1 Break a Sweat

The Normal as Natural

The word normal circulates pervasively. It is often used to refer to a statistical or medical state of a body (e.g., “normal blood pressure,” “normal development”). It is also routinely deployed as a way of categorizing, evaluating, or judging people (e.g., “normal person”). The ubiquity of the normal might lure us into imagining that this concept is universal and transhistorical; what normal is seems straightforwardly evident—normal is just the way things are and have always been. Ideas about normalcy are, for many, simply a matter of common sense. For example, “normal” is not fat bodies, wrinkled skin, wheelchair use, or stimming. Yet, determinations of who or what is “obviously normal” rely on an intricate network of social, economic, and cultural values, beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and relations of power. In this way, what or who is normal is neither timeless nor universal. However, as Rod Michalko (2002, 82) points out, the persistent contemporary association of normalcy with timelessness and universality involves a process of concealment: “Normalcy blends into what is conceived of as ‘naturally given,’” he writes, “and the only way to sustain this camouflage is to avoid any attention.” Taken to be natural, the normal appears only to disappear into the background order of everyday life. The naturalization of the normal conceals its origins as a historically specific, ideologically constructed cultural phenomenon, one that is deeply entangled in the historical emergence and proliferation of racial capitalism. By examining the genealogy of the concept of normal and tracing its development through history, we reveal how norms blend bodily description and evaluation, bridging, as Ian Hacking (1990, 160) argues, “the fact/value distinction” and “whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.” Describing a normal body as one that is, for example, youthful, thin, white, and able-bodied is not only a description of that body but also a judgment or evaluation of those characteristics as positive and desirable, or even the only way to rightly be. The normal body is thus a body we should all want to have and strive to attain. The category of “normal” is infused with considerable power, and the effects of this power are not evenly distributed across populations.

This sense of normal as conceptually universal and politically neutral is key to the logic of the Gap ad and challenged by Unilever’s and Tommy Hilfiger’s denunciations of the normative status quo. The Gap ad presents Moss as typical, timeless, and universal. Yet, we know that Moss’s embodied look is highly curated. The idea of “normal dress” is made sensible by way of a calculated advertising strategy, one that is reliant upon classed, raced, and gendered trends in fashion, as well as culturally and historically specific norms of bodily desirability, ability, utility, and beauty. Further, as we explore in greater detail later in the chapter, the capacity to “dress normal” in the Global North is only made possible by camouflaging and naturalizing violently exploitative social relations of racial capitalism in the Global South—for example, by way of the debilitation of garment industry workers laboring in hazardous factory conditions and the ecological destruction associated with the logistics of transnational supply chains and just-in-time shipping. The normal is fashioned literally in the Gap clothing ad in the sense that this is an ad for a particular normative style of fashion. The normal is also fashioned figuratively in the ad insofar as it relies on a particular idea of what normal is, an idea constructed through a network of cultural values and inequitable and unjust social relations. Because normalcy’s cultural power rests in part on its invisibility and its capacity to blend into the background order of the everyday, Michalko (2009, 91) contends that the most abnormal thing we might do is attend “to its production” and denaturalize normalcy. The category, he reminds us, should always be treated as a contingent site of meaning-making, one that is constituted in and through relations of power. One way to denaturalize normal is to historicize it, to observe its shifts and adaptations across time and through space, and to attend to the particular social, political, and economic conditions that render it intelligible. Doing so helps us grapple with more recent calls to break with normalcy, as suggested by Unilever, or to create a new or more inclusive normal as called for by Tommy Hilfiger and some activists and social movements. Tracking the refusal of normalcy alongside its expansion enables us to lay bare the disposability of some people, kin, and ecologies at the heart of the infrastructures that allow a “return to normal” or a “new normal” for the few. In this way, we seek to break with the material conditions that maintain and repair dominant forms of normalcy and instead compose ourselves differently through practices of alteration.

Historicizing Normal

The concept of the normal is a relatively recent invention. Normal, in its contemporary usage denoting “usual,” “typical,” or “common,” was not formally introduced until 1848, and it did not become widely recognized until 1945 (Cryle and Stephens 2017, 1). Prior to this, normal was used in geometry deriving from the Latin word norma for a measurement device used in carpentry, masonry, and drafting to reproduce right angles. By the mid- to late nineteenth century in Western Europe, normal had become an important concept underpinning a new style of measurement: statistics. With the introduction of the “normal curve” or “normal distribution,” normal became a law of mathematics positing that the further a given variance is from the mean, the less frequently it will occur (Stephens 2014). Normal, in other words, became synonymous with average, referring not to a specific state or individual subject but to a range, to distribution points, and to a system of variation. The statistical norm was not the only conception of normal in circulation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however. While statistics gave us normal by the numbers, nineteenth-century medicine introduced the somewhat different understanding of normal as a dynamic biological state (Canguilhem 1991). An organ or bodily system could be deemed medically “normal” if it was within “a state of balance or range of variations deemed appropriate” (Cryle and Stephens 2017, 15). For example, the mid-twentieth-century work of Georges Canguilhem (1991, 152) shows how the biomedical normal at once names the body’s “habitual state” as well as its “ideal.” The normal state, Canguilhem writes, is “that which is such that it ought to be” (125).

While the statistical norm gives rise to the possibility of an outlier (or that which is outside of the normal range), the medical norm similarly gives birth to a pathologized category of the abnormal. Indeed, it was only through this intermingling of statistical and medical understandings of normal “that the word came to acquire its current cultural authority” as an effective means of classifying, ordering, and controlling all modes of human and nonhuman variation (Cryle and Stephens 2017, 4). As Hacking (1990, 160) notes, “People, behavior, states of affairs, diplomatic relations, molecules: all these may be normal or abnormal.” Yet, any act of categorization is also a mode of governance. As demonstrated by the genealogical work of Siobhan Somerville (1994) and Ann Laura Stoler (1995), conceptions of normal bodies and minds were deeply intertwined with colonial and eugenic ideologies of racial and sexual superiority and inferiority and leveraged in the service of white supremacy, empire-building, and capitalist extraction. Perhaps the most prominent of the early eugenicists was Francis Galton, whose foundational work on the development of the statistical sciences cannot be separated from his expansive classist and white supremacist writings on the innate superiority of “normal” or “pure” heredities and, relatedly, on the need for the elimination of so-called degenerates (Dolmage 2017).

As both a formal historical period in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America and Europe and an ongoing logic or “impulse” (Comfort 2012), eugenics was and is primarily about power and control over human and social reproduction. Advanced via discourses of “human improvement” and “social betterment,” the formal eugenics movement implemented social engineering by incentivizing the reproduction of “fit” families while restricting or prohibiting the reproduction of those deemed abnormal or “unfit” (Kevles 1985; Comfort 2012). Leaning on racially inflected moral and medical notions of normal and abnormal, the eugenics movement encouraged the proliferation of economically privileged white Western Europeans (and those of Western European descent) while strengthening and expanding the reach of colonial and imperial institutions and infrastructures. While eugenic normalcy was raced white, its oppositional category—abnormal degeneracy—grouped together a wide range of bodies that did not conform to the ideals of bourgeois respectability. Those coded as degenerate—racially unfit or socially undesirable—included nonwhite, Indigenous, and enslaved people in the colonies, as well as a wide array of racialized groups in the metropole (e.g., queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people; ethnic and religious minorities, including Jews and Roma; political dissidents, such as communists, socialists, and trade unionists; as well as low-income, disabled, sick, mad, and drug-using people). Deemed both a threat to white supremacy and disposable, these groups were targeted by state-sponsored measures to curtail their social and biological reproduction, including by forced sterilizations, institutional incarceration, and genocide.

