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-verite, 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.
Industry 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 *
"Tremblay's book does for breath what scholars like Zoe Todd have done for broad concepts like climate change, which is to push back against the Platonic understanding of said concepts that cannot be confined to a single, material form. Breathing Aesthetics pushes back on the idea of a disembodied breath, of air as a vacuum-like space that surrounds us. . . . Not only are we breathing together, our individual forms part of an amorphous and often chaotic whole, but breath is also being negotiated in a variety of different ways, the morbid and the meditative existing side by side." -- Margaryta Golovchenko * Visual Studies *
"What is perhaps most revelatory about Tremblay's intervention is that there is no call for a full restoration of breath. Notwithstanding its impossibility for minoritarian communities, a return to optimal breathing could only work through a guise of self-determined liberation that masks persisting violence against and estrangement among those whose lives cannot be extricated from conditions of 'breathlessness.' Readers of Breathing Aesthetics will quickly find that Tremblay's assertion that respiratory crises are contagious between survivor and spectator in that the latter is made to suffer shortages of breath also apply here." -- Jennifer Cho * ISLE *
