“In this stunning, brilliant, and beautiful book Jean-Thomas Tremblay shows how breathing matters in ways that we might have missed. I had never thought about phenomena like the emergence of respiratory subjectivities, but after reading Breathing Aesthetics, I recognize them everywhere and every day. This book will make us wonder how we ever managed to do without it. It is a fantastic achievement.” - Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
“In this timely and brilliant investigation of the aesthetics and biopolitics of breathing, Jean-Thomas Tremblay theorizes our contemporary ‘crisis in breathing’ as a vital site for the differential remaking and depletion of life. Focusing on writing, performance, film, and conceptual art invested in counteracting hierarchies of breathability, Breathing Aesthetics shows how aesthetic experiments by those whose respiration is most imperiled deploy breath as a means of communicating politically charged and deeply embodied experiences of precarity, discomfort, and healing. Tremblay makes a compelling case for studying breath as an atmospheric and ecological problem with vast implications for how we think about race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.” - Hsuan L. Hsu, author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
“'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
"With palpable verve, Jean Thomas Tremblay’s Breathing Aesthetics surveys how breathing, as a literal and figurative medium, indexes environmental crises while heralding a dialectic between morbidity and vitality. At stake in such a project is Tremblay’s contention that respiratory crises, underwritten by the uneven distribution of risk, are embedded in how subjectivities are constituted. Within Breathing Aesthetics, what this means is that bodies and ecological milieu are never felt in isolation, that when we breathe, we are irrevocably imbricated in the spaces we inhabit—and with each other." - Tori McCandless, Lateral
"By way of exploring the reliance on breathing in a range of artworks and artistic practices and its presence in socioecological constellations since roughly the 1960s, Breathing Aesthetics makes a scholarly ambitious case for breathing as 'a resource for living under precarity' and as potential socio-political, environmental resistance." - André Krebber, Werkstatt Geschichte
"Breathing Aesthetics cleverly aligns with the urgent need to discuss breathing in our current time. ... These historical narratives deepen our understanding of the political dimensions of breathing and underscore its complex interplay with socioeconomic factors." - Yu-Hsuan Wang, H-Environment, H-Net Reviews