Eugenic programs designed to ensure the reproduction of “fit” citizens and nations within Europe cannot be considered outside of the broader colonial project and its racial capitalist and imperialist frameworks, which were fundamentally predicated on the violent ordering of human life through the valuation of human labor. As Cedric J. Robinson (2000) argues, modern capitalist systems were birthed from a world already ordered by racial violence and fueled by ideologies of racial difference and disposability. Under industrial capitalism, such ideologies were further shaped by the need for labor and in turn shaped the valuation of the laboring body. The enclosure of the factory, for example, played an important role in reinforcing and expanding notions of difference and disposability in ways that specifically affected the categorization of bodies as abled or disabled. Factory work both required and produced a standard body, which would integrate smoothly and interchangeably with the rhythms and requirements of the production line. Workers were subjected to a uniform set of requirements regarding punctuality, the number of hours and days worked, and the application of effort. These imperatives were enforced through a variety of disciplinary penalties: strict timekeeping; fines for lateness, disobedience, and slow work; and the careful observance of performance. Intensive surveillance required that the worker adapt their body to the shape and rhythms of the industrial production, shaping the “normal” body as a young, male, nondisabled worker. This norm, in turn, influenced production rates, architecture, urban planning, transportation, work hours, and the organization of home and family life.

Against this normative subject shaped by the disciplinary regime of the factory, disabled people—alongside those racially or otherwise pathologized as lacking or abnormal—came to be understood as people that could not produce at an acceptable rate. Karl Marx (1990) notes that industrialization produced an “incapable” social stratum composed of disabled, sick, injured, and older people who were unable to sell their labor at average rates. This group was unable to adapt their bodyminds to the new modes of production and therefore were made to suffer the consequences of being excluded from the market, such as poverty, ill health, brevity of life, social marginalization, and dependence upon informal economies. At this juncture, we find that not only does capitalism disable people by excluding them from the valorized workforce, but it also creates disability and debilitation among its laborers, what Marx terms “victims of industry” (797). Friedrich Engels (1968, 280) explicitly connects bodily debilitations to the conditions of industrial labor, arguing, for example, that miners’ “splayed feet, spinal deformities and other physical defects” could be attributed to “the fact that their constitutions have been weakened and they are nearly always forced to work in a cramped position.” The workers’ increased dependency on, or indeed their enmeshment with, industrial production led to an increase in the destruction of the body itself: “the dead weight of the industrial reserve army,” in Marx’s (1990, 797) terms, and the incidental expenses of capitalist production. “Disability,” as a historical category, thus emerged in part through the standardized productivity of the normative nondisabled worker. By the late nineteenth century, many of those deemed “incapable” were incarcerated in workhouses, hospitals, asylums, and “crippleages” (Gleeson 1999, 108).

From the industrial era to today, populations deemed as “incapable” have consistently been framed as a drain on capital and as a burden to society. Yet, the fact that capital injures, disables, and debilitates does not faze capital as capital. At the same time as capital consumes the bodies of its workers, it also pathologizes, marginalizes, and extracts from those who do not work.2 Indeed, as Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant (2022, 5) argue, “the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. . . . Those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital.” Whether enacted slowly over years, across generations, or instantaneously through acute acts of violence, capitalist processes of debilitation and its widespread production of disability have become “biopolitical ends unto themselves,” observes Jasbir K. Puar (2017, xviii), “a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable.” Analyzing the origins of the commodification of disablement reveals the ways “the warehousing, surveillance, treatment, management, and diagnosis of difference” have become “an enormous sector” of contemporary global markets (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant 2022, 17). This in turn has implications for the evolution of the structuring social relations of normalcy.

For many in the Global North, what contemporary neoliberal capitalism both requires and produces “is not simply the docile body of the disciplinary society” but rather the flexible body, “one best able to adapt to constant change, to manage fatigue and maintain fitness” (Cryle and Stephens 2017, 357, 354). To return to the “Dress Normal” ad, for example, the image of Moss is not that of a factory laborer, although she does wear the fruits of that labor. Rather, the image frames Moss as a contemporary neoliberal subject—a productive, competitive, entrepreneurial, freelance, fit, and flexible subject who labors continuously to optimize herself, thereby ensuring her value as human capital. Her carefree style in the image masks the credit card debt she has amassed through her continuous consumption of just-in-time fashion. The self-care she performs—a leisurely walk along the beach—is a kind of optimization of the self that is meant to bolster her resilience. In this image of Moss, we encounter a model of neoliberal flexibility and efficiency. Her business casual attire might entice us to imagine that she has just popped out of the office, or perhaps, as a mobile freelance worker, this seaside pier is her office. We might imagine her sitting down in the sand, work and play intermingling as she orders her groceries online, answers work emails, and posts to social media. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (2017) caution that the effects of neoliberal flexibility cannot be equated with freedom and liberation, particularly when set against the enforced sameness of the industrial age. “Individuation also allows subjects to be held personally responsible for their ability to adapt to their social conditions,” they argue, coercing subjects through forms of self-governance and internalized pressure to conform to intensified social and economic demands (357). From this perspective, Unilever’s negation of normal and Tommy Hilfiger’s expansion of its bounds can both be understood not as a liberation from normative control but as a reflection of neoliberalism’s emphasis on flexibility and individuated bodyminds. Unilever’s and Tommy Hilfiger’s inclusive futures where “there is no ‘normal’” or where normal is “for all” turn away from homogenization to instead embrace deeper profits through more customizable products. We contend that the Gap ad that embraces the normal, the Tommy Hilfiger ad that expands normal, and the Unilever ad that rejects it all contribute to a normative and normalizing neoliberal social milieu that frames individuation as a marker of social progress and freedom. As we will demonstrate, this framing obscures the structural relations underpinning normalcy, currently rationalized through ideals of personal responsibility and flexibility.

As we have seen, the development of industrial capitalism played a key role in the production of an “incapable” class wherein those bodyminds that did not fit within the standardized confines of the factory—e.g., debilitated, injured, sick, and mad people—became disabled and, thus, abnormal. With this history in mind, we can better appreciate how contemporary neoliberal social and economic conditions also anticipate the emergence of a new kind of “incapable” bodymind, one that cannot easily adapt and self-style through profitable embodied flexibility. As Puar (2012, 154) compellingly argues, under neoliberal- and racial capitalist-control societies, “the distinctions of normative and nonnormative, disabled and nondisabled do not hold up as easily.” Instead, she holds that there “are variegated aggregates of capacity and debility” (154). We therefore contend that a key question of the twenty-first century is not “Is this a normal bodymind?” but rather “How normal is this bodymind; how amenable is it to normative enhancements or optimization?” This means that the flexibility of twenty-first-century normal is, on the one hand, more inclusive than the normalizing effects of disciplinary industrialization: we might, for example, see evidence of the normative inclusion of bodyminds previously classed as abnormal in the mainstream media or in social policy. On the other hand, however, this “new” normal is not as new or inclusive as it would seem at first blush. Participation in the neoliberal entrepreneurial economy normalizes the functions of globalized racial capitalism that require that some people be enhanced or capacitated at the expense of others. For Moss to “dress like nobody is watching” requires a naturalization of normalization that erases the historical and political conditions that bring this norm into being. For Unilever to promote “no normal” or for Tommy Hilfiger to promote a more inclusive normal requires embracing a form of flexible customization that obscures inequitable structural forms of power and control. We turn now to a consideration of the conditions through which some people—including, we note, a minority of highly privileged disabled people—are incorporated into contemporary norms and discuss how such inclusions work to normalize the exclusion of other often multiply marginalized and oppressed people, as well as mark certain environments and ecologies as disposable.

“Fashion for All”?

