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

My Livelihood or My Life

Lessons related to the pandemic—about “essential” work, material needs, care labor, and human connection—include whether and how “well-being” can be achieved within a neoliberal and hypercapitalist economy (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013). The necropolitical calculus that rendered some people, many already economically and socially vulnerable, as simultaneously essential and disposable (Olayo-Mendez et al. 2021; Robles, Sauermilch, and Starks 2020), made the durable and stark inequalities within the U.S.’s formal wage economy impossible to ignore. COVID-19 work arrangements also made visible the hypocrisy of a “productive worker” ideology, in that arrangements long sought by disabled people (such as remote work) were normalized as soon as it made economic sense for nondisabled workers to accrue them (Shew 2020).

This figure of the productive worker is central to my arguments here: how it is (re)produced, which bodies it maps onto, what kinds of work make it achievable, and how it can be dismantled. Though sympathetic tolerance was extended toward people rendered unemployed by the pandemic, such patience did not exist in the booming Bakken. Though plentiful, jobs were not a given. Competition existed at all wage and benefit levels, and people routinely fell (just) outside the boundaries of how jobs were structured. When I asked Daisy, a local social service provider who I shadowed for several weeks, about who didn’t succeed in the Bakken, her answer was simple: “People who can’t work.” One afternoon, I overheard an exchange between a young white woman barista and her customer, a white man who drove for an oil and gas company. When the barista grimaced about the long hours she and her boyfriend routinely kept, the customer (who noted he’d worked 80–100 hours that week) replied “Well, that’s why we came up here!”

But, and as Kathi Weeks (2020) has recently argued, the pace of full-time wage work does not align with the lives of many people:

How many. . .really possess the full list of capacities. . .to devote 40 hours to intensively focused effort. . .? What about. . .cognitive, emotional, neurological, or physical differences that mean we cannot. . .work in the[se] ways. . .? [W]hat about. . .when even the otherwise. . .acceptable worker is taken over by joy or. . .grief? (Weeks 2020, 578).

And though the early COVID-19 employment landscape generated a distinct category of worker, that is, someone who had the capacity to work but whose physical presence couldn’t be safely borne by a vulnerable population, both pandemic and boomtown economies reveal the fluidity and contingency of “those who work [and] those who don’t” (Sherman 2009) within an economy structured by capitalist growth. I suggest that both scenarios illustrate the highly dynamic relationships between jobs, on the one hand, and, on the other, an uneven combination of state policies, (dis)ability, gender, race, education, mobility, and sector, industry and market trends. Few (but not none) of my Bakken interlocutors understood the work they were doing in anything but economic terms; this was similarly true for people collecting unemployment or working an essential job during the pandemic, people for whom the livelihood = life equation was acutely palpable. It’s true that there were ideologues who “loved North Dakota oil” (Peters 2014, 2), but the vast majority maintained an explicitly instrumental relationship to the source of their income: it was paying off their student loans and consumer debt; it housed them; it purchased their first new vehicle; or it obviated their dependence on friends or family. These folks were engaging in what I call compounded extraction: squeezing what they could, and as quickly as they could, from booming extractive industries.

From Boomtown to Hometown (Site and Methods)

Between 2015 and 2018, I made six trips to the Bakken in order to better understand how gender, (dis)ability, and labor intersect during an extreme economic expansion. The region has experienced enormous growth since the refinement of hydraulic fracturing technologies and my visits took me to several of the most impacted towns. Because the term “fieldwork” can refer to a variety of experiences and methods, I note the following: I gathered data via participant–observation, informal interviews, and conversations; three of my visits consisted of 2–5 week stays in an efficiency hotel; two shorter visits involved participating in “expos” organized around feminized professional identities; and one trip consisted solely of a two-day all-woman oil rig training.

The traditional inhabitants of the area referred to by Westerners as “the Bakken” are the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations (the Three Affiliated Tribes), who are headquartered in New Town, North Dakota (MHA Nation 2022). Fossil fuel production relies on a 200,000 square-mile shale rock formation that, due largely to fracking technologies and in spite of some pandemic fluctuations, produces approximately one million barrels of oil per day. Since 2008, when the U.S. Geological Service estimated that the region held between 3 and 4.3 billion barrels of “undiscovered, technically recoverable oil” (Mikulka 2020), the area has experienced locally unprecedented levels of immigration and migration, wealth accumulation, crime, and residential displacement. Oil and gas revenues constitute over half of the state’s budget, fully aligning the region with what Shadaan and Murphy (2020, 2) refer to as “oil-based fossil fuel capitalism,” a set of violent processes rooted in settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The origin point for the radically contested Dakota Access Pipeline, resistance to which took place on the Standing Rock Reservation (Estes 2019), is in Stanley, ND, just 31 miles west of New Town, where a mural on the Fort Berthold reservation proclaims “WE ARE STILL HERE.”

