ABSTRACT
We explore how disability, as it occurs among human animals, is juxtaposed, transposed, and erased in similar ways to its appearance (and disappearance) in the non-human animals that sit at the centre of neoliberal capitalist production by describing four instances where neoliberal logic determines the relationship between disability and productivity: (1) among farmed animals, those that are deemed “productively disabled” are killed, while impairment is genetically engineered to create “hyperproductive” beings; (2) impairment that is created via intensive farming practices is normalized and made invisible; (3) the highly exploitable, low-paid human workers who perform “meat work” suffer injury, ill-health, and impairment; and (4) neoliberal welfare-to-work regimes reclass humans from “disabled” to “unemployed” so they can be compelled to move in and out of low-waged, precarious work. We follow this with a discussion of the processes that make visible or invisible certain types of work performed by certain types of body and conclude by asking how interspecies disability solidarity can be used to resist the neoliberal logic that deems some bodies “non-productive.”