The Tommy Hilfiger ad in Figure 6 provides another example of how normalcy is fashioned, highlighting key overlaps with—and divergences from—the Gap ad. Both ads fashion the body through normative styles of dress and through specific cultural, political, and economic values. However, unlike the Gap ad, which, as we’ve seen, aligns with typical Western body norms rooted in eugenic, colonial, and imperial histories, the Tommy Hilfiger ad seems to place the disabled body—alongside other bodies that have been historically excluded from normalcy—at the center of a better and more inclusive normal. The Tommy Hilfiger ad features six diverse, disabled individuals accompanied by their high-end mobility devices and prosthetics. Five light-skinned children and adults flank a Black disabled man with a prosthetic leg, who is positioned at the center. All models are decked out in red, white, and blue, an all-American preppy style for which the brand is famous.

This normative inclusion of disability by a mainstream clothing brand signals a clear departure from the commonsense belief that disability disqualifies someone from normalcy. Indeed, Tommy Adaptive was released at a moment when inclusion initiatives were gaining traction across industries. As Jordan Foster and David Pettinicchio (2021, 579) note, by 2018 “a greater number of racial minority women, trans-women, and plus-sized models were postured in print media and walked in ready-to-wear runway shows.” It is in this context that disability entered mainstream fashion. For example, Teen Vogue’s September 2018 cover featured physically disabled models Jillian Mercado, Mama Cax, and Chelsea Werner, a model with Down syndrome, adjacent the headline “the new faces of fashion” (589). While some clothing brands and stores like Target and Walmart were already including disabled models in their advertising, others such as Nike, Aerie, and the Gap quickly followed suit by including disabled models on billboards and in their catalogs. Before examining the specifics of the Tommy Hilfiger ad to explore what it reveals about the porousness and flexibility of the neoliberal normal—and the novel and enduring ways it governs, controls, and orders bodies—we first turn to an examination of the broader phenomenon of adaptive fashion and its relationship to the history of mass production and the standardization of products.

The rise of mass production during industrialization led not just to the standardization of workers but also to the standardization of products. Prior to this, for example, it was far more common to have access to handsewn or tailored clothing to fit the unique contours of an individual’s body. As the clothing industry developed, it faced the challenge of creating garments that could fit a wide range of body types while still maintaining mass commercial viability: mass production and the factory line were, in many ways, incompatible with a need for customization (Cryle and Stephens 2017). In an effort to solve this problem, large-scale anthropometric studies were conducted to develop sizing for mass-produced clothing that could fit as many consumer bodies as possible, striking a balance between the economic efficiencies of universal standardization and the need for individual customization. To illustrate this, Cryle and Stephens (2017) draw on a 1940 example of how the US Bureau of Home Economics recorded the measurements of white American women in response to a request from the Mail Order Association of America to create an industry-wide standard for ready-made clothing. The bureau’s research findings indicated that standardized sizing simply could not fit most bodies due to the vast range of variation within the population. Noting the “almost bewildering variety of shapes and sizes” of the participants, the research makes evident that “mass-produced objects cannot take for granted the existence of standardized bodies” (326). Given the impossibility of making clothing fit all bodies, anthropometric data was—and continues to be—used to standardize clothes themselves, incorporating a range of variations while still privileging Western sociocultural norms of being young, white, thin, and able-bodied.

South African disability activist and wheelchair-user Eddie Ndopu (2013) describes how mainstream clothing rarely accommodates his disabled body. On-trend garments, he explains, are often difficult to put on, uncomfortable to wear, and can interfere with assistive devices. Meanwhile, custom sewing, tailoring, and alterations are expensive and often cost-prohibitive, constraining disabled people’s clothing options to functional attire: casual comfort wear or disability-specific adaptive clothing. Disabled designer Liz Jackson (2023) discusses the painful physical toll of being forced to wear clothing designed for a nondisabled body, and disabled and fat activists draw attention to the financial toll of the so-called fat tax and disability tax whereby companies charge more for plus-size or adaptive clothing. “It costs us more to simply live,” notes disabled author Tiffany Yu (2024). And until recently, adaptive clothing has been treated as catering to the user’s “special needs” with little consideration for aesthetics as a medium for identity expression and pleasure (Wright 2022). “Clothes are deeply imbued with the insidiousness of power relations when attached to the bodies wearing them,” observes Ndopu (2013), frequently reinforcing narratives of disabled people as incapable or pitiful. As disability activist Harriet McBryde Johnson (2005, 2) notes, people “think they know everything there is to know just by looking at me.” Citing the example of brands like Buck & Buck, whose advertising focuses on older consumers, disabled fashion designer Sky Cubacub (2020, 91) highlights how “the styling [of the clothing] isn’t action oriented, assuming the wearer won’t be moving around much independently, and the garments look like hospital gowns or scrubs. . . . Even if you are sick, wearing clothing that makes you look sicker is dehumanizing.” Ndopu (2013) sees his interest in fashion as a challenge to this dehumanization and the underlying normative logics of ableism that sustain them. By “‘wheel[ing]’ through the world donning ‘super-fly’ waistcoats over a crisply pressed button-up white shirt, held together by a brightly-colored signature silk bow tie,” Ndopu argues he is “challeng[ing] the sociocultural imposition of an expected . . . way of being.” Indeed, he asserts: “I am giving ableism the middle finger.”

Yet, as Ndopu importantly acknowledges, normalization does not work by people simply choosing to “dress normal,” as per the Gap’s invocation. “If non-disabled people take me seriously only when I am dressed up,” writes Ndopu (2013), it “reflects the insidious (re)entrenchment of ableism.” The mere suggestion that “dressing normal” is an autonomous choice asks us to look away from the structures and power relations that shape bodies, such as how disciplinary power encourages or incentivizes some ways of being while discouraging or forbidding others. For example, as a person moves outside of the (raced, classed, gendered) norms of dress—such as when a masculine-appearing person wears a dress in a context rigidly defined by norms of gender and (hetero)sexuality or when a Black youth wears a hoodie in spaces dominated by white supremacy—these transgressions will be met with a variety of social punishments ranging from microaggressions (e.g., a disgusted or nervous side glance from a stranger passing by) to more overt forms of violence (e.g., being made a target for harassment by police, physical assault, murder, etc.). Eli Clare (2003, 257) speaks to the violence of having his dynamic, disabled, and gender-nonconforming body dissected, reduced, and disciplined by the stares of strangers, writing: “When first a pair of eyes caught me, held me in their vise grip, tore skin from muscle, muscle from bone. Those eyes always shouted, ‘Freak, retard, cripple,’ demanding an answer for tremoring hands, a tomboy’s bold and unsteady gait I never grew out of. It started young, anywhere I encountered humans. Gawking, gaping, staring seeped into my bones, became the marrow.” Normative rewards and penalties are often deeply felt, affecting people’s feelings about their bodies and compelling practices of self-discipline and self-governance in order to approximate ideals of normalcy. Roxane Gay (2018) notes how the continuous messaging that her fat body takes up too much space translated into her feeling pressured into losing weight in order to “fit more peacefully into a world that is not at all interested in accommodating a body like [hers].” She comments, “As a fat person, I am supposed to want to lose weight. I am supposed to be working on the problem of my body. I am supposed to apply discipline to physical unruliness.” As Gay’s statement makes clear, not only is the body disciplined by external rules, structures, and relations, but normalization also affects our personal feelings about our bodies, compelling us to discipline and govern ourselves toward social norms.

The disciplinary norm serves not only as an ideal toward which the individual must strive but as one they will inevitably fail against. Just because someone might readily approximate a particular set of sociocultural norms at one time or in a particular space does not mean that this person will always pass as normal. To inhabit the normal is always tenuous, ever dependent upon a constellation of relations between bodyminds and their discursive and material contexts. Because of this, the normal-passing person is always susceptible to abnormalcy and thus is always under threat of being expelled from normalcy. However, while it is true that most people, no matter how hard they try or what choices they make, can never inhabit the category of “normal”—at least not fully or completely or without the threat of failure—we must nonetheless account for how some are positioned further away from normalcy than others.

