Of Life and Breath: Towards Geographies of Breath and Breathing Bodies

Abstract

Recent scholarship has opened up the historical ‘black-boxing’ of the body in geographical research. Developments in critical health and feminist geographies, together with new materialism, have countered long-standing binaries perpetuated by the biomedical model of health. Contributing to health geographies, political ecology as a field has generated critical insights into the inter-related, complex and multi-layered nature of human-environment relations, as manifested in the production of (ill)health. In accordance with feminist political ecologists, this paper pushes for the incorporation of the visceral, fleshy, fluid body into geographical enquiries to propose an all-encompassing understanding of health and the body, that visibilises how intersecting structural vulnerabilities shape health outcomes. Building on feminist political ecology models, this article highlights how developments in new materialism - when read geographically - can re-imagine understandings on the body, health and the environment. Contributing to geographies of the body and geographies of breathing, this paper integrates new materialist thinking into a feminist political ecology framework, to attend to affective corpo-realities and the making of healthy environments and bodies, across time, place and scale. Through the example of breathing, this article highlights how intimate everyday metabolic processes are perpetually mediated by socio-political factors, which change the body's very constitution. Employing a biosocial approach to bodily processes, such as breathing, highlights how health is deeply entangled in everyday sociopolitical life. Crucially, this article argues for a reconceptualisation of the place-based relationship between air, breath and bodies to push for a preventative approach to the emergence of harmful, health-depleting assemblages in the context of breathing. In doing so, this theoretical intervention problematises variegated health outcomes to lay the groundwork for an emancipatory respiratory politics, where everyone is afforded the right to breathe.