Breathing Aesthetics

Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era and identifies responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Jean-Thomas Tremblay's book Breathing Aesthetics explores the relationship between difficult breathing and the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay argues that biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. He identifies 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. Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards, and that an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.

Weight: 376g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478018865