Of course, “in discipline,” writes Michel Foucault (1979, 180), “punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment.” On the other side of the spectrum, as a person conforms to social norms of dress, such compliance is met with a variety of associated rewards: a complimentary look or comment from a friend or stranger, a successful job interview, the ability to pass through airport security without hassle, paying less for clothing, or seeing one’s body positively reflected in the popular media. Normative fashion often enables access to life, including community, safety, desirability, and employability. Ndopu (2013) too reminds us that for multiply marginalized people, the stakes for approximating the culturally privileged or even compulsory normal can be particularly high. While Ndopu acknowledges the tremendous and often insurmountable labor and expense involved in “dressing to the nines almost every single day,” and that this process “takes time, energy, and ability not always accorded to my Black queer crip body,” he nevertheless names access to fashion as protective and tied to his survival. Norms and standards of dress, he argues, carry “social currency” that can “in some cases lessen the threat of violence and, in other cases, improve economic conditions.” Norms of dress shape social perceptions about which bodyminds naturally appear as “fit for work” (McBee-Black and Ha-Brookshire 2018). Such norms can also affect who is deserving of social protections, freedoms, or even life itself. As Alexis Shotwell (2017) notes, attending to the workings of normalization helps explain how the further from normalcy one is, the closer to death and debilitation they become. Intersectional understandings of norms of dress are especially salient, for example, in contemporary discussions of anti-Black and anti-Palestinian racism and state, police, white supremacist, and Zionist violence. From the symbolic and material significance of the hoodie in the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, or the keffiyeh in the 2024 shootings of three Palestinian university students in Burlington, Vermont, an interplay between garment, comportment, and body often shapes violence. This interplay routinely justifies the everyday profiling, policing, and criminalization of racialized and Indigenous people, sex workers, trans people, and unhoused people, as well as those who are mad or disabled. Because the stakes of passing as normal are so high, and because normalcy is only ever inhabited tenuously, it requires continuous maintenance. Normal is therefore not a finite state of being (i.e., something we are or are not in any definitive sense) but, rather, it is a doing (i.e., a practice or performance reliant on the constant repetition of historically and politically constituted gendered, classed, racialized, and ability norms of comportment).

As it promises social inclusion and protection, fashion is a key site of normative capacitation. In her detailed history of the 1960s- and 1970s-era US-based adaptive clothing line Functional Fashions, Natalie E. Wright (2022) illustrates the role clothing and fashion played vis-à-vis the establishment and maintenance of postwar American normalcy. Functional Fashions marketed fashionable clothes as a solution to the persistent exclusion of disabled people from day-to-day social life and labor market participation. Rather than demanding society place “less cultural currency on bodily autonomy,” the designers of early adaptive fashion viewed apparel as promising rehabilitative overcoming for wearers (143). In a post-WWII United States, which ascribed high value to cultural conformity, Wright argues, “the market for accessible clothing quickly became a measure of successful rehabilitation, and successful rehabilitation quickly became a justification for accessible clothing” (143). Fast-forward half a century to the release of Tommy Adaptive, with its seemingly antithetical choice to “boldly” center disabled people through carefully concealed accessibility features and promises of seamless social integration. As with its 1960s-era predecessor, the discourse of rehabilitation remains central to Tommy Adaptive, though the latter anchors this ethos in a promise of overcoming ableism through notions of disabled individuality, a distinctive neoliberal form of inclusion: “Our adaptive collections have revolutionized everyday dressing for people with disabilities, giving them the independence and confidence to express their individuality through style,” writes Tommy Hilfiger (2021) in a press release. Such an emphasis on the individual rather than the structural leads Dark (2021, 147) to comment: “Rather than hating the loss of dignity wherever it occurs, hating the feeling of ‘abnormal’ is the neoliberal answer.”

Neoliberal inclusion demands that individuals flexibly adapt and style their bodies and minds such that they align, albeit tentatively, with the market. Maintaining normalcy requires continuous labor to ensure that one’s bodymind aligns as closely as possible with shifting norms of body, dress, and conduct while engaging in the exhausting and expensive labor of covering over one’s inevitable normative failures. Maintaining one’s bodymind by consuming the latest in fashion becomes one way to keep pace with shifting neoliberal norms: preserving or even advancing one’s status through practices of capacitation while simultaneously fending off worse outcomes. Attending to the mass production of disability fashion helps illuminate how gender, disability, race, and class work together to produce some embodied subjects as seemingly naturally (if tentatively) deserving of normative inclusions, while leaving others firmly outside of normalcy’s protective embrace. Far from being “inclusive” as per Tommy Hilfiger, high-end adaptive clothing produces deep divisions within disability communities, reifying and even naturalizing some disability exclusions at the expense of the precarious inclusion of others. The Tommy Hilfiger line marks out for (tentative) social inclusion those disabled subjects who can access relatively costly, independence-boosting clothing enhancements, leaving most disabled people—who, in this era of socioeconomic abandonment and infrastructural neglect remain underhoused, underemployed, and underinsured—without easy access to “Fourth-of-July inspired khakis and polos for all” as a promised means of social integration (L. Jackson 2023).

At the same time, through a reliance on just-in-time transnational supply chains, unethical manufacturing processes, and cheap racialized labor, fast-fashion brands like Shein are able to produce inexpensive plus-size and adaptive clothing “for all,” and an increasing number of disabled and other nonnormatively embodied consumers are demanding access to the fruits of fast-fashion industries. The basic premise of the now trillion-dollar fast-fashion industry is to get the latest styles to market as quickly as possible—from the catwalk to store racks in just a few weeks—through their mass production in low-wage, underregulated factories in the Global South. The accelerated pace of production drives demand and profit by allowing consumers to purchase clothing at the height of its popularity, only to discard it after a few wears to make room for the next trend.3 With the rise of fast fashion, mainstream brands are uncovering new ways of expanding their markets by catering to the “special” needs of consumers with nonnormative bodies, all while preserving profit margins. “Accessibility isn’t, like many believe, kryptonite for profits. It is a moneymaker,” writes product designer Cat Noone (2021). As we unpack in the next section, while profitable, fast fashion is generating a myriad of crises, breaking down human and more-than-human bodies and the environs that sustain them. With the advent of fast adaptive fashion, disabled people are both implicated as actors in the production of these crises while, simultaneously, being abandoned by them. In exploring the debilitating cost of the exploitative labor practices required for neoliberal disability inclusion, we highlight important ways disabled and debilitated people can move together in solidarity to challenge and alter the ascendant—and often violently normative—logics and orderings of our contemporary world.

Business as Usual: Death and Debilitation in Fast-Fashion Production

Access to culturally normative dress promises a form of capacitation for some. Yet, the production of fast fashion is debilitating and deadly for garment industry workers laboring in Global South factories and harms the human and more-than-human communities and ecologies living in relation to these heavily polluted and polluting sites. The differential harms of contemporary fashion are felt via the industry’s extractive overuse of water, its destruction of vital ecosystems through clear-cutting and waste, its unchecked carbon emissions, and its reliance on toxic dyes and plastics in the clothing itself. Its labor and production practices, alongside the murderous logics of extraction and socioeconomic abandonment that drive them, facilitate the graded debilitation of human and more-than-human life.

