emerges through its proximity to the concept ‘weathering'. As a feminist figuration, weathering attunes us to human embodiment and difference in a time of climate change, where ‘weather' is not only meteorological, but the total atmospheres that bodies are made to bear. An infrastructure for better weathering thus centres opportunities to acknowledge and account for embodied difference and the differential effects of weather as a specifically feminist design feature. Better weathering is not neoliberal resilience, but rather attention to and redistribution of low-stakes vulnerability as an infrastructural politics. The article proceeds in two parts. We theorise a feminist infrastructure. We then pilot the infrastructure in a series of practice-led research activities. We argue these new infrastructures facilitate low-stakes vulnerability between strangers and so enable better weathering.