The extraction of mineral and fossil resources has historically been inseparable from the deployment of human bodies. Mines, quarries, oil fields, and other extractive environments do not merely exploit pre-existing bodies: they shape bodies through labor regimes, technologies, spatial arrangements, and economies of health that respond to the demands of production. The body of the miner, for instance, is produced through repetitive movements, exposure to dust and toxic substances, exhaustion, injury, and the disciplinary organization of time. At the same time, such bodily regimes are profoundly shaped by the material properties of the extracted resource and their technological context, which dictate particular practices of extraction. Furthermore, representations of bodies within extractive economies respond to gendered conceptions of labor, strength, endurance, vulnerability, and care.

This panel explores the relationship between extractive economies and bodily regimes in the age of fossil carbon. It asks how bodies are materially and culturally produced within different extractive environments and how literary and cultural forms register, reproduce, negotiate, or contest these processes. Particular attention will be paid to the historical and regional specificities of extractive economies and to the ways in which literary cultures shape and are shaped by local histories of mining, fossil-fuel production, and resource exploitation. We therefore invite papers that explore a wide range of historical and geographical contexts marked by extractive economies affecting bodies and lives.

The panel understands the body as a contested site in which the demands of production encounter the limits of human corporeality. How are bodies disciplined and adapted to the mine, the oil field, or other extractive spaces? How are health, illness, injury, endurance, and productivity organized within extractive economies? What gendered imaginaries sustain particular forms of bodily labor? And how do bodies resist, adapt, improvise, and develop practices of survival within regimes that seek to render them productive?

By bringing together literary studies, cultural history, environmental humanities, and theories of the body and labor, the panel investigates the reciprocal relationship between resource extraction and corporeal production. It seeks to understand how literary cultures make visible the bodily costs of fossil capitalism while also deploying forms of embodied knowledge, resistance, and survival that exceed the imperatives of extraction.