In April 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza garment factory which made clothing for fast-fashion brands in the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed just one day after being declared unsafe by structural engineers due to severe cracks in its walls. Managers of the factory had threatened workers with the loss of a month’s pay if they did not show up to work after the structural assessment deemed it unsafe, even though the cracks were so large that workers could put their hands inside of them (Fayner 2016; Connell 2023). The disaster, caused by infrastructural neglect and a lack of safe laboring conditions, killed 1,138 people and injured over 2,600, making it among the most significant industrial tragedies in recent memory. In keeping with market demands and profitable business practices, North American and Western European chains such as Gap, H&M, and Tommy Hilfiger rely on various subcontracts to facilitate garment production that is both quick and cheap. For example, large garment industry corporations operating out of Dhaka often focus on quick turnaround and strict delivery deadlines, putting increased pressure on suppliers that have led to safety shortcuts, such as those that occurred with Rana Plaza. While neither Tommy Hilfiger nor Gap were directly linked to the Rana Plaza factory disaster, these companies both regularly produce their products in similarly organized garment factories in Bangladesh. Indeed, both Gap and Tommy Hilfiger were among a group of manufacturers whose clothing was produced at the site of a 2010 fire in the Ashulia industrial zone just outside of Dhaka that claimed nearly thirty lives and left over one hundred injured. The fire broke out on the tenth floor of the factory, which did not have proper fire escapes, forcing many of the workers to break windows and jump out of the building to escape the blaze.

Despite years of public shaming by regional and international activists and watchdog organizations, as well as a variety of post–Rana Plaza safety agreements and labor reforms, the $34 billion apparel industry in Bangladesh leaves much to be desired (Preetha et al. 2021). According to the International Trade Union Confederation’s Global Rights Index, Bangladesh rates as one of the ten worst countries for working people, in part due to the near impossibility for workers in the garment sector to form or join trade unions, exposing workers to “mass dismissals, arrests, violence and state repression against peaceful protests” (ITUC 2021, 27). For example, in 2021, “police fired live rounds and used batons and tear gas to disperse workers [seeking to form a union], killing six workers and severely injuring others” (Connell 2023). It is estimated that there are more than four thousand garment factories and facilities in Bangladesh employing over four million people, 58 percent of them women (Connell 2023). As notes Tula Connell (2023) of the Solidarity Center, a US-based international worker rights organization, “Without unions, millions of garment workers who produce clothing . . . are afraid to say ‘No’ when asked to work in unsafe jobs. . . . Unable to collectively negotiate higher wages, garment workers often live in poverty conditions, even as the clothing they make accounts for nearly 82 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, making the ready-made garment industry vital to the national economy.” Despite Bangladesh signing and incorporating various international conventions and frameworks into domestic law, “they are disregarded by many employers and rarely enforced” (Islam et al. 2022, 14). This comes as no surprise since brands are highly motivated to source from countries with the fewest regulations and protections to keep their profit margins high. Bangladeshi garment worker wages remain the lowest in the world, with research showing that since the Rana Plaza collapse, “the price paid by lead firms to supplier factories in Bangladesh declined by 13%” even as producers decreased lead times for making and shipping products by 8 percent (Preetha et al. 2021, 16). This is despite retailers’ “professed goals in public to end the exploitative conditions in Bangladeshi factories,” resulting in ongoing poverty-level wages, excessive hours, unpaid entitlements, and increased retaliation against trade unionism (16). The Covid-19 pandemic further “amplified existing interrelated vulnerabilities,” including increasing the use of child and forced labor, poor workplace hygiene, and increased sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical violence (Islam et al. 2022, 5–8).

Because of these ongoing hazardous working conditions, in addition to producing cheap clothing in narrow timeframes, the fast-fashion industry also produces, in its workers, various forms of disability and debilitation. Many studies have tracked the range of adverse health effects brought on by garment factory conditions, citing depression, musculoskeletal, respiratory, and vision issues, headaches, and urinary tract infections as conditions commonly experienced by garment industry workers (Preetha et al. 2021). In Bangladesh, it is estimated that occupational injuries from the garment industry account for more than 8 percent of all disabilities in the population (Villanueva et al. 2017). Exposure to high levels of formaldehyde, particulate matter, and noise can lead to hormonal imbalances, hearing loss, cardiovascular conditions, oxidative damage, and other health complications (Rahman et al. 2020). Additionally, because of low wages and a lack of health benefits, many workers are unable to afford medications, treatments, or medical visits, leading to worsening health effects (Preetha et al. 2021; Islam et al. 2022). A 2023 report by ActionAid Bangladesh revealed that a decade after the disaster, 54 percent of the Rana Plaza survivors continue to struggle with the debilitating effects of physical pain and mental trauma.

The deadly and debilitating impacts of the fast-fashion industry extend beyond the working conditions within the factories themselves, affecting humans and more-than-human communities and ecologies both in proximity to industrial sites and far beyond their immediate vicinity. The spatial politics of placing over five thousand heavily polluting factories across Bangladesh says much about the perceived disposability of those living in proximity. After the oil industry, the fashion industry is the second-largest polluter globally and accounts for 20 percent of industrial water pollution (Bailey et al. 2022). Dhaka—the second-largest producer of textiles and the site of Tommy Hilfiger and Gap manufacturing—is consistently ranked as one of the most polluted cities in the world. The Buriganga River—once a vital source of drinking water in Dhaka and a place for fishing and bathing—is now among the most polluted rivers in the world. Blackened by dyes and chemical runoff from the wastewater of textile factories and tanneries along its banks, its waters leach toxins into the surrounding environment. While not all chemicals and solvents found in the waters are hazardous, the World Bank has traced seventy-two chemicals to textile dyeing that cause a range of health issues from rashes to increased rates of various cancers, as well as death for plants and wildlife that depend on the water for survival (World Bank 2014). “The once-fresh and mighty river Buriganga is now on the verge of dying because of the rampant dumping of industrial and human waste,” says Sharif Jamil, a local environmental activist. “There is no fish or aquatic life in this river during the dry season. We call it biologically dead” (quoted in Hossain 2023).

Industrial chemicals are mobile and lay bare the deep and inescapable ways we are interconnected across air, water, and land (Chen 2023; Murphy 2017). Whether clothing brands are selling normal or celebrating its apparent demise, the fast-fashion business model normalizes low-cost, synthetic, oil-based textiles. These fabrics shed plastic microfibers at every step of the garment supply chain and beyond, from the factory floor to the consumer’s washing machine to our shared waterways and atmospheres. Indeed, an estimated 35 percent of plastic pollution in our oceans can be traced back to synthetic clothing fibers, and when these textiles are burned, the fibers are also released into the air. The rest sit in landfills, their lifespan far exceeding ours. Of the one hundred billion garments produced annually, ninety-two million tons of discarded clothing end up in landfills (Chen et al. 2021). While some clothes may gain a second life through resale in thrift shops, the sheer volume of unwanted clothing far exceeds what local secondhand consumers and charities can absorb, prompting companies to ship discarded apparel to Global South countries, where the burden of disposal is deferred. There is “a mountain of cast-offs in the desert of Chile that is literally visible from space,” writes Monika Warzecha (2024), highlighting one of many social and environmental consequences of the fast-fashion business model.

