By examining representations of disabled workers in modern Chinese literature and film, the four presentations in this panel question the boundary between productivity and non-productivity, initiating critiques of imperialist racialization, capitalist exploitation, state rehabilitation, and rural debilitation. This panel understands “disability” not as a universal category but as historically grounded experiences of “debilitating,” to borrow queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar’s concept, by social conditions beyond neoliberal order. It also reconceptualizes “worker” not as an ableist category but as a corporeal process of becoming that confronts the politics of abstract labor and productivism. The openness of these processes lends itself to envisioning alternative working conditions where the disabled can reclaim their agency. This session includes four fifteen-minute presentations and fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion.

The first paper, “Body and Dream: Dis/Enabling the Diasporic Chinese Labor in Late-Qing Fiction,” delivered by Tianyun Hua, examines the racialization of the diasporic Chinese labor and the dis/enabling of them in discursive realm between the mid-19th century to early-20th century through reading two late Qing fictions Bitter Society (1905) and Golden World (1907) in the socio-historical context of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the US and its boycott in China. Bitter Society realistically presents the bodily experiences of how Chinese laborers were disabled upon arrival and racialized as inferiority by the anti-Chinese discourse in the US. As a comparison, Golden World provides a utopian dream of colonization to enable and empower the Chinese labor, which nonetheless was regulated by the logic of colonization and ableism.

In the second paper, “Amputated Agents of Revolution: The Double Logic of Alienation in Guo Moruo’s Fairytale ‘A Hand,’” Jiahe Mei uncovers the resonance between “alienating” and “disabling/amputating” in Chinese revolutionary writer Guo Moruo’s lesser-known fairytale “A Hand” (1927), which identifies the agents of revolution as a “crip family:” a blind father, a paralyzed mother, and a hand-amputated child laborer, with all their disabilities resulting from the detrimental working conditions in different factories. Mei argues that Guo’s fairytale manifests a double logic of alienation that turns the disabled (non)workers into the spearhead of revolution: disability is the extreme consequence of labor alienation that upholds capitalist production and class reproduction, but the uncanny scene of the weaponization of the amputated hand envisions the possibility of alienation negating itself.

The third paper, “‘Never Disabled’: Worker Disability, Technological Innovation, and a Critique of Productivism in 1950s China,” by Yiming Ma, explores how narratives of disability undercut Maoism’s voluntarist glorification of labor productivism by describing work conditions and productivity as socially constructed and transformable. He focuses on the stories and reportage produced during the Movement of Technological Innovation in 1950s China. In this Movement, various stories (e.g., On the Path to Technological Innovation) foreground disabled workers. These workers, instead of overcoming significant impairments to work physically, transform work for everyone, including the disabled, with innovations in mechanical automation and scientific management. In these stories, self-making myths, disability accommodation, and technocratic visions of socialist construction converge.

The final paper of Xuesong Shao, “Blindness as a Way of Seeing: Producing through Reenacting in Cut Out the Eyes,” analyzes Xu Tong’s 2014 independent documentary that looks into the work and life of a blind performer in the debilitated rural North China. While the agrarian lifeworld deemed his blindness as, to use the social Darwinian term, “unfit,” the protagonist cultivates his professional identity within the village-town-city-outskirt entertaining circuit by turning his violent story of cutting-out-the-eyes into a signature show. Xu’s documentary remediates the unsettling yet spectacular performance by scrutinizing the surrogate eye and problematizing the gaze. By complicating the aesthetic and ethical implications of reenacting bodily violence, Xu develops a dialectic discourse on vision and blindness vis-à-vis non-conventional laboring subjects and working conditions in rural China.