Disaster survivors bear the burden of proving their own invisible bodily damage

Evidence

Looking back at Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bhopal, Petryna laments how “many persons who have survived these large-scale technological disasters have been caught in a long-term and vicious bureaucratic cycle in which they carry the burden of proof of their physical damage while experiencing the risk of being delegitimated in legal, welfare, and medical institutional contexts.” Such people, the illiterate poor above all, are thrust into a labyrinth of self-fashioning as they seek to fit their bodily stories to the story lines that dangle hope of recognition (possibly, though elusively), even recompense. In so doing, the poor face the double challenge of invisibility and amnesia: numerically, they may constitute the majority, but they remain on the margins in terms of visibility and official memory. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 177

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch3’s ‘Uncounted slow-violence casualties skew how wars are remembered’ and ch9’s ‘Pollution victims must narrate their lives in state-sanctioned suffering genres’.
• DEFINE: Captures the ‘burden of proof’ inversion at the heart of slow-violence legibility.