During my stays, the region was (and remains) plagued by poorly planned infrastructure, both that specific to fossil fuel extraction and that related to supporting workers and their families. Not only did residents long for “normal” amenities like hair stylists and mental health providers, they also struggled to secure housing, to cross streets over which hundreds of industrial trucks traveled daily, and to afford goods and services that were increasingly priced for those earning “serious” oil and gas money. In short, though fracking can coerce oil and gas out of the shale, the Bakken “was not prepared to deal with these hydrocarbons once they came out of the ground” (Mikulka 2020). Much of the infrastructure that does exist was built haphazardly, resulting in risks that arise from the locomotive transport of volatile oil through residential and agricultural communities. The laboring population was largely (though not exclusively) white, male/masculine, youthful (under 50), and able-bodied; the Bakken’s growth was so accelerated that initial waves were comprised of single men (Caraher et al. 2017; Moss 2014) who were eventually followed by their partners and children. In 2016, the FBI opened a regional office, amplifying residents’ concerns about drug and human/sex trafficking. These developments, and the experiences and conversations that I describe below, situate residents of the Bakken into a form of “energy citizenship” (Carlson 2016) that structures most aspects of their lives.

In the following analysis, I draw on Bear et al.’s (2015) robust feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism in order to interrogate the figure of the economically productive worker and to demonstrate its generative dimensions, i.e., “the very processes. . .through which [economic] systems and socialities are made.” I bring this into conversation with post-work, feminist, and disability studies scholarship in order to argue that “jobs” in places like the Bakken, and in the long COVID-19 landscape, are a patently unsuitable solution to meeting material needs, making lives (more) meaningful, and achieving more just social relations. “Work,” argue Bear et al. (2015), “often takes for granted what counts as. . .the economic. It thereby narrows analyses of the generative processes of production, distribution, and consumption, and removes from consideration the ways in which these processes variably entail broader. . .relations.” Residents and temporary transplants alike characterized life in the Bakken as for and about workers, and workers, in turn, were understood to be able-bodied, primarily masculine, uncomplaining, and nimble. I use interview-derived and ethnographic insights to argue that economic self-sufficiency is a woefully inadequate model for meeting the material needs of people and, in a brief concluding discussion, that labor innovations such as a universal basic income (UBI) are necessary to achieve the kinds of flourishing sought by those participating in the “great resignation.”

Economic Refugees

In early COVID discourse, the figure of the essential worker was nearly canonized: yard signs, advertising, and targeted giving campaigns sentimentally thanked health care workers, delivery drivers, and grocery store employees alike for enabling the rest of us to experience our lockdowns in relative comfort. Peoples’ willingness to “keep the country going,” despite a very understandable set of fears and constraints, was understood in noble and even sacrificial terms. Similarly, much of the “talk” (Carlson 2016) in the Bakken concerned virtue, and the equating of work with morality (Sherman 2009) frequently surfaced in conversations about who did and didn’t deserve to succeed. Several residents referenced people who understood themselves as “better than” what the region had to offer, people who would leave once they’d secured the economic stability for which they had come. Compounded extraction was sanctioned, in other words, but personal positive regard was also tied to a “shoulder to shoulder” attitude toward the broader extractive project and its role in securing the American Dream. Lynn and Amanda, two middle-aged white women who I met via a town official, illustrate this local ideology through their self-definition as “economic refugees.” An intersection of age and gender led both to believe that the Bakken was their “last shot” and, indeed, a mutual acquaintance told me later—and with breathless admiration—that both women “knew what it was like to not have any dreams but this one.”

The relative respectability of these womens’ struggle was epitomized by their self-assignation as “refugees.” But their use of the concept relies on something called an “economy,” a social construction that they conjure via their vulnerability to it. At the time we met, both women were professionally precarious, earning money in and also on the fringes of formal wage work. Yet their use of the word “refugee” evoked nostalgia for a stable economic order that existed neither where they came from nor where they had landed. Though the local paper ran headlines like “Williston Job Fair Brings out Hundreds to Fill Thousands” (Williams 2014), the misalignment between jobs, workers, and wages was far more complex and multidirectional; the one-way bus tickets provided by local charities stood as just one form of evidence of those who, failed by the boom, were literally sent away.

What, then, is an economy and how does one feel exiled from it? Rather than being two individuals moving from one bounded (and busted) “economy” to another (booming) one, Mitchell (2008) would have us understand Amanda and Lynn as part of a broader economic “project,” a regime “based upon new technologies of organization, measurement, calculation, and representation” (1120); they represent, in other words, core dimensions of a project whose success is measured by “the extent to which it helps make of the wider world places where its facts can survive” (Mitchell 2008, 1119). As people who had come from somewhere (else), and to the Bakken, Lynn and Amanda intersected with hydraulic fracturing technologies, man camps, mineral rights, a bus station, oil trains, and pools of feminized labor to realize and enliven the boom. Carlson (2016) notes “how life forms are appropriated in—and articulated through—energy development projects.” Here, we see how participation in a fossil fuel boom is shaped by the repudiation of any number of alternative economic worlds, including those shaped by mutual aid, degrowth, nationalized energy projects, or a Civilian Climate Corps (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013; Bell, Daggett, and Labuski 2020; Sciales 2021).

