Disability, pace, and anti-productivism (Access copy for BU These Toxic Times conference, March 10, 2026)
Content notes: Climate chaos, immigration injustice, colonialism, ableism, war, the genocide of Palestinian people, violences of capitalism.
1. Living in evacuation areas
I think often about people, critters, waters, and growing things in East Palestine, Ohio, a small working-class town between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, at the intersection of Erie, Osage, and Kaskaskia traditional territories. On February 3rd, 2023, there was a massive and preventable Norfolk Southern train derailment there. That train freighted various toxic materials, notably including vinyl chloride; three days after the derailment, emergency responders and contracted clean-up workers emptid five of the freight cars and set them on fire, which they described as a “controlled release” – burning up the toxic substance as a method of clean-up and to prevent them exploding in a less-controlled way. Hydrogen chloride and phosgene gas, otherwise used as chemical weapons (notably in World War One), were produced as a side effect of burning the vinyl chloride. Phosgene gas apparently has a pleasant smell, like fresh-mown hay or green corn, but you can only smell it when it’s four times the threshold limit for toxic effects. East Palestine residents and workers were exposed to the chemical dispersal of that burn, as well as the more ordinary dispersal of toxins in the water, soil, and air both from the derailment and as a side-effect of clean-up, which includes dust raised from trucking contaminated soil to disposal sites, and aerating (or “airstripping” or “airknifing”) water to release the vinyl chloride it carries.
I don’t know where exactly the train that derailed on February 3rd was coming from, or going, and looking at Norfolk Southern’s rail network map, we see that East Palestine isn’t listed. Nor is Mossville, Louisiana, though one of the main spurs in the rail network goes there. This makes sense, since vinyl chloride is overwhelmingly used to produce polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. As Heather Davis writes,
Southern Louisiana is notorious within the United States for its high concentrations of petrochemical plants, leading to the appellations “cancer alley” or “death alley.” In particular, it produces much of the country’s pvc which is transformed into shower curtains, piping, toys, signage, and traffic cones, among other things. Constitutive of contemporary infrastructures, and particularly the built environment, pvc is the most toxic of plastics produced. The building and construction sector uses 69 percent of all pvc. It is made through pyrolysis (thermal cracking) of petroleum, followed by the addition of plasticizers and stabilizers, added to create flexibility, durability, sheen, and adhesive capabilities. It is the plasticizers and stabilizers, key among them phthalic acid esters and brominated flame retardants, that can be toxic, releasing and off- gassing volatile organic compounds such as formaldehyde, benzene, and perchloroethylene. Owing to all these additives, pvc is nearly impossible to recycle. Because it is mostly used for durable goods, the toxicity from pvc is often localized in its production phase, transmitted through the bodies of residents near the plants, rather than being found in the wider environment, as is the case with waste disposal associated with polyethylene (Davis 2022, 65)
PVC is a good example of a substance that differentially kills and sickens people, but which we are hard pressed to avoid and whose harms are differentially distributed. It’s a good example of the ways that, as Max Liboiron elaborates, pollution is colonialism – and thus we need to be specific and deliberate in what we talk about when we talk about plastics.
Following Liboiron and Davis, among others, one way to respond to the facts of toxicity through being more deliberate about what we’re talking about and how we’re engaging. For Liboiron, it’s useful to differentiate among plastics, for example, to not be singular when we engage them. Without differentiating among plastic’s purposes, uses, and production processes, it is, as they write, “impossible to be responsible to the problems and ethics of plastic pollution. This is just one way to think about the relationships among differentiation, specificity, ethics and obligations in plastics. There’s not even a We for plastics” (Liboiron 2021, 28).
PVC is used everywhere, from toys to medical materials to DIY adaptive technologies. As the European PVC Network says on their website, “Polyvinyl chloride, known as PVC or vinyl, is the cornerstone plastic in modern healthcare. Its unique balance of safety, versatility, and proven performance has made it indispensable for over 70 years — from life-saving devices and pharmaceutical packaging to hospital infrastructure and emergency response. Today, vinyl is the single most used polymer in disposable medical devices, with a market share of around 30%. Most strikingly, it is the only material approved for blood bags, enabling safe storage of red blood cells for up to 49 days — a critical function no other plastic can match” (https://pvc.org/applications/healthcare/).
