Sweating on Feminism
I’m reading Cold Enough for Snow1 as sweat marbles across my face.
It’s already 24 degrees at five am on a day in mid-March. The weather hits you in the face in this place, at this time of the year. It’s a thumping, clumping, pounding that drapes your body and sucks at your soul.
It’s five am and the clouds are so thick and low it’s hard to tell if the drops that hang in the valley like a question mark are the vapor of them or me. Sweat beads in trail-lines down my spine. When you live in this place, you seek out coolness in every crevice. Maybe that’s why I was reading Cold Enough for Snow.
To sweat is to have a bodily reaction. It’s a response to fever or fear, a raised emotional state. I’m reading Cold Enough for Snow in a place and time distracted by sweat. The day is like a fever because I’m still fired up about what International Women’s Day has meant and what it’s becoming. Sweat doesn’t just emerge from heat and humidity.
Cold Enough for Snow is a book about, among other things, choosing what you pay attention to. International Women’s Day core aim urges us to pay attention to the sweat of women who worked for lower wages and fewer rights than their male counterparts, and then didn’t want to anymore. It is about women who worked so hard that at times they felt their spines might crumble into dust and at times they did. It is about women who still rose up and marched in the streets for the right to vote and equal pay and bodily autonomy.
Women have long marched feverously. They have marched to sweat the fear and fever out of their bodies and into a story on the street. They have walked together in a state of rapid heartbeat and heightened emotion. Sweat stains on their shirts are testimonials of their fever. They gathered, “like a fever”.2
International Women’s Day is now increasingly cast through a capitalist lens, where female empowerment is mediatized and big business trips over itself with cupcakes and superlatives.
But women who walk know the importance of material that wicks. Wicking is an action to move moisture from the inside to the surface. It relies on tiny capillaries converging, entangled, intertwined, to absorb liquid into material, rather than on to a body. A wick is a “bundle of fibres or loosely twisted, braided or woven cord, tape or tube usually of soft spun cotton threads that by capillary action draws up to be burned”3 And so, I am thinking that we must continue to write International Women's Day as a method that wicks, writing that burns but doesn't suck the life out of women. This is writing that comes together, brings together, all the threads, all the stories, drawing them all together, pulling the moisture away from bodies but still doing the work.
I’m reading Cold Enough for Snow in a world that is feverish, it is a world that is still Warm Enough for Rain.
And so now, I’ll leave you with the words that are wicking the sweat away from women’s bodies but still maintaining the heat. Rupi Kaur’s home body contains poems about women’s work that has happened but is also ongoing. I end with one of her poems, for all the women of the world who are still sweating on justice, and for those who are still writing and walking.
i’ll be quiet when
we can say sexual assault
and they
stop screaming liar
Rupi Kaur – home body4
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (2022) won the 2023 Victorian Literary Awards and the inaugural Novel Prize.
Poletta, Francesca, It was like a fever: storytelling in protest and politics. 2006. University of Chicago Press.
Merriam Webster Wick Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Rupi Kaur, home body, 2020