Such an analysis does not center the individual choices of Lynn and Amanda; rather, alongside Bear et al. (2015), it seeks to “demonstrate the taken-for-grantedness of [the] already made worlds” that are presumed to cohere in the narratives of “the economy” to which they subscribe. Such narratives—abundantly available via mainstream media and amplified in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—artificially separate “the economy” from the meeting of material needs, primarily via economic growth measures like the GDP (Hickel 2020). So inadequate is the GDP in properly signifying working peoples’ economic realities, a veritable cottage industry of alternatives has proliferated over the past several decades (Hoekstra 2019). Much of this work presciently anticipated the dire effects of so-called essential workers during the pandemic’s early months, when the coercive nature of the “my livelihood or my life” equation was born of their experiences. Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick made international news by proclaiming that he would prefer to risk a then-likely fatal COVID-19 infection than to “see the whole country. . .sacrificed” and that an economic shutdown was “worse than dying” (Livingston 2020). Patrick’s grotesque sound bites perfectly capture the pre-pandemic affects in the Bakken, where the pressure to hustle normalized extraction, harmed workers, separated families, and taught people that it was reasonable to exchange dangerous and exploitative work for greater economic security. And though these labor landscapes differ in important ways (e.g., extractive economies long precede the U.S.’s COVID-19 labor landscape), both scenarios poignantly remind us that perhaps no one is an economic refugee; that neither boomtown nor pandemic workers are safe from the “unstable [and] contingent networks of capitalism that surround us” (Bear et al. 2015).

(Some) Warm Bodies

Across both pandemic and boomtown economies, the economically productive worker always articulates gender, race, ability, educational background, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. The fictionalized nature of the “Any warm body” mantra in the Bakken attunes us to the practices and strategies through which only certain bodies are allowed to labor, and how some lucrative forms of work are practiced by a very specific identity—that of a white, able-bodied, self-regulating and socially reproduced cisnormative man. Work, like every other social experience, is intersectionally stratified (Choo and Ferree 2010; McBride, Hebson, and Holgate 2015) and inequalities are generated and maintained via large-scale structures as well as interpersonal interactions. In the following sections, I use ethnographic and interview-derived data to demonstrate how some of these mechanisms played out in the Bakken and how gender and (dis)ability specifically were subject to the “contingent production of inequality and structural violence” (Bear et al. 2015) of the Bakken’s labor landscape.

Bear et al. (2015) maintain that “[capitalist networks] are generated from heterogeneity and difference, and from our varied pursuits of being and becoming particular kinds of people [and]. . .communities.” Boomtown work patterns reveal how these modes of difference are ranked and (de)valued as well as how the meaning of an economically productive person comes to reflect and reproduce this constructed hierarchy. My interviews and observations in the Bakken reveal discriminatory attitudes and practices through which workers are unevenly rewarded and penalized; productivity, then, becomes less about “those who work [and] those who don’t” (Sherman 2009) and more about how that aphorism is always shot through with forms of devalued difference. Though my focus in this essay is on the modes of discrimination about which I was able to gather the most data (i.e., gender and (dis)ability), forms of workplace discrimination are constrained only by the limits of peoples’ identities and lived realities (and hierarchical imaginations), with racial discrimination being one of the most salient and enduring in the United States (Pager and Shepherd 2008). In other words, in a work world structured by “difference as pejoration” (Braidotti 2017) identity dimensions such as those described below will always shape the degree to which anyone can meet their material needs through work.

Gender Discrimination and Structural Violence

Journalists began singling out Bakken gender relations as a site of dramatic social upheaval in the mid-2010s (Bryan 2014; Brown 2013). The massive influx of men seeking work—pitching tents downtown, sleeping in churches (Moss 2014), squeezed into man-camps (Caraher et al. 2017)—was an international spectacle, and concerns about sexual and domestic violence, as well as drug and sex trafficking, emerged alongside the reporting. Arriving for the first time in 2015, I observed only indirect evidence of these upheavals: women were rarely alone in public and most described cultivating habits to protect themselves from gender-based violence despite not having experienced any. How gender did emerge was via robust and widely reproduced narratives that wove seamless and naturalized connections between conventional gender roles, biological differences, heteronormative family arrangements, and feminized sexuality as both a boon and an obstacle for available forms of labor. Tropes of women who might tempt a partnered male coworker and stereotypes about the “drama” that women bring to the workplace were common and therefore impossible to disentangle from how women were imagined as workers. Moreover, not only do extractive economies rely on the reproductive labor of feminized workers, they also produce their own forms of gender-based violence. Perilous working conditions, long hours, and single-gender housing arrangements were routinely recruited to rationalize men who would “act out” under such conditions. And though beyond the scope of my research and analysis, it must be noted that Indigenous women—largely due to how tribal governance intersects with federal and state laws in the United States (Deer 2015)—are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in extractive zones (Grisafi 2019; Manning et al 2018; O’Feral and Heck 2020).