It doesn’t feel possible, to me, to respond to the East Palestine train derailment and its many toxic effects by simply arguing that we shouldn’t transport vinyl chloride, or that we shouldn’t use it – as Liboiron writes, there is neither a coherent “we” nor a coherent “plastic,” here. And pointing out PVC’s medical uses is a bit of a dodge; it renders the whole class of plastics somehow beyond critique because in this case they are so useful.
Responding to toxic disasters by finding examples of material use that most people agree is good or by saying that we should simply not use the substance in question is an obvious – but still tempting! – turn to a purity politics that falsely imagines it is possible to avoid or shield ourselves from implication in staggering, horrific harms. We can be honest that we want medical plastics to exist, and that we also use and benefit from less-necessary plastics in every part of our lives. If we look at any of the incredibly numerous explosions at chemical manufacturing plants over the last years we find similarly nested material realities of things we want or need, like blood bags.
The purity impulse is easier to sustain when we think about whether we really need the automotive lubricants produced by Smitty’s Supply, the Louisiana plant that exploded in August 2025, and which in February 2026 continues to dump millions of gallons of contaminated water, affecting residents and wildlife. The Tangipahoa River was described after the spill as looking “like motor oil,” with residents nearby describing a die-off in wild animals in the area. But here too it’s easy to reply to the purity move by – correctly – arguing that all of us use or benefit from automotive lubricants; we would not eat or move without them. The purity move also, notably, leverages the fear of disability in ways we ought to worry about – think here of the spectre of the disabled kid, victim/prodcut of toxic environments, medications, or maternal failings; think here of the person disabled by their work; think here of ecologies disabled by chemical pollution. If we believe that disabled people should exist, now and in the future, but want a way to oppose disabling environments and workplaces, we need something different than purity politics.
A second unsatisfying option, rather than believing we can be innocent of implication, is to just carry on. If we can’t do anything about everything, we might as well get on with our lives as best we can. This isn’t only for the people who gleefully use up the world. It’s also just, everyone. It’s too exhausting to worry about plastic diapers or menstrual pads, petroleum product use, or the lungs of workers in the plant that makes popcorn flavors when we’re just trying to make it through the weekend, microwaving some popcorn and changing the diapers and hoping the ibuprofen kicks in soon. Some people – people I know, good-hearted people – are actively unbothered by, for example, flying as much as they can while it is still financially possible for them to visit far-away places that are progressively more and more devastated by climate change and tourism so that they can see them before they are destroyed.
Another option is to recursively iterate all the terrible things we face, and the complexity of the work to be done, to explore the branching options for response and management. Any of us who write about toxicity skirt this line – I have perhaps already done it myself in this paper so far. In my life this pattern, which we could think of as toxic rumination, or rumination about toxicity, emerges both as symptom and symptom management; when my own chemical reactivity is triggered I mentally loop, and also practically spiral and filter to try to remediate my environment. My chemical reactions result, at least partially, from living in an apartment with forced-air heating after a fuel oil spill, from exposure to industrial chemicals while imprisoned in a bus depot in New York City, and from living in a small mining city in Northern Ontario. I haven’t lived in Sudbury, Ontario, for many years now, but I still worry about people there and follow the news about the regular industrial chemical releases – dust clouds, chemical spills, explosions – that happen there. While I lived there it was a regular thing to have a local alarm alerting us to stay indoors, and it was common to have unexplained black soot on the laundry, or bad air days. When I left Sudbury and moved to Ottawa, Ontario, I felt a strange disconnection and guilt, that I could just leave the bad air and not be so sick anymore.
