This essay traces an aesthetic genealogy of feminist breathing since the 1970s. Deviating from declension narratives that locate in that decade the end of breathing as a means of feminist socialization and politicization, this essay argues that indigenous and black feminisms have continuously relied on respiratory rituals as tactics or strategies for living through the foreclosure of political presents and futures. Case studies on Linda Hogan’s ceremonial poetry and Toni Cade Bambara’s fiction on healing expose the tensions that have animated a feminist breathing premised on the management of vulnerabilities: first, the enmeshment of vitality and risk and, second, the destabilization of the wholeness or wellness afforded by rituals. As felt theory or embodied critique, feminist breathing ultimately reveals an impulse to repair the conditions from which it emerges.

In concert with an account of the HBO series The Leftovers (2014-2017) as a respiratory drama, this introduction considers scholarly precedents for this special issue and outlines its intervention into the research on breath across screen cultures. The essays compiled here seek to broaden the archive of media objects definable by the breathing they render, specify the relation between on-and offscreen breathing, and redraw the taxonomies of artistic genres and genres of the self associated with breathing.

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In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify 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. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.