Breathable Futures: Breath as Feminist and Decolonial Imagination in Heating and Polluted Worlds

In feminist, decolonial, and ecological work, many pathways towards what are claimed to be ‘sustainable’ futures are criticised for their status quo-reiterating, ecologically devastating, effects (Kolbert, 2021). To struggle free from these rather claustrophobic climate futures, this article conceptualises breathable futures as a way out of current and pressing atmospheric troubles (e.g., climate change, air(borne) pollution, ‘silent’ skies (Carson, 1962)) and their intersecting ‘suffocating structures’ that squeeze the breath out of many beings ontologically, physically-ecologically and atmospherically. This article mobilises Irigaray’s (1999) account of the ‘forgetting of air’ to explore why it is so difficult to imagine futures otherwise. It continues by critically situating this account in polluted, heating, and otherwise un/breathable worlds, informed by work of Kristen Simmons (2017) and Achille Mbembe (2022, 2017, 2020), thereby staying with the trouble of techno-intimacies (Weston, 2017) and more-than-human (co-)respiration. Ultimately, it proposes to rethink subjectivity alongside three (techno-)imaginaries: intoxication, allyship, and (be)coming alive. In these imaginaries, breathable futures come to the fore as multiple and asynchronous worlds generated by living beings in their (be)coming alive. They break with dreams of maximisation, solution, and (fair) distribution, and instead figure open-ended struggles for breathability in changing more-than-human coalitions.