Social and Political Suffocations

This volume focuses on breathing and suffocation as political phenomena. It brings together work from feminist, queer, posthumanist, postcolonial, decolonial, abolitionist, and literary studies, as well as critical geography and aesthetics. Across these fields and different geopolitical locations, the contributions discuss breathing and suffocation as corporeal, affective, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and political forces, and examine how intersectional power relations enact and are enacted by them. Attending to the differential distribution of breathable and unbreathable life in the present conjuncture, the volume asks whose lives and what forms of living are made un/breathable, and how social and political suffocations are lived with, resisted, and transformed. Structured around the rhythm of a respiratory cycle – through inhalations, stops, and exhalations – the volume brings together academic, poetic, and artistic forms of inquiry to create multiple forms of engagement and (re)orientation.

Part of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series, this book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars, students, and artists, as well as to those working in gender studies, politics, sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental studies, philosophy, and the humanities more broadly.