But really, forest fires, industrial accidents, oil spills, and pollution mean none of us can entirely leave the bad air – it comes to us. However, some people can evade some of the experience of harm through money. Even while it’s possible for some to stay indoors, to wear masks and filter the air, and to advocate for public spaces to be open for people to breathe, the masks and the filters have to go somewhere after they filter out the toxins. In heat waves, air conditioning and well-insulated buildings should be available to all, even as the carbon costs of making heat pumps or refilling the refrigerant in the air conditioning unit are real. No amount of rumination or fretting takes us out of the cycles of production and use that implicate us in the material production of toxicity and its byproducts, centrally the unjust distribution of those byproducts.
Because I left Sudbury and become much less sick, I think of all those who stay in places that are making them sick, because they cannot leave or because they love the places or because they feel too responsible to go. Here rumination loops are not pathological; there just isn’t a good solution. East Palestine resident Ashley McCollom talks about the ways her house makes her sick, that the mice in the house will eat the toothpaste but not the food. She says, “I don’t want someone else to get sick. In March of 2023, I told everyone I couldn’t sell my house to someone to watch them get sick in it” (https://therealnews.com/a-billion-dollar-company-poisoned-my-home-and-destroyed-my-town). She doesn’t want to get sick, and she doesn’t want someone else to get sick. The interviewer asks, “What do you still need? What are your needs right now?” and McCollom says,
It’s hard because it’s complicated. I don’t want someone to get sick here, so I would still have to pay on that house. If I go somewhere, if I get assistance, I have that house. I can’t move on until this is fixed. I mean, people are still here. They can’t move on until it’s fixed. I mean, I could use everyday items that most people could, but I mean we need people to get together and listen. Go to their local charity events, talk to the people in these areas, reach out to ’em on Facebook, see what other people’s needs are. I mean, talking to people is the best thing that we can do right now. Other than getting everyone out,
It’s hard because it’s complicated. The people who are there are sick, and she is sick, and she doesn’t want them to be sick, and she wouldn’t sell her house to someone and watch them get sick. So, maybe what we can do is talk to people, right now – barring the despairing and somehow impossible expression, “Other than getting everyone out,”
McCollom also says, reflecting on the day of the derailment, “I was sitting there, got up, that’s when normal was over. That’ll happen to anyone. It is happening to everyone, and they just don’t know it. We have new derailments, new water, contaminations, coal mines. There are just so many different things going on. It is happening.” People live over Superfund sites, downstream from plumes, next to pipelines. People live in resettlement camps situated in bombed-out rubble, and then get bombed again. No one person can understand or respond to the scale of material toxicity involved in living under capitalist colonial regimes. And even if we got everyone out of East Palestine, there isn’t any guarantee that wherever they go isn’t toxic, too.
My theoretical work over the last while has been organized around the claim that we should reject purity politics and the idea that we can be innocent of implication in or completely disentangled from toxic relations. I have argued that it is best – most realistic and also most strategic – to embrace the fact that we are fundamentally relational beings; starting from our inter-implication in the world is a good place to find traction for fighting the differential distributions of harm and benefit. And I have an almost spiritual commitment to the idea that we can collectively transform the world we are flung into through our collective practices; we build new worlds in the shell of the old, only and always with others.
And yet, I have become more and more convinced that we cannot take normative guidance in any simple way from collectivity and relationality. Fascism, eugenic biopolitcs, and jingoism are all collective and relational formations. In deciding what is to be done, we need politics – a content beyond our methods, ends beyond our means. I have also been struggling with the question of how to centre the differential distribution of toxicity’s effects, and the ways we respond politically to that distribution from a disability, anticapitalist, and anticolonial politics. I have commitments to slowness, moving at the speed of trust, and refusing the idea that everything should scale, grounded in these politics. These commitments bump up against both the real urgency of the work there is to be done, which pair with my own inclinations to be what a former teacher talked about as a “working dog,” someone who likes having a task, being of use, and getting things done.
So, we have shared but uneven problems arising from toxicity’s effects. One – impossible – response is to pretend that purity and innocence is an option. The endless rumination might actually be a subspecies of this approach, one in which we loop and loop, trying for a way out, or to be free of the relations beyond our control. A second – possible, but unevenly so, and with the risk of killing our souls – is to acknowledge that we’re implicated in terrible things and either actively embrace the project of distributing toxicity to others and relative ease to ourselves or metaphorically put our hands over our ears and hum rather than think about it.
