Climate Changes Sex
Climate Changes Sex at “Insular weathers, global atmosphere: Exploring the aerial histories of islands" Conference, Historical and Popular Art Museum of Aegina Islands, Greece. Organization Committee: Robert-Jan Wille, History and Philosophy of Science, Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, Vladimir Jankovic, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), The University of Manchester, George N. Vlahakis, Laboratory of Science, Technology and Medicine Communication, Hellenic Open University. Nov 2024
Abstract
If I were a late nineteenth-century explorer focused on the hypothesis that hot climate causes sexual exorbitance, homosexuality, gender promiscuity, such as Sir Richard Burton in 1886, and with the time machine I was catapulted to 2024 with global warming, sea tropicalization, queer wave, LGBTQIA+ movements expansion, I would think I was right: the sexual apocalypse presupposed and caused by warm climates on bodies deemed marginal is now globally expanding. It is ironic and liberating to re-address, in the light of these two contemporary phenomena, global warming and the spread of minority sexualities expressiveness, those scientific theories that ran through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asserting, with various drifts, how the hot climate was stimulating sexualities deemed abnormal.
For example, Burton's Sotadic Zone, in which climate and geography determined areas of high homosexual rates, and A. Sper’s pamphlet in 1902, Capri und die Homosexuellen, arguing that homosexuality in the Mediterranean was related to the humid climate; also in Cesare Lombroso, who wrote, analyzing the Italian territory, that more frequent and premature prostitution are noted where the climate is warmer. These theories had ancient roots: for example, in Lemnius in 1576, in which women exposed to the hot air are prone to fleshy concupiscence and bodily lust.
None of these theories were scientifically proven as correct. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, climate sexualization was developed as part of a power device, along with racial and colonial ones, which enabled the visual, economic, and sexual exploitation of bodies and cultures deemed peripheral, and supporting an ethnographic exploration boom in colonized spaces. Even the atmospheric climate was categorized as sexually perverse. This heat wave that tragically invades oceans, air, and lands, can be re-thought, with irony, to understand the crisis of the near future with more sensual lightness.