Good Injuries: Embodiment, Temporality, and Collectivity in US Class Conflict

ABSTRACT: At a festival in the rural southeastern United States devoted to music and off-road vehicles, white working-class people frequently seem to court situations of predictable harm. More precisely, injury and the risk of injury in this context appear as unintentional but acceptable outcomes in the pursuit of proper conditions for good sociality, and in fact often come to index ethical social behavior for participants—a phenomenon I describe as injuries of prosocial care or “good injuries.” This striking set of attitudes points towards a fundamental and often-misunderstood aspect of class and political conflict in the contemporary US: the entanglement of class with deep-seated beliefs about the boundaries and demands of ethical intersubjectivity, or what it means to be a good person with respect to other people. I examine these classed ethical stances with particular attention to ideas about temporality and embodiment, in a situation where the boundary between care and harm is porous and contingent.