I’ve been looking for a secret third option. Following Mel Chen, any real response will have to be something more than simply a physical management of pollution. As they write, it is worth attending to the “rich interanimations of toxins and toxicities, the repulsive dynamics of racism, and temporalized modes of control (chronicities), whether in the clinic or in the traffic of contentious transnationality. In all examples, it is the production of the toxic, whether or not specific chemicals are invoked, that bears imagining in the whole; to only manage toxins as a biochemical process might be to unwittingly collude with the dynamics that produced them” (Chen 2023, 35).
I turn now to the very imperfect and perhaps impossible site of whether work, care, and love can offer us normative guidance for meeting toxic relations. What would it be to turn towards toxicity with love? Since we cannot avoid living with it, we can ask how we live with toxicity. A central part of this question of the “how” concerns the “we.” How do we constitute the scope of beings living in evacuation zones, specify the differences among places or plastics, and take seriously the material conditions that mean some people have more exposure, vulnerability, or reactions to the same stimuli. How do we love a place that is now toxic? To think with this question, in the next section I turn to disability care politics, to war and debilitation. In the final section I think about disability antiwork politics, alterlife, liberatory intoxication, and loving toxicity.
2. Care, work, and war
One thing is clear: Toxic times require work, and response. A lot of that work is care work: care for the people suffering as a result of exposure to toxins, and care for the places in which toxicity emerges. Whether it’s meeting the fast violence of a train derailment or a bomb, or the slow violence of chemicals leaching into waterways through dumps or atmospheric dispersal, dwelling with what M Murphy calls “alterlife,” being in the wake of alteration, is work. Even being alive in these places take effort. Murphy writes, “Alterlife names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration” (Murphy, 2017). How do we respond to be altered, and available for alteration? One way is through care – caring for others, being and ecosystems, and allowing ourselves to be cared for.
In Just Care : Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, Akemi Nishida examines both the experience of being cared-for as a disabled person, and the experience of carers-for who are themselves disabled and debilitated. She begins with a description of helping some friends when Superstorm Sandy hit New York and power was cut off for days. Transportation on and off the island ended, their care workers were not able to be with them, they both had mobility disabilities that prevented them using stairs, and as one of them uses a ventilator, steady access to power was literally necessary to life. Nishida was able to provide this through being mobile enough to walk up and down twelve flights of stairs to recharge the ventilator battery at a local fire station, and as power was restored a network of mutual support in disability community began pitching in to ensure they had help, food, and support. They all made it through, and in a way that built and strengthened disability community.
As Nishida explores, the experience of the mostly Black and Brown paid care workers offering similar support to disabled and elder people during the hurricane was different; workers at care homes were forced to make choices about whether to stay at work and keep their clients alive or go home to care for their families and friends. As climate catastrophes become common, my fears for my friends (and non-friends!) who require power to live and move intensifies; we know that disabled people are not meaningfully factored in to evacuation plans in multi-story buildings, so this story hits there. It’s instructive to centre the broader question of care work, and of what it means for mostly-migrant, mostly-women, who are themselves frequently disabled by or in conjunction with their care work. Work is hurting and killing them, as work always does: it is toxic. And yet without their care, the disabled people who rely on them – especially people accessing care through radically underfunded state agencies – suffer and die. Care work is toxic at this nexus, where some people’s lives require alienating and extracting the living energy of others.
But this is true of work generally: Our ordinary and beautiful capacities for creation and being with others in the world are translated into an exchange relation, into something alienated, which hurts and kills us. It maybe that the simple transit from activity to wage activity, since that transit is forced upon us under capitalism, is toxic. Or it may be that we’re forced to do so much of it to live that it’s toxic – the dose making the poison. One of my questions here is precisely about the question of work’s ontology – can there be good work? Or is it always only alienating?
