Breathing Aesthetics

Breathing Aesthetics explores aesthetic responses to our contemporary crisis in breathing. Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that following a global increase of air pollution in the 1970s, and the continuation of racial and extractive capitalism and imperialism, breathing has emerged as a medium through which biopolitical and necropolitical forces are increasingly experienced. Tremblay thus traces this crisis in breathing through aesthetic practices that foreground breath and respiration, ranging from the music videos of Kate Bush, the video work of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and documentaries that attempt to capture recently deceased individuals' last breath." Central to the book's argument is that while everyone breathes, not everyone experiences the risk and cost of breathing evenly. Tremblay focuses on how queer individuals, feminists, and/or artists of color have employed breathing aesthetics to examine ongoing gendered, racialized, sexualized, and imperial traumas"--