Somaforming: Transition as Method for the Anthropocene

In this article, I discuss what the science fiction writer Becky Chambers has termed “soma-forming” as a method for negotiating the climate changes at work in the Anthropocene. Reading Chambers next to the memoir-writing of transgender man Lou Sullivan, I argue that transition can be understood as a form of somaforming, changing the self rather than terraforming the world around oneself, as capitalist modernity has more usually done. Transition and somaforming, then, offer themselves as survival strategies in the newly uncertain environment of the Anthropocene.