One thing I know is that workers experience the violences of toxicity. The proliferation of thought pieces and listicles about how to survive a toxic workplace are one obvious place neoliberalism enjoins us to personally manage the harms of having to work, or working in particular places. All of the people living in East Palestine Ohio or next to the Smitty’s Supply explosion in Louisiana or in Sudbury are working as they manage the effects of those places being made toxic. Wage workers are the people who are immediately killed in toxic accidents – in the factories, on the railroad, when they come as first responders to a spill – and wage workers are the shock absorbers bearing the slow violence of capitalism.
Johanna Hedva’s piece “Sick Woman Theory” concludes by arguing that caring is good work, and that it can in itself be a way to fight capitalism. They write:
The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.
Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt (Hedva, 2014, 2022)
Nishida takes up this idea. Rather than valuing our being based on whether we are productive members of society under capitalism, she aims to centre an understanding of worth based on simply existing. She asks: “What does it mean to recognize and value people based on their bare existence, which emanates energy, instead of evaluating them solely on their functionality and its usefulness to the political economy?” (Nishida 2022). She discusses a 2014 poster from disability performance art collective Sins Invalid and artist Micah Bazant, which asserts: “To exist is to resist.” Nishida amplifies, in her exploration of this phrase, a conception of what she called “ontological resistance,” which she argues is embodied in the experience of “Bed activism.” Nishida argues that bed activism immanently critiques “structural exploitation and offers a different value system based on people’s existence, which I call ontological resistance.” It is a form of activism “rooted in our being and not necessarily and solely in our doing.” Nishida says, “The statement describes how people’s existence itself, and the fact that they continue living within the oppressive society that wishes otherwise, is already resistance” (Nishida 2022).
The Sins Invalid poster Nishida references was generated when they withdrew a documentary about their work from Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF). Their withdrawal was in protest of the VQFF accepting a paid print ad that, as Sins Invalid said, attempts to portray “the state of Israel as a friend to LGBTQ communities, particularly in the current moment as the people of Palestine are living through hell and dying in staggering numbers daily.” They continue,
As we write these words, the Israeli military continues to kill scores of Palestinian civilians every day in Gaza, including queer Palestinians. The Israeli military is disabling thousands of people, while it continues to bomb hospitals, fire on ambulances, and destroy disability rehabilitation facilities. Of the thousands wounded from this current assault, many will be permanently disabled in a place where the basic necessities of daily life are stopped at the border, and basic medicine – much less adequate medical care, physical therapy, and adaptive technology – is beyond reach. These newly disabled Palestinians have been described by some as a “burden” to Palestinian society. In fact, these are the Palestinians whose bodies most directly bear the burdens of occupation and state violence, and most obviously show its scars (https://sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-to-palestine/).
Words on the poster read, “Disability justice means fighting together from solitary cells to open-air prisons,” and it pictures a Black woman in a wheel chair wearing orange prison garb and an Arab woman in hijab with a recent above-the-knee leg and lower left arm amputation. The women gaze strongly toward one another, their hands grasping one another’s wrists.
I remember Israel’s bombardment in 2014; I remember feeling that the death and suffering was unbearable. Operation Protective Edge, the major attack launched into Gaza at that time, was the subject of an Amnesty International report co-produced with Forensic Architecture (https://blackfriday.amnesty.org/). It’s hard to find words for what it is like to read this report now, when the genocide in Palestine is so much worse in so many different ways, but also when today’s ongoing devastation was so intensely prefigured in that August 2014 invasion (or, as the Amnesty international report puts it, “events,” “incidences,” “ground operation”). The kind of reconstruction the Forensic Architecture group did of what happened in Rafah is unimaginable now; the buildings that are discussed and pictured in a video reconstruction of the events of the day simply don’t exist now. The report says:
There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces committed disproportionate, or otherwise indiscriminate, attacks which killed scores of civilians in their homes, on the streets and in vehicles and injured many more. This includes repeatedly firing artillery and other imprecise explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas during the attacks on Rafah between 1 and 4 August. In some cases, there are indications that they directly fired at and killed civilians, including people fleeing https://blackfriday.amnesty.org/).
