The Theory of Breath: Long Covid, Disability Justice and the Right to Breathe

Abstract

This paper develops the theory of breath as an interdisciplinary framework emerging from my lived experience of long covid, a post-viral illness now disabling an estimated 19 per cent of Canadians who contracted SARS-CoV-2. Using autotheory as methodology, I weave together fragments of my shifting bodymind. This inquiry situates long covid within Critical Disability Studies. The theory of breath connects the laboured respirations of long covid to broader struggles for the right to breathe: the asphyxiation of Black men at the hands of police, the burning of forests, and the choking wildfire smoke of a destabilized Anthropocene. Capitalism guarantees unequal access to breath across lines of race, disability, class and gender. Drawing on disability justice, Black feminist thought and Indigenous knowledge traditions, I examine long covid as a mass disabling event marked by epistemic injustice, medical dismissal and the gendered silencing of illness. I trouble the ableism within disability rights movements that leave housebound people behind, and critically examine how whiteness structures both long covid activism and the field of Critical Disability Studies itself. The bed is reclaimed as a site of activism; rest and slow art making as legitimate forms of resistance. I argue that the bodymind of someone severely disabled is not a site of weakness but of methodology, a place from which new knowledge is churned up. Long covid demands urgent attention in our field as a portal to the disability futures we are called to imagine.