Paper short abstract:

I draw on 18 months of fieldwork to explore the bodily effects and affects of injury and its aftermath on low-wage laborers in a small city in the USA’s Midwest. I explore what injury, pain and debility mean and give rise to.

Paper long abstract:

Injury is an expected part of life for many laborers who work in low-wage, physically demanding roles at grocery stores, restaurants, and factories. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a health clinic in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, serving people with little to no insurance coverage, I learned what injury means for people who fill these roles. Injury, here, encompasses bodily aspects in terms of pain and functionality, and socio-economic aspects, in terms of care, lost days at work, and mounting demands on scant finances. In some cases, injury leads to lifelong chronic pain and debility (Puar 2017). In this paper, I consider the role of socio-economic class, race, and gender—many of the laborers I spent time with were women—in shaping embodied experiences of injury and pain, and the bodily effects and affects of that injury and pain. For most, recovery is embedded in a system of care that values their bodies less than others, and has become an impossible dream. Healing for those who cannot access advanced care, is a journey to “as good as it’s going to get.” For some, this experience has given rise to advocacy and activism efforts, while for others it has meant apathy and disillusionment.