2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Working in the oil and gas shalefields of the United States involves multiple hazards, including heavy equipment, chemical toxins, and high-pressure environments, that expose drill-site workers to embodied risks. The work also invites criticism of those who follow extractive industries for lucrative pay in the boomtowns of the American West. This paper examines the labor-environment nexus through the discourses of the American oil and gas boom since 2005. I develop the concept of a drill worker aesthetic that aligns the masculine, blue-collar body with toxicity and violence against land and people. Through interviews with drill-site workers and analyses of media reports, stakeholder narratives, and marketing campaigns, I argue that the fracking boom has produced a specific working-class identity affixed to men working in the shalefields and circulated by media and their public audiences. A primary research question asks, how do dominant discourses that are available for discussing the blue-collar labor of fracking simultaneously close alternative narratives about the dangers of drilling to humans and nature? The drill worker aesthetic that is produced through popular media reports shifts attention from the risks required by drilling companies to the choices of individual workers to seek high paying jobs. I also discuss how the aesthetic is reproduced through marketing and the workers themselves, who embrace its distinct style. The danger of perpetuating this identity can be found in the criticism that workers face for accidents, even when they themselves are harmed in the process. Workers come to be identified with the lawless landscapes that they tend and characterized as a social threat without roots, wild and untamed, putting them at risk of being constructed as disposable as the land they frack.