Weeding Out the Weak: Labor,Gender,and Disability in a U.S. Fossil Fuel Boomtown

Abstract

COVID-19 has radically reshaped the labor dreams of many U.S. workers. This essay uses pre-pandemic fieldwork in an oil and gas “boomtown” to consider post-work imaginaries in the wake and midst of COVID-19. I use feminist and disability studies perspectives to argue that economic analyses must not only move beyond the discourse of “jobs” but must also attend to gender-based and ableist modes of discrimination that persist even in so-called booming economies. I posit the figure of the economically productive worker, asking how routine practices of identity-shaped discrimination undermine the capacities of some to embody this figure. My interview-derived and ethnographic data suggest that economic self-sufficiency is a woefully inadequate model for meeting the material needs of people, and that labor innovations such as a universal basic income are necessary to achieve the kinds of flourishing sought by those participating in the “great resignation.”