Frozen Bodies A Visual Autoethnography of Deep Field Antarctic Glaciology

This essay presents a visual journal that I created for a field season on Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica, as a way both to record states of dissociation/depersonalization and track my gender identity. Drawing on autoethnography as a method of inquiry, I created a pocket-sized journal of body outlines and used oil pastels to document my embodied and emotional responses to conducting fieldwork. I reflect on how my visual journal helped me understand how my body responded to living and working in extreme conditions, how my work and body relate to one another, and how the creation and completion of this journal gave me agency over my experiences of dissociation and queerness. Through this account, I aim to contribute to the growing literature on the personal and political dimensions of polar research—critical glaciology—as well as to demonstrate the potential of autoethnographic methods to facilitate embodied ways of knowing in deep field contexts.