Pollution victims must narrate their lives in state-sanctioned suffering genres to get compensation

Evidence

The ground rules for being counted and discounted kept changing. Even the boundaries of the pollution zones were unstable, shrinking and dilating through a mixture of bureaucratic caprice, economic expediency, and slippery science. So the system required energetic, up-to-date pro-activism on the part of Ukraine’s biocitizens as they scrambled to avoid plummeting into economic free fall. A key survival strategy was to fit their life stories, their self-narrations, into the limited generic narratives of suffering that possessed a state mandate from which a small stream of compensation might flow. New categories of identity emerged that—in other societies, in other times—might have remained confined to the domain of private medical records. Instead, a Ukrainian might introduce herself, position herself publicly, by announcing, “I am a mother of a child who is a sufferer. I am an evacuee from Zone Two. My husband is a Chernobyl worker, Category One.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds ‘biological citizenship’ in the concrete act of fitting one’s life story into state-mandated narrative categories.
• BMF: No fictional match in the library list, but the self-identification by officially certified categories echoes nothing so much as Zamyatin’s We’s numbered citizens — a genuine cross-domain resonance.
• XREF: Connects to ecojustice literature strand: visibility-making is a matter of surviving as narrative rather than fact. — connects to: Blame displacement lets polluters prescribe victim-focused remedies instead of removing hazards — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1775; Contested science determines who is officially recognized as a pollution victim — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 124; Media and government jointly determine whose suffering merits public sympathy — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 813

Broader Connections

• Contested science determines who is officially recognized as a pollution victim #expands (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 124
• Media and government jointly determine whose suffering merits public sympathy #expands (0.80) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 813
• Blame displacement lets polluters prescribe victim-focused remedies instead of removing hazards #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1775