Attending to gender meant noticing a glitch in the wages + opportunity = economic well-being formula: overt and covert forms of discrimination. Men were preferred for work in the extractive industries; this included not only roustabouts and deckhands but also drivers and inspectors. Physical strength and bathroom access were two of the most commonly voiced “facts” regarding why rig work was so heavily masculinized, a pattern noted by Rolston (2014) in her study of Wyoming surface miners. Rolston found that the routine use of coveralls and oversize equipment led many women to drink less water in order to avoid the logistical difficulties and harassment that accompanied their bathroom breaks. In both sites, productivist and gendered logics were deployed in order to stabilize hierarchies through which hegemonic forms of masculinity were privileged. Cultural narratives about women who compete with men for a “family wage” (Scott 2010) articulate with very specific technologies, which are themselves designed around an able body whose elimination habits are compatible with coveralls, in order to naturalize the work as masculine. In truth, simple technologies like Stand-To-Pee devices (Cauterucci 2020), redesigned coveralls, and a differently structured workday could solve each of these problems. But what we see instead is the active construction of a sociotechnical imaginary through which certain workers become marginalized. During my fieldwork, physical strength emerged most saliently during my (all-woman) rig training in that none of us could single-handedly lift a section of pipe from the ground onto the raised deck through which we would guide it underground. What we learned from our trainer, however, was that virtually all rigs employ a mechanical pipe feeder that obviates this problem.

Nebulous beliefs about sex-linked biological capacities and habituated gender roles were not limited to women: when I asked local folks what it would mean for a white, U.S.-born, able-bodied man to work in the service sector, I was told that his masculinity and sexuality would likely be questioned. This attitude was tied not only to the physicality of rig work but also to its high wages. A trucking company rep who I met at a job fair told me that his company struggled to retain mechanics in the context of oil and gas jobs: Why would anyone choose against that money? I occasionally raised this topic while talking with local women and Kim put it this way: “When I see males serving, I think ‘Why aren’t you out there making more money?’ You still make a lot of money serving, but you make a lot more on the rig.”

Women could access rig work via support industries such as environmental engineering and, indeed, this was the case for most of the women engineers I met. Shadaan and Murphy (2020, 5) call this “environmental sexism,” noting the specific division of labor that feminizes environmental stewardship (see also Unger 2012). For the most part, however, women who came to the Bakken to “chase the money” were steered toward socially reproductive labor: cooking and cleaning in a man-camp or hotel; food and beverage service; retail; clerical work; health care; local government jobs; social services; and sex work. None of this work paid self-sufficient wages and the women I met who performed this labor had the majority of their material needs met by the (better-paid) men with whom they arrived.

The nativist and racialized dimensions of Bakken workers were contoured by a combination of racialized stereotypes, national and international migration patterns, and regulatory loopholes through which oil and gas companies could exploit foreign-born workers. The Black workers that I encountered were mostly men and were a mix of African migrants and still-migrating Hurricane Katrina refugees; many worked in service and retail, evincing the ways that race is often lived and perceived via gendered filters (Choo and Ferree 2010). Because of both my research focus and the relative whiteness of the region, my conversations about race were less formal and rarer than those I had about gender. Some residents were delighted by the greater racial diversity in their town and those who voiced displeasure often did so in the context of the region’s broader growth patterns. A potent form of xenophobia surfaced in relation to the local Walmart, a place that was often fearfully invoked, particularly during my earlier visits (Kilanski 2015). My own experiences of being routinely leered at while moving through the store, typically as one of only a handful of femme-bodied people, helped me to understand the gendered nature of peoples’ trepidation. Nevertheless, it was hard to ignore the possibility that the Black faces and bodies of Walmart workers likely also played a role in how the store was characterized.

A woman named Maverick constituted a rare exception to the demographic patterns that I observed. A Black woman who had relocated to start a small food business, Maverick’s presence in the Bakken was also influenced by a man, a friend who sponsored her move and initial expenses. When the venture failed, and she was buttressed by housing support from another transplanted woman, Maverick decided to pursue oil and gas money in earnest. She secured a few jobs but her refusal to grant an employer’s request for some illegal bookkeeping (on top of her manual labor job) led Maverick to experience both racial and gendered forms of discrimination. She tried to solve this by pursuing a commercial driver’s license (CDL) which would have not only minimized her exposure to coworkers’ microaggressions, but also helped her to secure better-paying jobs elsewhere. The cost for CDL training was $5,000 and grants to enroll were offered by the local employment agency. But because Maverick’s pre-Bakken work experience was primarily administrative, she was deemed ineligible, unable to transcend the gender-coded nature of her labor history.