Shortly after the launch of Tommy Adaptive, Tommy Hilfiger announced “Make It Possible” (MIP), an initiative purported to take “a bold approach to environmental and social sustainability” by creating “fashion that ‘Wastes Nothing and Welcomes All’” (quoted in Business Wire 2020). Building on the brand’s stated commitment to inclusivity and accessibility, the company seeks to reduce its water and carbon footprints and expand recycling initiatives. It is no coincidence that the company connects its apparent move toward environmental sustainability with its foray into inclusive fashion, for both initiatives aim to profit from neoliberal approaches to inclusion and capacitation. “With hard work and a positive outlook, anything is possible,” says CEO Tommy Hilfiger in a video about the MIP initiative. “America was built on these values and so was Tommy Hilfiger” (quoted in Business Wire 2020). In the video, Hilfiger positions himself as triumphing over his working-class background as he recounts how he went from selling jeans out of the back of his car to leading a billion-dollar company. “My story’s proof that with perseverance and belief, even the wildest dreams come true,” he claims. “Right now, we need those qualities more than ever,” noting how we now “face some of the biggest challenges yet: climate change, scarcity of natural resources, drastic inequality, rising prejudice.” Through Hilfiger’s personal overcoming narrative, and the company’s much-celebrated venture into adaptive wear, MIP casts the corporation as itself a kind of determined underdog fighting to overcome the social and environmental crises of our times. This narrative not only aids in crafting an uplifting brand identity but also distances Tommy Hilfiger from its association with fast fashion and its debilitating effects. As public awareness and discomfort with the industry’s unethical environmental and labor practices continue to grow, brands face the risk of reputational damage and declining profit margins. However, as is evident in the Tommy Hilfiger initiative, this cultural shift also presents a lucrative opportunity for companies to expand their market reach by offering more sustainable, inclusive, and transparent products. “We do not know how we’ll get there,” says Hilfiger of the company’s approach to becoming more sustainable, “but we’re determined to try” (quoted in Business Wire 2020). What remains unmentioned here is how many of these crises are irreversible—meaning a change in policy or practice doesn’t fix the problem. While cutting back carbon and water footprints or recycling waste products are welcome changes, much of the damage is permanent, leaving humans and kin to differentially live with its debilitating effects. Hilfiger also fails to mention how the crises to which he refers are crises that implicate Tommy Hilfiger’s own environment and labor practices, which are utterly entwined with the structures of capitalist production in general and fast fashion in particular. For example, as part of its MIP initiative, the company is investing in AI-fueled 3D technologies and expanding into the metaverse—shifting from ready-made to on-demand production and consumption models—as a more “sustainable” alternative. Yet, the metaverse consumes high amounts of energy and fresh water to support its computation and processing needs. Furthermore, the operation of the metaverse is also dependent on a wide variety of harmful material infrastructures and processes from mining to microchip manufacturing to e-waste disposal. Much like textile waste, e-waste is often exported to countries in the Global South contaminating soil, groundwater, and the atmosphere, upholding colonial and imperialist geographical asymmetries. The integration of sustainability into the Tommy Hilfiger brand ultimately illustrates how neoliberal logics of capacitation and inclusion serve to reinforce, rather than dismantle, the systemic injustices inherent in global capitalism. As observed with Tommy Adaptive and other lines catering to a wider array of nonnormative embodiments, expanding the market into new digital spaces primarily aims to grow market reach and increase sales. Such an accelerated, growth-focused approach remains fundamentally incompatible with justice-oriented commitments to move with those most and multiply marginalized by the dominant normative social and economic systems under which we live and labor. Even if Tommy Hilfiger succeeds in implementing more ethical environmental relations across its value chain, the inherent nature of capitalism—to prioritize profit—ensures that other bodies, kin, and resources will be marked for exploitation.

As we’ve argued throughout this chapter, there is no inherent justice to be found in waging war on normal itself or in seeking to expand its inclusionary boundaries. Instead, we must take aim at the structures that naturalize normal as “just the way things are” and draw attention to its historical contingency. In doing so, we can break with the violent and debilitating relations that currently sustain normalcy and instead create other possible ways of fashioning ourselves, our communities, and our relations with the more-than-human. For example, Figure 7 makes plain how business as usual within the fashion industry results in death for those positioned as disposable to capitalism. The image, taken on April 24, 2014, by the Solidarity Center, shows a woman holding up a protest sign at a demonstration marking the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse. Thousands of disabled and debilitated survivors, relatives of the dead, workers, and other supporters marched to the ruins of the building, wearing funeral shrouds and carrying flowers, demanding fair wages, safer working conditions, and compensation for those killed and injured. Protesters also came together outside of the organization representing local garment manufacturers in Dhaka. In the photograph, the woman stares confidently at the camera with an expression that tethers outrage with defiance. Her sign simply reads: “I don’t want to die for fashion.” This protester—and the millions of garment workers with whom she forms a collective—looks directly at the conditions of laboring bodies in the Global South and challenges the ways some lives are rendered less valuable or more disposable, naming the material violence of this relation.

In her analysis of disabled and debilitated people’s survival and resistance practices following the 1984 Union Carbide pesticide factory gas leak in Bhopal, India, Jiya S. Pandya (2023) argues that survivors of the industrial disaster are routinely caught in damage narratives, portrayed by commentators in the Global North as mere “victims of a tragedy caught in an endless cycle of injustice.” This framing problematically reinforces what Yi Lin (2024, 784) describes as a “racialized culprit-victim opposition between the North and the South.” Heeding these cautions, we now turn to explore possibilities for transnational solidarity among multiply marginalized disabled, debilitated, and injured people across the Global North and South. We explore antiassimilationist crip adaptive fashion, interpreting these disability-justice-informed practices as examples of rupture rather than mere inclusion. We argue that such practices aim to transform, rather than expand, existing neoliberal racial capitalist systems, prioritizing crip time over fast fashion and solidarity over inclusion.

Crip Alterations for Collective Flourishing

Throughout this chapter, we have examined how the concept of “normal” functions under neoliberal and racial capitalism to include and exclude, exposing how these oppositional processes are often mutually dependent. As we have seen, certain disabled subjects, and others who have been historically deemed abnormal, are being granted precarious inclusion through upwardly mobile self-styled acts of normative capacitation, which frequently rely on the normalized disposability and debilitation of others. Across tentative capacitation and routine debilitation, we find disabled and debilitated people in the Global North and South are differentially treated as resources ripe for extraction—whether through their purchasing power as consumers, their labor power as producers, or through profitable forms of warehousing, institutionalization, and management—only to be discarded when disability becomes so severe that it impedes further avenues of extraction. While, as we have seen, normative punishments are flexible and graded, the stakes differ across our diverse embodiments and geographical locations. Despite important material differences in degree and consequence, we nevertheless contend that recognizing these shared logics of violence and oppression has the power to fuel movements for transnational solidarity and against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. By focusing on the interconnectedness of our struggles and the shared systems and structures of oppression that fuel them, we can nurture relations and build movements committed to collective liberation rather than individual inclusion.

While there is no doubt that there is much work yet to be done to dream up and build out social and economic relations and trade systems that are not reliant on the racialized exploitation of people and environs—and whole movements still yet to come that will facilitate such transformations—Pandya (2023, § 1) importantly reminds us that “utopian imaginings do not always have to be distant. Radical forms of crip, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial futurity are already being articulated by those who most immediately negotiate their disabling and debilitating pasts and presents.” Building on Pandya’s insight, we highlight some existing crip modes of survival and flourishing in the face of the brutal exposures and abandonments of fast fashion and neoliberal racial capitalism. We interpret these interventions as engaging in the slow work of radical transformation—breaking away from the insufficiencies of the present to alter our relations anew.

In fashion, alteration refers to the act or process of modifying a piece of clothing to better suit the needs and preferences of the wearer. A tailor might alter or reshape a garment to better fit with the particularities of an individual body, such as lengthening or shortening hems, widening or narrowing seams, adding a pocket, or removing a sleeve. And while disabled people have long relied on alteration practices to ensure that clothing made for the standard body fit the nonnormative contours and access needs of their disabled bodyminds, the notion of alteration extends beyond the realm of sewing to the very fabric of our day-to-day lives and relations. For example, as alterations to normative clothing and sizes have entered the realm of mass production through adaptive and fat fast fashion, this is contributing to other alterations still. Industrial dumping can alter wildlife and plant life, waterways, food webs, and ecological communities. Exposure to toxic chemicals, plastics, or hazardous waste can irreversibly alter the DNA of human and more-than-human species, predisposing people and kin to disease, illness, and premature death. Factory fires and collapsing structures also irreparably alter bodies and relationships. The crushing destruction of physical forms—whether human, more-than-human, or architectural—leaves lasting marks on individuals, communities, and ecologies, alterations that ripple outward, reshaping lives, perceptions, and systems. And, just as the blunt force of social abandonment can irrevocably alter a body that once was, the act of moving through the world in and as an altered body leads to alternative perceptions of the world. By bumping up against the norms many take for granted as natural, disabled bodies, minds, communities, and cultures expose these norms, highlighting the often-invisible power of the structures and relationships that sustain them. In its broadest form, alteration is the process of changing or being changed in and through our relations—with ourselves, one another, or the social and material worlds we inhabit—and we look to forms and practices of alteration that open possibilities for collective flourishing (see Figure 8).

