This paper interrogates the relationship between the body and socio-material dimensions of
infrastructure in the city. Although a burgeoning interdisciplinary literature has been attentive
to the socio-material features of infrastructure, the generative relationship between
infrastructure and the body has received less attention. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens
to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered/casted/classed bodies act as part of urban
infrastructure through the quotidian practices and labor of finding and circulating water to
households across neighborhoods. I specifically use the concept-metaphor of “prosthesis” as a
heuristic devise to help show when and how bodies become ‘internalized’ as part of infrastructural
networks, and to render visible often overlooked dimensions of infrastructure and our analytic view
of it. I argue that conceptualizing the body as a prosthesis to infrastructure helps make visible
1.) the embodied labor, maintenance and care work that subsidizes and enables infrastructural
assemblages and networks, 2.) the politics that produce the necessity for particular
gendered/casted/classed bodies to act as infrastructure in the first place, and 3.) the
valuation/devaluation of labor and lives in relation to urban infrastructure. I conclude by calling
for further analyses of the body as the site by which the sociopolitical and material dimensions of
infrastructure are affected, resisted, negotiated, and lived.
