Disability Theory, Labor, and Ecological Struggles

This paper draws from disability theory to understand community struggles amidst pollution, enclosure, and labor exploitation. It focuses on the Mantaro Valley in central Peru, where Indigenous agricultural ecologies were transformed by the growth of the copper industry in the early twentieth century. From this case study, three conceptual avenues emerge: Injury, abandonment, and chrono-normativity. By centering the body, disability studies help us understand the webs of injury connecting the physicality of labor exploitation and the disablement of plants, animals, and landscapes. By emphasizing the tendency of capitalism to commodify, pollute, and abandon bodies of nature, this field points to the importance of community efforts to return and restore. Finally, by insisting on the existence of dominant ableist ideas about time, disability scholars illuminate the multiple ways in which communities of laborers have sought to “stop the clock” of capitalism and disable its extractive metabolisms.