Productive bodies : how neoliberalism makes and unmakes disability in human and non-human animals

In this chapter we examine the relationship of productivity to disability in four examples involving human and non-human animals. Among farmed animals, the spectrum of biological diversity is narrowed by the killing of animals who are deemed "non-productive" or "productively disabled," while impairment is engineered through genetic restructuring and intensive farming practices to create "hyperproductive" beings, in the process normalizing impairment and rendering it invisible. In the slaughterhouse, the flesh of farmed animals is handled by highly exploitable, low-paid human workers who, in performing this work, suffer injury, ill-health, and impairment with the unrelenting efficiency demanded of low-cost, high-output production. Finally, with neoliberal reclassifications of the productive body-and-mind and the capacity to work, humans who receive disability pensions are reclassed as unemployed so they can be transferred to lower paid benefits and compelled to move in and out of low-waged, precarious work. The normative codes of farm production, the interspecies relational nature of the slaughterhouse, and welfare austerity, particularly in the policy area of disability, are deeply enmeshed with broader neoliberal regimes of the intensification of work. We follow these examples with a discussion of the processes that make visible or invisible certain types of work performed by certain types of bodies and the productive value that neoliberalism places on this work. While disability is erased from the policy sphere and from the farm to be replaced with a measure of productivity, impairment created via intensive work among human and non-human animals becomes naturalized, "absolutely invisible . . . fall[ing] outside the register of sight." We conclude by asking how interspecies disability solidarity can be used to resist the neoliberal logic that renders some bodies "non-productive" and compels all bodies-and-minds to aspire to be productive.