Gendered Modes of Interpersonal and Social Upheaval

Some forms of gender-based discrimination surfaced as a preference for men and masculinity. A video for oil rig workers, which I watched as part of my 2018 training, portrayed the work as physically unpleasant and eminently masculine (My fieldnotes characterize the script as boiling down to “Don’t be a p*ssy!”). The video’s narrator stresses that the work is “dirty, wet, and cold” and that “no one will bring you lunch.” Indeed, because the work goes “from sunup to sundown,” viewers learn that they likely won’t even get a lunch break. Given these privations, the narrator asks, “Why would someone do this job?!” The answer is provided in moralizing and masculinized terms: Because they “like to see the sun come up,” “take pride” in their work and maintain “old-fashioned” values. The work may be backbreaking, the voiceover concludes, “but it’s all worth it when you see your paycheck!” Underscoring and naturalizing the heteronormative dimensions of these work arrangements, one woman who worked on the HR side of the industry told me that a rig crew becomes “like a small family” who both “take care of” and “know a lot about” each other, including one another’s medical needs.

Beliefs about biological capacity intersected with sexualized narratives, deepening a heteronormative division of labor that physically separated women from men and that naturalized socially reproductive labor. This was most clearly instantiated by the Oilfield Wives and Girlfriends, a group that socialized and traded survival strategies, both online and in person, for enacting the domestic roles that members had moved to the Bakken to perform (e.g., organizing playdates). Some women took exception to this role, rolling their eyes about the “bling” that these “wives and girlfriends” allegedly brandished; many were partnered with men in the industry but didn’t understand themselves in “girlfriend” terms because they earned their own money. Nevertheless, the work in which this latter group of women was engaged almost always conformed to the gendered division of labor that served the region’s family wage model. They were underpaid and working hard in hotels, man-camps, coffee shops, restaurants, retail establishments, and medical and social services, as well as in roadside coffee shops with names like C-Cup Coffee and Boomtown Babes.

Ideas about gender in the Bakken were not limited to journalists and local women. While waiting in a hotel lobby one day, I met a man named Wyatt who, on my prompt, listed the following three reasons why women didn’t work oil and gas jobs: (1) they didn’t want to get dirty; (2) they misunderstood what the work entailed (many believed themselves physically incapable but Wyatt disagreed); and (3) they preferred to access the economic boom through a man, letting him do “the hard work” while they spent the/his money. Wyatt’s hypotheses evidence Weeks’ (2011, 11) assertion that “the occupational segregation that is part and parcel of the gender division of labor stands as supposed empirical proof of the necessity of gender difference and hierarchy.” Indeed, Sarah, one of the very few women I met who had worked on a rig site, substantiated Wyatt’s claims by arguing that “it’s not because women can’t do it, it’s [because they] choose not to”; women, she continued “won’t tolerate conditions that are intensely manual.” And because withstanding these conditions for at least several years is the way to move into physically easier and more lucrative management work, the ratio of men to women grows increasingly disproportionate. “[M]ost women,” said Sarah, “won’t stick it out that long. [. . .]. [Y]ou’re talking 12 years of pulling pipe and that’s way harder than anything I was doing.’”

The fact that the work itself is heavily masculinized—recruiting billboards depict muscular white rig workers, and engineers, particularly those involved in environmental or safety regulation, are feminized by men like Wyatt (he called them the “little engineers” whose knowledge of drilling was inferior to his)—further indexes Weeks’ argument. Sarah’s claim that the work is simply too dirty for women is both complemented by claims that it’s too difficult and dangerous but also undermined by narratives about women who don’t want their husbands working long hours around women who might tempt them, and about restaurants who won’t hire male servers because they need women to attract the disposable cash of the (masculine) rig workers. Weeks (2011, 10) argues that “for an employee, it is not merely a matter of bringing one’s gendered self to work but of becoming gendered in and through work. For an employer, it is not just a matter of hiring masculine and feminine workers and putting them to work, but of actively managing workers’ gendered identities and relationships.”

When I interviewed Sarah, part of her job involved hiring workers for an oil and gas company. She spoke eloquently about the gendered details of her work experience, starting with her first day on a rig in West Virginia: she sized up the filth and coed living arrangements and told herself “This is not going to work.” Sarah also described how the coveralls that she was provided were not designed to accommodate breasts: because they kept coming unzipped, they exposed more of her cleavage than her regular clothing would have. Sarah was attentive to the gendered aspects of the work she’d chosen but rather than use this experience to agitate for change (e.g., in clothing design or regulations), she instead naturalized a strict division of labor.

In the following interview exchange about how she parses gender in hiring decisions, Sarah evinces a set of “cultural means by which. . . ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as [something that is] prior to culture,” (Butler 1990, 113) and how that alleged “sex” subsequently contours laboring subjects.

Here, Sarah describes the same behavior—“crying,” “eyes welling up”—along lines that reify the Bakken’s gendered division of labor: when men cry, they are invited to “buck it up,” whereas the risk that a woman might cry provides the rationale for denying her an opportunity, fashioning “the specific kind of feminized or masculinized subjects [that employers] imagine that they have already hired” (Weeks 2011, 10). Intriguingly, Sarah attributes this behavior to her interest in helping women. But the individualist frame through which she interprets her own success obscures her ability to see that her assumptions about men’s and women’s relative capacities to labor limit rather than expand women’s professional horizons. Unsurprisingly, these assumptions align with a heteronormative imaginary that routinely contains women’s bodily and sexual comportment.

