Breathing through Catastrophe: Respiratory Disability in Sarah Crossan’s Fiction

Résumé

This essay argues that Sarah Crossan's young adult dystopian duology, Breathe (2012) and Resist (2013), represents a significant eco-crip intervention into the politics of atmospheric governance, one in which respiratory disability functions as the primary lens through which environmental catastrophe, political violence, and social stratification become legible. Set in a near-future world where the mass destruction of trees has rendered the atmosphere practically unbreathable, the novels imagine a sealed dome (known as the Pod) operated by a private corporation that manufactures and distributes artificial oxygen, thereby producing a deeply hierarchical society in which breathable air is privatised, unequally distributed, and weaponised as a tool of biocultural control. Drawing on disability studies and the environmental humanities, and engaging with the work of scholars like Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Stefanie Heine, Magdalena Górska, Alison Kafer, and Lennard Davis, among others, the article explores how Crossan's fiction stages the systematic conversion of ecological crisis into a logic of atmospheric infrastructure and bodily incapacitation. The first section examines how the Pod's regime produces and controls respiratory dependency as a structural effect rather than an anomaly, managing disability through surplus oxygen and the deliberate suppression of intuitive respiratory knowledge. The second section tracks the protagonists beyond the dome into a depleted and hostile landscape, where collective breathing emerges as a counter-practice grounded in shared vulnerability, precarity, and interspecies interdependence. The third section confronts the ethical price and limits of this communal vision through the duology's most consequential deaths and its two competing models of atmospheric community: the Grove's voluntary interspecies commons and Sequoia's eugenic regime of enforced bodily acclimatization. The essay concludes by arguing that Crossan's fiction refuses triumphalist resolution, offering instead a politics of recalcitrant persistence in which breathing remains a continuously mutating, precarious, and irreducibly collective practice of inhabiting damaged worlds.