Another Place Is Possible? Labor Geography, Spatial Dispossession, and Gendered Resistance in Central Appalachia

Abstract

The demise of Fordism and inauguration of neoliberal policy regimes may be conceptualized as historical processes of spatial dispossession that diminish and sometimes destroy the collective spaces of working-class life. In central Appalachia, where miners’ militant, unionized brotherhood once influenced the geography of the bituminous coal industry and enabled the growth of active, working-class communities, spatial dispossession is especially stark. Here, neoliberalization of space involves not only the familiar dismantling of public institutions but also corporate enclosures of lands once treated as commons, withdrawal of residents from polluted local ecologies, intentional destruction of union solidarity, and erosion of miners’ heroic masculinity. Historical analysis reveals this dismantling of labor's gendered geography and degradation of working-class environments as mutually interrelated processes. Spatial dispossession is also evoking opposition, however, from reactionary, industry-orchestrated mobilizations to valorize coal in the name of masculinist nationalism, to fragmentary efforts, often led by women, seeking alternative economic and political possibilities. These conflict-ridden dynamics of spatial influence, dispossession, and (re)creation lay bare interrelated coproductions of gender and class, political economy and cultural practice, “nature” and society and thereby point toward a labor geography capable of engaging the contradictory forces that animate working-class life.