In a neoliberal context, when forms of exchange are organized around autonomous agents selling labor in individualized arrangements, womens’ dependence on male partners increases their economic and physical vulnerability, something I both observed working alongside social workers and heard about from domestic violence shelter staff. Shelter clients had frequently come to the Bakken in order to join a man, but when the relationship dissolved, were stuck with neither a network nor the means to support themselves. What’s noteworthy here is how gender articulates the extractive neoliberal subject of the region, who is shaped by a town that refuses to provide an infrastructure for people that can’t work. For Bear et al. (2015), this is evidence not only of how capitalism is “at its core, a diverse, intimate network of human. . .relations,” but also of the “heterogeneous processes through which people [and] . . .labor are converted into resources for various projects of production. Some of these conversions are enacted through. . .money [or] contracts. . . [but o]ther conversions occur through intimate social relations such as marriage, parenthood, [and] friendship. . ..”

These intimate capitalist projects are evident in Daisy’s description of how “some people surprise [her] and [. . .a]re still around in three months”—“the women that are maybe having to depend on some man that they met and they’re getting a roof over their head in exchange for whatever so, you know. . ..” Here, women for whom wages are not forthcoming, and who can’t imagine their productivity or worth outside of the particular configuration of resources, technologies, and financial arrangements called a “boom(ing) economy” exchange “whatever” for a roof over their head. Weeks (2020, 578) speaks to this as well: “The family is supposed to be our safety net. But. . .whereas the state assumes the family is our first option, many of us see it only as a last resort. . .. And, of course, this assumes that we have families, that they are bearable, and that these families include waged workers who have sharable income. . ..” The intimacy of these projects became acutely evident to Daisy when her husband, whose oil and gas job subsidized their housing (and therefore her ability to work for low wages), became violent. Though they were able to reconcile, his behavior left Daisy and her toddler temporarily scrambling for shelter.

Ableism, Erasure, and Illegibility

(Dis)ability also influenced peoples’ relative capacity to “make it” in the Bakken. Shanna argued that though companies claimed to want “all warm bodies,” there was a physicality to much of the labor that excluded some people: “They ask you about being able to lift 50 pounds or heavier on an application. I think if you’re healthy and capable then definitely,” while Tammy told me that the long and difficult hours “weed[ed] out the weak ones.” Such instances of explicit “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 2006) went unquestioned by almost everyone I met. Social service provider Daisy put it this way:

[S]o if they’re mentally ill, if they have severe addiction problems, . . .. [B]asically anybody that has some sort of vulnerability [, . . .] you know, poor background, poor, sketchy work history, it’s gonna be really difficult.

Disability, in other words, was as unthinkable as recycling or as unextracted oil and gas. Indeed, disabled bodies in the Bakken were the antithesis of what Hamraie and Fritsch (2019, 20) call for in their crip technoscience manifesto, where “disabled life is. . .desirable [and] . . .worth living.” Hamraie and Fritsch (2019, 2) “agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence,” summoning instead a world organized around interdependence and accessibility. Being a worker in the Bakken required that one could physically and mentally “do the job” and my questions about who failed were almost always answered in ableist terms.

Daisy explained that veterans could access a few more services related to addiction and mental health care but repeatedly stressed that “If they’re not a veteran. . .,” their better choice would be to secure a bus ticket home from a charitable organization. These bus tickets render the Bakken as a world that erases disabled people, a world that glorifies individualist impulses and capacities and literally sends people away rather than reconfigure ableist structures (Hendren 2020; McRuer 2006). This pretense of self-sufficiency, in addition to willfully obscuring the invisible care and reproductive labor that structures any individual’s relative success, reveals the inadequacy of understanding disability in terms of “access,” a concept that Hamraie and Fritsch (2019, 10) describe as “a site of political friction and contestation.” In other words, the Bakken’s extractive ideologies rely on ableism to function; making the jobs “accessible” would mean altering the 365/24/7 pace at which they are performed. For Hamraie and Fritsch (2019, 6), “access-making” is not about an individual’s right or ability to gain entry to an ableist world but is, rather, comprised of “acts of non-compliance and protest” for spaces and worlds where “disability is anticipated and welcomed, and in which all disabled people thrive, regardless of their productivity.”

Disability activists and scholars remind us that being nondisabled is almost always a temporary condition (Clare 2017; Hendren 2020) and that agitating for more accessible worlds is a necessarily collective project. In the Bakken, the ephemerality of an able body was acutely evident in that much of the work was itself disabling; jobs from which people were excluded, based on physical capacity, were also sources of disability. One morning I received a text from Daisy asking if I could help with a move. A couple, Gary and Anita, was leaving town because Gary had “wrecked” his knee and could no longer work, rendering him and Anita ineligible for their company-subsidized apartment. They were returning home so that Gary could secure medical treatment and resume his status as a productive worker: “He’s such a hard worker; he needs to work,” Anita told me. My fieldnotes from that morning reflect on the rise and fall of Gary’s masculine and able body, about how neatly gender and disability intersect in this couple’s experience, and how the very same body through which he accessed housing and a measure of economic stability is the one that, now broken, has failed him. “It kills him,” Anita continued, “to watch other men pack up his house.” In the context of a body broken by one’s labors (Holmes 2013), this couple have the opportunity to refuse productivist structures through which Gary’s embodied labor is no longer valuable. Such a refusal might still seek to repair an injured body, but could do so from the understanding that “people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity” (Sins Invalid 2016, 17). “Bodies,” argue Hamraie and Fritsch (2019, 22), “need not be perceived as productive, legible, articulate, or beautiful to be understood as important agents of world remaking.”