The description of these events that Amnesty International frames – correctly – as shocking, as international crimes, is now so ordinary that for many it has becomes unremarkable for a military force to target civilians, hospitals, schools. We are seeing this now in the targeting of all of these things in the current invasion of Iran.
Jaspir Puar examines the lines of continuity between policing practices and practices of intentional disablement. It’s a truism now to say that one definition of the State is that it sequesters for itself the right to kill, expressed through police, the military, or, in the US, ICE. Puar also articulates the practice of the “right to maim,” the title of her 2017 book. Puar writes:
Alongside the “right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule— that of creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (idf) have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill. This is ostensibly a humanitarian practice, leaving many civilians “permanently disabled” in an occupied territory of destroyed hospitals, rationed medical supplies, and scarce resources (Puar 2017 x).
People who are maimed are not counted as part of the death toll of wars and occupations, and perhaps we could read Israel’s “shoot to cripple” policies as simply strategic choices to avoid censure. Puar writes, “Because eventful killing is undesirable, the dying after the dying, perhaps years later, would not count as a war death alongside the quick administration of war deaths” (Puar 2017 144).
But as Puar elaborates, the practices of creating disabled Palestinians are part of a more sustained transit in the current moment, endemic and ongoing – structures not events, to reprise Patrick Wolfe – that create and capacitate at the same moment as they injure and harm. Puar says, “Relational forms of capitalism, care, and racialization inform an assemblage of disability to a constellation of debilities and capacities” (Puar 2017 xvi). Debility names the “constitutive slow death” endemic to life under current conditions. As she writes, debility is “not nonnormative, not exceptional, not that which is to come or can be avoided, but a banal feature of quotidian existence that is already definitive of the precarity of that existence” (Puar 2017 16). She continues, understanding debilitation as a part of work altogether:
Debilitation as a normal consequence of laboring, as an “expected impairment,” is not a flattening of disability; rather, this framing exposes the violence of what constitutes “a normal consequence.” The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation (Puar 2017 xvi).
Puar is interested in the twinned metabolic processes of “working and warring” in the production of debility and disability, and the capacitating output of those processes. We might say that world economies rely upon a continual regime of producing debilitated bodyminds, sorting and classifying some of us in the category of “being disabled,” and then offering care, aid, citizenship, and so on depending on how we are placed. Is practicing care the best way to attack and transform this assemblage? What does disability justice mean for our shared project of building worlds not organized under capitalist social relations?
I think here about a friend and comrade, who I’ll call George (though I could name him after any one of a succession of other passionately overworking revolutionaries of my experience or in history). He has had a succession of disabling health events over the last two years, and I am frequently very worried about him. George is one of the people who shaped my practice of how to be a political person and at the same time a professor who maintained some integrity and practice of non-instrumental care; I became close with him during my first academic job, in Sudbury, Ontario, and imprinted on him like a duckling. In the same way that one of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most biting insults was to remark that someone was “clever,” one of George’s most cutting observations is that someone is an “operator.” He values, and I value, people humbly practicing what is sometimes called a politics of responsibility – doing what we can with what we have, and especially if we benefit from relations of oppression doing what we can to offer back that unearned privilege to collective struggle.
Last November George went through a really scary health situation, and his partner sent me and a few others a video of him when he had gotten well enough to speak. The video begins with George sitting in his hospital bed, thanking people for their care and solidarity. At the beginning, it seems like he’s thanking us for our solidarity with him as he’s been ill – but immediately it becomes clear that, no. He’s thanking us for any solidarity work we are doing to fight climate catastrophe, war and especially the ongoing genocide in Palestine, to destroy imperialism and capitalism, and to build something that could be better. In some real way, the video is a form of bed activism, but one enjoining us to work harder. It was resistance – but not particularly resting. Science fiction writer Jo Walton coined a term in one of her novels for when someone is being very characteristically themself – “raensome.” This video of George, passionately and articulately speaking with a nasal canula from his hospital bed, fighting to survive and enjoining his friends and comrades to fight for collective survival, was extremely raensome. It landed for me during a time when I had been working hard at various things, for my wage work and around non-academic political work that I do, and it simultaneously affirmed my life choices and made me worry about whether I can last another twenty years working at this pace of political urgency.