For example, by creating more capacious understandings of human bodies and human value, nonbinary queer and disabled Filipinx designer Sky Cubacub’s Rebirth Garments project seeks to create adaptive and gender-nonconforming fashion across the full spectrum of gender, age, size, and ability. Through its distinctive use of bright-colored textiles made of soft, stretchy, and flexible fabric that encourages a full range of motion and that can accommodate fluctuations in body size and weight, Rebirth Garments challenges the long history of exclusion of disabled, fat, nonbinary, and other nonnormative people from fashion. In their “Radical Visibility: A Disabled Queer Clothing Reform Movement Manifesto,” Cubacub (2020) discusses their practice of offering a sliding scale with wearers, including at low or no cost, to create custom apparel that fits their unique measurements, gender, and accessibility needs, in addition to their aesthetic preferences. Cubacub highlights that they make specialized binders with a “‘less-tight bind’ fit option—something my clients with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome especially prefer, since rib dislocation is a common issue. For people with sensory sensitivities, I create garments with the seams on the outside. . . . Pockets to hold gender-affirming prosthetics or insulin pumps can be added as needed,” Cubacub notes (93). In contradistinction to mainstream adaptive fashion that often seeks to minimize disability or to camouflage disabled people such that they blend into the normative center, Rebirth Garments are unapologetically noticeable. Of the project, Cubacub writes: “Cultural norms don’t encourage trans and disabled people to dress stylishly or loudly. Society wants us to ‘blend in’ and not draw attention to ourselves. But what if we were to resist society’s desire to render us invisible? What if, through a dress reform, we collectively refuse to assimilate?” (90).

The Rebirth Garments project interrupts the flows of fast fashion. In addition to their handsewn as opposed to mass-produced clothing, Rebirth Garments pays local tailors a living wage and sources textiles from vendors who utilize eco-friendly manufacturing processes and nontoxic, water-based pigments and are committed to reducing waste by-products (Reddy-Best et al. 2017). As a local, anticapitalist clothing line with a relatively smaller carbon footprint and less reliance on global supply chains, Rebirth Garments offers a relationally more ethical alternative for adaptive clothing for disabled people. Yet, the style of dress does not suit all disabled people or contexts, and the practice of customization means that this adaptive wear is not widely accessible. Indeed, the project is neither a cure nor a fix for the deeper problems of fast fashion and its debilitating effects. For example, Cubacub still grapples with how to balance running a small business sustainably, including how to listen to their own body and capacity limits. “Sometimes, I feel like a one-person sweatshop,” they say in an interview, expressing feelings that they are “never going to sleep again” and are “just working” all the time (quoted in Reddy-Best et al. 2017, “Rebirth Garments”). They also express their discomfort with the fact that, however ethically sourced, the stretchy fabrics used to ensure bodily movement and comfort are still derived from petrochemicals. Of course, as Cubacub notes, “one clothing line alone cannot destroy societal oppression.”

Indeed, there is no purity in inescapable global systems of oppression, and instead we need to focus on lifting up the practices that help to create more livable worlds. Without differentiating between large multinational mass-producing clothing for profit and small local designers interested in social change, it is impossible to be responsible for and responsive to the harms of the industry. Rebirth Garments refuses the normative inclusion of disabled people and offers us a means of altering our relations to the normative mass production of adaptive fast fashion. This alteration creates space to dream of more sustainable disability cultures that refuse the environmental and social violence of fast fashion and to struggle toward something else. Even as the Rebirth Garments project focuses on making clothes to individual specification, the ethos of the project pushes outward beyond the individual. For example, Cubacub facilitates a variety of sewing and no-sew workshops where participants engage with the concept of “radical visibility.” Participants are guided to make or hack their personal wardrobes using no-sew methods or else design and create new garments by learning various draping and sewing techniques and repurposing recycled fabrics. These workshops encourage participants to critically explore mainstream fashion norms while experimenting with design practices that are disruptive to these norms. With accessible fashion shows and hacking workshops, the project is first centered on resistant culture-making where disabled and other nonnormatively embodied people can come together.

The Rebirth Garment project is not the only space interested in fostering community through culture and fashion-making. Rather, it is part of a broader tradition that spans scholarly and artistic spaces, as well as informal, everyday spaces of disability community. Another example is the work of Taiwan- and US-based crip artist Chun-shan (Sandie) Yi, who describes herself as being born with “two fingers on each hand and two toes on each foot” (Yi 2022, 125) and as someone frequently told that their body needed “fixing” to align with normative body standards. Through Yi’s Project ImPerfect, Yi plays on the “wording of ‘imperfect’ and ‘I’m perfect’” (70). In her artist-organized workshops, Yi invites diversely embodied attendees to “trace their hands, fingers, feet, and toes onto fabric, resulting in bright patterns of diverse bodily formations” (Kafer 2019, 3). Yi then uses the tracings to create clothes for babies. Distinct from Cubacub’s design practice, which creates clothing tailored to suit the specificities of shape, desire, and needs of a particular person, Yi’s designs—while based on the unique bodies of actual people—work to foresee disabled children yet to come. Disrupting “ableist assumptions that disabled babies can only be met with disappointment, Yi’s workshops anticipate, prepare for, and welcome their arrival, both real and imagined,” Alison Kafer (2019, 3) writes, “queerly calling new kin into being.”

Still another example of fashioning disability community and building disabled futures is through Ben Barry and Philippa Nesbitt’s Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias project. This project explores how disabled men and masculine nonbinary people navigate and transform the world through fashion. The project highlights how queer disabled people use fashion to challenge and expand dominant understandings of gender, sexuality, and disability, creating spaces that center “dressed embodiments in their queerest, most normatively disruptive forms” (Barry and Nesbitt 2023b, 16). As with the Rebirth Garments project, Cripping Masculinity is rooted in the concept and practice of fashion hacking, “a methodology in which people intervene in designed fashion outputs—including media, clothing, and shows—by altering them to inscribe their histories and bodies” (Barry and Nesbitt 2023a, 100). As part of the project, Barry and Nesbitt invited disabled participants to collaborate with designer-researchers to deconstruct existing clothing to make it more accessible and comfortable for their queercrip bodyminds. Their workshops intentionally avoid reproducing the codesign model used by the designers of the Tommy Adaptive line, where disabled people are positioned as little more than a resource to be mined. As Liz Jackson (2023) points out, this approach can result in multimillion-dollar companies appropriating disabled people’s ideas only to then sell them back to us at a steep markup. Here, design is framed in transactional terms or as merely a tool to solve the “problem of disability.” Barry and Nesbitt’s collaborative practices instead desire and move with disabled people and culture in “crip time,” which “bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” instead of bending “disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock” (Kafer 2013, 27). Crip time is necessarily anticapitalist time, a temporality disruptive to the accelerations of fast fashion. Write Barry and Nesbitt (2023a, 104), “Disabled bodyminds are valued as teachers and as guides away from the urgency of capitalism and towards transformative slowness.” In the project, participants set the pace, negotiating changing access needs and personal capacity to take breaks and redistribute labor, as well as embrace slow sewing practices, such as hand embroidery, that they may have otherwise avoided for the sake of expediency.

