Duke University Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-1-4780-2349-4 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1622-9 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1886-5 Library of Congress Classification PN98.E36T74 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Humanities at York University and coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.
REVIEWS
“'Breathing is inevitably morbid,' reads the opening line of Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s exquisite new first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics. . . . By closely studying the writings and performances of Dodie Bellamy, CAConrad, and Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Tremblay is attentive to breathing’s knotty role in the space of queer life in how it ‘organizes desire amid crises ranging from the personal to the planetary.’ Similarly, by surveying the Black and Indigenous feminist respiratory rituals outlined in the works of Toni Cade Bambara and Linda Hogan, Tremblay asks us to consider ‘minoritarian models of collective life inspired by respiration,’ those that exist outside of and beyond mainstream feminist spaces of organizing.”
-- Ricky Varghese Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tremblay’s text is an exercise in exchange, in permeability. It begins with an acknowledgement that ‘breathing for’ is in the action of ‘I breathe,’ a ritual Tremblay learns from the poet M. NourbeSe Philip. This acknowledgement of human autopoetic respiration discloses the multiplicity and vulnerability of breathing. . . . Exchange, I have said, includes an etymological link to bartering. And [Breathing Aesthetics is] a bartering with the unknown amidst all too knowable crises."
-- Laurel V. McLaughlin ASAP/Journal
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
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