3. Finding normative guidance and politics
Moya Bailey has written compellingly on the question of pace as a disability issue, especially in the academic context. Like many disabled academics, she encourages us to resist speed while ruefully acknowledging that she herself is unable to take her own advice (“I ask you, dear reader, to do as I say, not as I do,” as she puts it [Bailey 2021, 287]). Bailey writes: “we make disability where there was none because of our need for speed. … Capitalism’s insistence on profits over people seems to be a major force behind the seemingly unquestioned ethos to make us produce more and faster” (Bailey 2021, 286). She argues that, instead, “We must pivot and change how we relate to each other. We must slow down to survive” (Bailey 2021, 296). Work is debilitating in part because of the pace at which we are expected to produce, but also structurally because as workers we are made to be used up. Puar argues that “Work and war as debilitating activities foreground U.S. imperialism, global injustice, exploitative labor conditions, the industry of incarceration, and environmental toxicity” (Puar 2017, 64).
Feminist antiwork political theorists such as Kathi Weeks would agree with these analyses from disability justice theorists, though these synergies are only more recently overtly emerging through books such as Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s Health Communism. Joining disability theorists including Susan Wendell and Alison Kafer, Sunaura Taylor, and Marta Russell, there is a building critique of the ableism of capitalist work relations, including the structural problem of making people unable to work and then rendering them the site of work – disabled people, incarcerated people, the elderly, and those temporarily institutionalized are made to be the substance on which others work to generate surplus value.
I think that analyses understanding war, capitalism, and colonialism as forms of toxicity allow us to meaningfully draw material connections between these producers of disability and debility and as inherently built on the idea that it is worth it to produce waste in order to produce profit. Profit relies on waste – wasted people, landscapes, externalities. Starting here, there are obvious arguments for the urgent need to abolish war, colonialism, and capitalism. But even if we could wave a wand and get rid of all these evils, we would be left with the toxic remnants and the bodily effects, which will always need care and work. If being cared for is a right, as Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, caring-for must then be a duty. Or a joy, a delight, a way to make and remake shared worlds without pretenses of innocence or purity.
My agenda here is to find a way to turn towards toxicity, to refuse the pretense that there is any “away” to throw anything. If we build the smokestack higher, it’s true that the people living right next to it don’t get so sick, but this is only because the particulates are sent to go further away. When people clean up Love Canal or East Palestine Ohio, they just truck the toxified soil somewhere else. My favorite provocation towards turning towards toxicity is a speculative religion/art project called Toxic Temple. My partner Kilian Jörg is one of the conveners of this collective project that takes toxic waste products, ironically but seriously, as an indication that we humans worship at the alter of plastic, petroleum, nuclear byproducts. Disrupting binaries of “natural/clean” and so on, this project brings attention to the substances we create that will outlast our lives and civilizations. Attending to everything from critters who eat Styrofoam to the feeling of vestal robes made out of trash bags, Toxic Temple offers an urgent and unfinished opening. It has helped me think about being against sequestration and occlusion – what happens if we refuse to push plastic, Styrofoam, oil spills, and other reminders of death out of sensory range, but instead face them, cradle them, hold them in our mouth? I have come to think that the logic of sequestering the toxic is, if not of a piece with, but part of a system that carceral logics also rest on: The idea that we can put the bad people away, the disabled and elder people in forced institutions where someone else will relate with them, the garbage out of sight and mind, go “no contact” with people, and move on.
Toxic Temple is one site that has helped me wonder what it means to love toxic places, people, and systems. “Love” here cannot mean: Revel in damage, dispense with responsibility, abandon repair. I need a kind of love takes forms like measuring dioxin levels, making meals and bringing them to a sick friend, abolishing borders, shutting down nuclear reactors, regulating water use, making sure food is good to eat and that everyone has enough of it, ending war, and so on. It also needs to be a kind of love that affirms that no one should have to be in contact with their toxic ex or abusive parents, that is grounded on Indigenous people’s collective rights to refuse entry to the land they care for, a refusal of the state as a producer of toxic worlds. And it needs to be a kind of love that affirms the beauty of working hard and well, in caring relations that are often not at all easy, without valorizing productivism or burn out, and without derogating people who don’t work.