Much of this chapter is dedicated to contesting the overt and covert ways neoliberalism promises disabled and other nonnormatively embodied people that they might triumph over entrenched ableism and intersecting oppressions through acts of capacitation, which are always linked to debilitation. Through their commitments to community, collaboration, interdependence, and slow fashion, Barry and Nesbitt’s project and Yi’s and Cubacub’s community praxes engage in the noninnocent work of envisioning alternatives to the deeply debilitating “business as usual” extractive and racial capitalist practices of fast fashion by sharing knowledge and creating fashion that goes beyond isolated products for individual gain. Their commitment to fostering disability culture and community invite us to think about the possibility of altering the persistent desire for individual capacitation toward a more collective capacitation, or ways of moving together in solidarity that are not reliant on the debilitation of others elsewhere.

While some disabled textile artists and cultural workers in the Global North are rethinking fast fashion through the slow work of making and hacking adaptive clothing, as well as through mending practices that extend the life of textiles and reduce reliance on fast fashion, other disabled and debilitated garment workers and kin in the Global South are using the sewing skills for which they are often exploited to highlight the violence of production and develop practices of survival and resistance. For example, two months after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, seven former workers, along with others who participated in the rescue operations, established Oporajeo, a worker-owned cooperative factory. Beginning with just five sewing machines, the cooperative tailored both its business model and its factory space to meet the needs of its workers. Sensitive to the experiences and trauma of the survivors of the Rana collapse, Oporajeo moved into a building with only a single floor, and workers were also able to take time away to attend physiotherapy appointments (Oporajeo, n.d.; Fayner 2016). After a year, Oporajeo grew to dozens of workers, the majority of whom were survivors from Rana Plaza, and produced jute bags, T-shirts, and cotton shirts in safer laboring conditions. In addition to earning a regular salary, workers equally divided 50 percent of the cooperative profits, with the other 50 percent going toward health and retirement funds, short-term loans available to the workers, and funds to support a local primary school.

In March 2015, a fire tore through the Oporajeo building, destroying all the sewing machines and nineteen thousand newly produced bags. Investigators found evidence suggesting arson, including a broken back door and stolen generator fuel (Oporajeo, n.d.; Fayner 2016). This incident occurred against a broader culture of intimidation, harassment, and violence targeting Bangladeshi workers and unionists who challenge the debilitating and extractive conditions of the garment industry (Fayner 2016). Oporajeo eventually relocated and has been gradually rebuilding, addressing threats from the industry by fostering and strengthening solidarities with others seeking alterations to the debilitating working conditions in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Its efforts over the years have included transnational partnerships with ethical fashion initiatives, such as the UK-based grassroots worker-solidarity project No Sweat. In 2020, Oporajeo launched a daily door-to-door food distribution program to support Dhaka-area garment workers, millions of whom were laid off—often without receiving owed wages or severance—when factories shuttered and major brands drastically slashed production volumes during the pandemic (Santamaria 2020; Worker Rights Consortium 2021). More recently, Oporajeo has expanded and diversified its operations, incorporating small-scale farming and agricultural projects alongside a factory producing jute products (No Sweat 2020).4

While forming a workers’ cooperative is one way to mobilize sewing skills for collective survival and social change, we conclude by attending to a collaborative artistic project that stitched worn textiles together with raw memories as a means of bearing witness to the lives lost at Rana Plaza while simultaneously fighting for those who remain. In the months leading up to the fifth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse, Taslima Akhter, a Dhaka-based documentary photographer and labor rights activist, collaborated with survivors and the families of those who perished in the industrial disaster to cocreate a series of quilts memorializing the dead. The project draws on the centuries-old South Asian textile tradition of kantha, which repurposes worn textiles—such as old rags, fraying saris, dhotis, or other discarded cloth—by binding them together and embroidering them in groups using regionally specific stitching techniques. At once utilitarian (extending the life of cloth) and intimate (passed down through generations and crafted from fabric worn down and softened through use), the quilted cloth also serves a protective function, commonly used as light bed covers, baby swaddles, or prayer mats (Ghosh 2020).

In the Rana Plaza kantha project, each quilt was layered not only with worn fabric, often having belonged to the victims, but also with personal memories and meaningful items. Collaborators stitched embroidered personal messages, memories, and condemnations like “We demand changes to the compensation laws” into their quilts. The kantha also incorporated photographs of loved ones who were killed and even some of their personal belongings (Bose 2024; Saha 2019). The slow and careful process of hand stitching the layers of fabric drew participants into close proximity with their loss. As Asima Begum, whose daughter Aakhi died in the collapse, expresses, “While I made this kantha, I remembered my daughter. With my pain and her memory, I thought of my child with every letter I stitched” (quoted in Saha 2019, 249). Their labor also brought them into closer proximity with one another, as is seen in one of Akhter’s photographs, where Shunnobala (whose son, nineteen-year-old Shonjeet Das, was killed) works side by side with Shumitra, a survivor who was buried under the rubble for five days before being rescued (Akhter, n.d.). Such acts of kinship, shared grief, and collective intimacy exist in stark contrast to the logics of dehumanization, abandonment, and disposability that led to the collapse.

On April 24, 2018, the fifth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse, the workers group Bangladesh Garment Sramik Samhati (Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity) mounted an exhibit of Akhter and collaborators’ work called Smriti Katha O Kotha (Memorial quilts and remembrances). Five floral-patterned, collaboratively made kantha quilts were draped across the plot where factories once stood, their soft, layered fabrics, along with years of plant overgrowth, partially concealing the traces of debris and rebar that remain at the site. Next to the kantha, exhibit curators suspended clothing and other items salvaged from the site of the collapse: scissors, spools of thread, and brand labels (Bose 2024; see Figure 9). These broken objects, together with the kantha quilts, their makers, and the bonds of loss and kinship that tie them together, demand that the Rana Plaza and other similar industrial disasters be recognized for what they truly are—not accidents or isolated tragedies but, in Akhter’s words, “structural killing” (quoted in Benson 2023). In doing so, it offers a powerful counternarrative to the normalization of fast fashion’s commodification of labor and resources, which renders workers, materials, and environments disposable.

The collaborative creation and public display of the kantha quilts compel an act of looking that insists that we remember what happened, how it happened, and then further demands concrete changes for all who continue to labor in unsafe and exploitative conditions, including the need to implement living wages and safely form trade unions (Akhter, n.d.). Through its assertion of the humanity of garment workers and its practice of repurposing and revaluing worn cloth, the kantha project brings into focus the true human and more-than-human costs of supply chain capitalism’s extractive relations. The work of the project is to expose the sustained, targeted, and extractive violence of racial capitalism, which conceals the exploitation, injury, debilitation, and death of workers laboring in the Global South while also and simultaneously obscuring the ongoing destruction of atmospheres, waterways, ecologies, and more-than-human kin who we all depend on for survival and flourishing.

Each of the examples highlighted in the final section of this chapter—from Cubacub’s, Yi’s, and Barry and Nesbitt’s anticapitalist interventions in adaptive fashion to Oporajeo’s worker-driven labor infrastructures and the kantha project’s acts of memory and solidarity—mark the violences of fast fashion and racial capitalism not as exceptional but as endemic, normal. Whether by exposing the often-concealed harms of normative design, normal labor practices, and normal consumption patterns or by unapologetically centering disabled and other nonnormative bodies and minds so routinely siloed, segregated, and effaced, crip alteration practices curate an interplay of visibility and invisibility aimed at transforming that which is taken to be natural toward alternatives that are more just and livable. Rather than seek refuge in expanding the bounds of the normal or in turning away from normalcy altogether, we push for forms of collective resistance and survival that denaturalize neoliberal and racial capitalist formations and that work with our altered bodies, minds, and environs to forge and extend bonds of solidarity, community, and culture, both locally and beyond.