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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.
List 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
About the author
Jean-Thomas Tremblay
