Metabolic Labor

Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality

Bibliographic Data

ID3914201
AuthorsLes Beldo (Williams College, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume9
Issue1
Pages108-128
Publication date2017-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-3829154
OpenAlexW2621318841
LanguageEN
Citations received66
References cited24

Amid mounting concerns over viral and bacterial outbreaks in industrial farm settings, scholars of modern industrial agriculture have increasingly focused their attention on the dangers posed by an "excess of life." While important, this focus tends to produce a narrative in which life is associated with disruption, pathology, and chaos, while that part of the animal that remains productive comes to be viewed as determined, machinelike, and anthropogenic. In this essay, I focus on the way that life is counted upon to exceed. Industrial animal husbandry depends upon nonhuman vitalities to predictably exceed human inputs to production, but this fact has been overlooked amid an emphasis on containment and control. I propose we think about nonhuman contributions to production, including those taking place at the microbiological level, as labor. This approach confers two advantages over Cary Wolfe's influential biopolitical analysis of the factory farm. First, it provides a register for talking about how life can be both potentially disruptive and indispensable to certain forms of capitalist production, even as multiple forces work to erase nonhuman contributions from the way we think about production. Second, it allows for the possibility of agency on the part of farmed animals that includes more than just resistance, disruption, or death. This essay concludes with an ethnographic description of the lives of broiler chickens on a hobby farm in rural Michigan, asking what it is like to do metabolic labor

Agency (philosophy · Agriculture · Animal husbandry · Animal life · Biology · Biopower · Economics · Environmental ethics · Farm workers · Hobby · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Production (economics · Social science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Law · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Ecology

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Open DOIOpen Access