Glen, the man who ran my 2018 training, had worked on rigs for years but was now disabled from that work due to repeated back injuries. Unable to function at the grueling and exhaustive pace, he had been demoted—in both pay and masculine privilege—to an inside office job of training. On the prompt of his all-woman training cohort, Glen revealed that he wouldn’t “allow” his sister or wife to work on a rig, largely because of how it could disable them, demonstrating the intersectionally ranked nature of identity dimensions (i.e., a disabled woman is less valuable than a disabled man). Moreover, our training videos relied on the specter of such accidents to instruct potential rig workers about the unlivable nature of disability. Reminding viewers, first, that they will need all their body parts to do the job, a video instructing workers about how easily hands can get caught in a damaging “pinch point,” the narrator exclaims “Can you imagine not having your hand? You couldn’t play a piano, use an adding machine, or even touch a partner! . . .. Hands and fingers are very valuable to all of us. It can be a very tough life without them.” Finally, age emerges as a devalued category in a section that takes learners through a thorough description of “basic tools.” The masculine voice conveys that they’ve added this material “because a lot of young people don’t know about tools [anymore].”

Cripping the Bakken

Weeks (2020) notes the ways that such forms of vulnerability make life in a world structured by work nearly impossible and are sometimes the catalyst for other work imaginaries: “[T]oo many of us have nothing or little in the way of support when our body-minds are rendered disabled by. . .waged work” (Weeks, 578–9). Quoting disability activist Sunny Taylor, Weeks further notes “the damaging effects of the fact that ‘many, though by no means all, disabled people will never be good workers in the capitalist sense.’” Indeed, Taylor (2004, 39–40) calls for “the right not to work with pride[;] ‘the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary.’”

The privileging of fit and able body-minds augmented the ongoing valorization of “hard work” in the Bakken (Peters 2014). Tammy, who, along with her mom, had “chased the [oil and gas] money” across Utah, Wyoming, Alaska, and now North Dakota, tied this to the physical environment: “The winters are long and hard here. It’s the same in Alaska. It weeds out the weak ones. Everyone who’s here that’s not from here is extremely brave.” When I asked if people perhaps worked too hard, she responded “I think work should dominate. I don’t watch TV because I’m always doing something.” When I asked about who “can’t make it,” Tammy told me “If they’re lazy, can’t pass a drug-test, or miss their family too much,” conflating addiction, sadness, and immorality in order to rationalize the extractive pace and hierarchies of compounded extraction.

Mainstream representations and discourses individualize disability, and biomedical discourses in particular depoliticize the refusals that disabled people have the capacity to enact. Crip theory, however, imagines disability as a collective political experience of both world-building and dismantling. In the Bakken, this would mean not only including disabled people in the local economy and continuing to care for and welcome the bodies and minds that have been disabled by energy sector labor, but also learning from these lives and bodies and restructuring economic and social life accordingly. A boomtown informed by crip theory would acknowledge the harms—bodily and planetary—perpetrated by fossil fuel extraction, “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) that these processes have caused and strengthening the community via collective projects, such as building renewable energy infrastructures and remediating contaminated land and water. These forms of interdependence, argue Hamraie and Fritsch (2019), and the “struggle, negotiation, and creativity” (12) they enact, become “political technolog[ies] for materializing better worlds” (13).

Tammy articulates her experience in the Bakken as steeped in individual ruggedness and self-determination and, alongside Sarah, rejects (feminized) sadness and vulnerability, equating them with weakness. But despite this blustering rhetoric, interdependence was a key mechanism for “making it” in the Bakken. Not only did people like Tammy routinely rely on other folks, for example, for social and commercial interaction (Tammy co-ran a local business), social service agencies were loathe to subsidize the food or housing needs of people who were in the area without demonstrable material support, such as friends or relatives.

Conclusion: From Exploited Presents to Interdependent Futures?

When I met Kate, she was securing a housing voucher and a food box because the job she’d relocated to the Bakken to perform had just been given to someone else. She had been told that her (feminine) gender had played a role, that someone in the company “didn’t want to work with a woman.” Undeterred, Kate remarked, “Well, you’ve gotta have a Plan B up here!” Such aphorisms, though important for people like Kate, whose material needs require that they pivot, neglect to consider the grotesquely uneven ways that plans—A, B, and beyond—are always rendered vulnerable by the normalization of ranked difference.

