This article investigates the politics of thermal comfort: a nebulous state that is simultaneously biophysical and cultural, standardized and personalized. Intimate media—from thermostats to television—scale experiences of comfort across diverse populations, often entrenching social hierarchies by universalizing subjective preferences into standards. However, countering standardization by reifying embodied perspective can also perpetuate harm by allowing brutal conditions to be dismissed as individualized perceptions of discomfort. This article analyzes how mediations of comfort have negotiated the tension between standards and standpoints in postwar America. I analyze the aesthetic strategies of media practitioners who develop “intimacies of measure” to concretize embodied experiences abstracted by numbers. Mobilizing the feminist analytic of intimacy, I reframe comfort as a mediated structure of violence predicated on the displacement of discomfort across carceral and racial-capitalist geographies. Ultimately, this article models an approach to climatic and representational media as technological forms that actively distribute dis/comfort.
Sasha Crawford-Holland (Thu,) studied this question.