Breathing Aesthetics

by Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Overview

In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478018865
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2022
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Humanities at York Universityand coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Ecologies of the Particular  1
1. Breathing against Nature  33
2. Aesthetic Self-Medication (Three Regimens)  65
3. Feminist Breathing  94
4. Smog Sensing  113
5. Death in the Form of Life  139
Coda: A Queer Theory of Benign Respiratory Variations  158
Notes  163
Bibliography  197
Index  221
 

What People are Saying About This

Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age - Nicole Seymour

“In this stunning, brilliant, and beautiful book Jean-Thomas Tremblay shows how breathing matters in ways that we might have missed. I had never thought about phenomena like the emergence of respiratory subjectivities, but after reading Breathing Aesthetics, I recognize them everywhere and every day. This book will make us wonder how we ever managed to do without it. It is a fantastic achievement.”

The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics - Hsuan L. Hsu

“In this timely and brilliant investigation of the aesthetics and biopolitics of breathing, Jean-Thomas Tremblay theorizes our contemporary ‘crisis in breathing’ as a vital site for the differential remaking and depletion of life. Focusing on writing, performance, film, and conceptual art invested in counteracting hierarchies of breathability, Breathing Aesthetics shows how aesthetic experiments by those whose respiration is most imperiled deploy breath as a means of communicating politically charged and deeply embodied experiences of precarity, discomfort, and healing. Tremblay makes a compelling case for studying breath as an atmospheric and ecological problem with vast implications for how we think about race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.”