The radical interdependence invoked by Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) is a concept with which exploited workers can think about refusing these forms of devaluation, and post-work innovations such as a UBI are an avenue through which greater levels of interdependence might be achieved. Though a full treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay, I mention it in closing because of the ways that recent calls for a UBI (Daggett 2019; Weeks 2020) help us to better imagine the transformative potential of material stability. Without this kind of stability, workers in the United States will remain deeply precarious and, as unemployment decreases, employers can and will engage in the kinds of discrimination I’ve described here. In considering my ethnographic data from the hindsight of the pandemic, it is clear that even in moments and locations that are brimming with work, scores of people will fall away from the labor landscape, unable to map themselves onto the figure of the economically productive worker. The buses leaving the Bakken were filled with people who had pursued an economic situation on the situation’s terms: workers who were largely white, documented, dominant language speaking, and mobile enough to take advantage of what many unquestioningly referred to as a “jobs boom.” What if a more stable and generous infrastructure had allowed them to stay? Might some of them have secured enough economic stability to subsidize someone else? The debt relief experienced by many Bakken workers can be achieved through means other than individualized and body-breaking work; it can also be achieved via modes of non-extractive and caring labor, if and when that work is materially rewarded (HSCSW 2020). Shorter work weeks and a UBI make it possible to engage in collective projects and forms of generative labor that invest in community well-being, such as mutual aid or a Civilian Climate Corps (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healty 2013; Sciales 2021), modes of interdependence that can be understood as political technologies (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019).

Kate’s gender is just one alleged “difference” that workers will always bring to their workplaces, where “difference” is defined by hegemonic hierarchies that structure labor landscapes. Kate’s situation indexes the tenacity of such structures, reminding us that even measures like shorter work weeks or a UBI will be inflected by how these differences are ranked and lived, and by how they are perceived by those who will design and oversee the implementation of these economic programs. Lombardozzi has outlined how “gender-based discrimination, wage gaps, an androcentric welfare system, unequal care responsibilities and lack of job opportunities” will shape the substrate of post-work innovations and suggests that a UBI cannot stabilize well-being across gender identity should these problems “persist and remain embedded in the dominant social relations of production and reproduction” (Lombardozzi 2020, 320). And though Lombardozzi’s argument is specific to the “permanent material disadvantage” (Lombardozzi 2020, 318) of minoritarian genders, it should prompt us to investigate how the success of a UBI will also be undermined by factors such as race and disability.

In 2015, Daisy became infuriated with her mayor when he told a local journalist that he was unwilling to “clean up the mess” left by people whose dreams had failed in the Bakken. This stance was a primary reason why bus tickets out of town depended on local charities and why the nearest housing shelter was hundreds of miles away. But whose mess was the mayor describing? Was it Kate’s, or Maverick’s? Anita and Gary’s? All of these people arrived in the Bakken ready to work, and all of them eventually needed help. “The town isn’t doing any cleaning up,” Daisy fumed. “They’re just outsourcing [the mess] to service providers and charity groups,” a sentiment echoed by Brittany, who told me that people “literally get stuck here, every day, multiple times a day.” These insights demonstrate how a boomtown economy is (also) a cruelly optimistic shell game, with wages, opportunity, and economic well-being forever dynamic and elusive, and rarely secured at the same time.

The jobs involved in compounded extraction harm the planet and the people who perform them; there are numerous and compelling reasons to discontinue these forms of work (Bell, Daggett, and Labuski 2020; Hickel 2020; Sciales 2021). But our solution to this problem must move beyond replacing extractive jobs with so-called “green” ones, leaving intersectionally stratified labor relations unchanged. The COVID-19 category of essential workers that ranged from respiratory therapists to meat packers raised important questions about human and planetary needs: Is unchecked meat consumption on par with healthy breathing? What forms of mutual aid and interdependence are possible during an infectious pandemic? (How) does the valorization of economic growth distort what counts as a problem? Degrowth proponents remind us that not all growth is untoward; some sectors of local and national economies, such as public transportation, will need to grow in a transition away from fossil fuel extraction and refinement. Indeed, people in the Bakken told me that they needed therapy, a Target, and a car wash; my fieldwork suggests that their labor landscape might also benefit from a recycling program, disability and elderly services, and capping abandoned wells.

The COVID-19 economy has radically reshaped the labor dreams of U.S. workers, many of whom are poignantly aware of the need for Plans A, B, and beyond. Such plans must not only meet material needs, but must also center the well-being of both people and the planet; the agendas of climate, reproductive, gender, disability, racial, Indigenous, and geopolitical justice movements have converged during our varied responses to COVID-19 (HSCSW 2020), demonstrating how interconnected these struggles have always been. My experience in the Bakken suggests that the social hierarchies refused by these movements run deep, perhaps as deep as the sweet crude housed in Bakken shale. We must therefore strive to replace the drilling technologies that fracture and destabilize the ground on which these social arrangements are lived with sociopolitical imaginaries through which more just and plural relations can be enacted.