LA&PS Professor Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s research and teaching in environmental and sexuality studies span literary, screen, and performance cultures. Their latest book Breathing Aesthetics, releasing in October 2022, shows how minoritarian artists have responded to a crisis in breathing marked by the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of the air from the 1970s onward.

Breathing Aesthetics demonstrates how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied in and experienced through respiration. As an object of physiological, environmental, philosophical, aesthetic, and political concern, respiration demands a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry. According to Tremblay, breathing enables us to observe where disciplines like environmental, sexuality, and disability studies converge, but also where they diverge.

“If we want to gain something from interdisciplinary research, we must be willing to lose some things--such as comfortable analytical habits or ideological orthodoxies--along the way. My hope is that readers will receive Breathing Aesthetics as an example of humanities research in which interdisciplinarity appears as a problem in its own right rather than an easy solution to disciplinary isolation.”

The book can be pre-ordered via the Duke University Press website.

Prof. Tremblay is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University. Connect with him at jtt@yorku.ca to learn more about their research, including various collaborations.