So. My descriptive commitment is to the understanding that change is inevitable, and that toxicity helps us think about change. In their book on intoxication, Mel Chen articulates this:
there is one seemingly unlikely place where the nexus between race and disability vibrates, has vibrated, quite resoundingly, and yet is perhaps one of the most transparent participants in becoming, for it represents nothing but change. Change that tips into damage, or threatens abandonment, spiritual escape, or even revolution, or all three. That place is toxicity – or intoxication. Both toxicity and intoxication hover around disability (as intoxicated incapacity or depressed capacity, for example); and because of the chemical intimacies attached to race they also hover around that (Chen 2023, 3-4).
Toxicity as change, as that which changes us, also constellates mattering social relations, including disability and race. We are all living as manifestations of what M. Murphy calls alterlife. Recall their definition:
Alterlife names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. It is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life. Alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposures that attempts to be as much about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive chemical relations (Murphy, 2017)
If we turn toward alterlife, towards toxicity, with this orientation, we take up the Earthseed doctrine from Octavia Butler’s Parable books: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change” (Butler). The chemical intimacies and relations explicit in toxicity illuminate the ways change arises from relation – life entangled, damaged, transformed, and so on. Life at the nexus of change figures life and responsibilitiesbeyond the individual. That is to say, how change happens, what changes we embrace, are collectively determined. We don’t and can’t change alone. But also collectivity and relationality don’t give us guidance about what particular decisions to make, at any level.
So I’m going to make a speculative attempt at articulating a normative commitment for responding to toxicity. Here I’m looking for something that allows us to respond and hold what Murphy lists as the “community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories” shaping the possibilities for future life. I am specifically concerned to have a normative commitment that does not rely on rejecting disability or on logic of exile, sequestration, jingoism, and national purity. And I want also something that allows those of us who like working ridiculously hard at things, vocationally or for spiritual practice or out of love for the world, to do so, but also has room for everyone who does not work in any way, and doesn’t make up for not working by being interesting or really kind or nice to hang out with. Responding to toxicity as a collective endeavour needs to be something that isn’t about charisma, beauty, or metrics of value based on use, productivism, or virtue.
I think that we should opt for changes that reduce fixed hierarchies and relations of domination. Toxicity right now indexes both; the distribution of toxicity rests on and produces logics of waste and wastelands – people who can be abandoned, places that are fly-overs, polluted, not worth caring for. No such places exist, no such people exist. But our current social relations of oppression and benefit distribute toxicity downward: Some places are designated dumping grounds, sacrifice zones, and waste lands. And some people become the repositories for toxicity’s after-effects; I am thinking here of the people who live near disasters or dump sites and work to make their homes and lands livable, workers who go in to clean up after a spill, people disabled or ill because of their work or their exposures, people who take care of others in the wake of capitalism and colonialism. Care workers and everyone who is cared-for. These are fixed hierarchies of domination, secured by racial capitalism. In a context in which everyone has to pay to live, and in which the wealthy can buy better lives, people who metabolize toxicity will be those who are forced to. They do the work because if they don’t work they can’t live.
Unfixed hierarchies are those that undo themselves. Think of the hierarchy of being a good teacher, a good parent, a good doctor. Those taught, parented, or cared for surpass the people they once deferred to if they wanted to learn, be someone’s child, or have medical care. If we teach, parent, or heal well, we are delighted to watch someone unfurl into something bigger and more unpredictable, well beyond our control. If we can pursue hierarchies that destroy themselves, and relations without measure or domination, responding to toxicity becomes both more grounded and more iteratively possible. Here I think we also need to follow Paolo Friere’s question in Pedagogy of Hope, “what can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?” (Friere 1994, 125). What relations can we transform, in these toxic times, that will change us and the world such that other worlds become ever more possible, palpable, and present with us?
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