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DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 21 Holstein cow in a side-on view, fat and happy. I think of the far­mer who likely commissioned this painting of his cow and proudly displayed it on the wall. These paintings have a long history. In the mid-eighteenth century, at a time of agricultural revolution, farmers were experimenting with livestock breeding. This enabled them to redistribute flesh to de­sired parts of the body and shor­ten the time between birth and maturity. At this time, livestock portraiture became quite the thing. 1 Introduction On the wall in my office hangs a painting of a cow, Rosie the Prize-Winning Cow. The painting shows a The historian Emily Pawley po­sits that“[t]o skilled eyes, animal portraits were repositories of a code that we are no longer trained to perceive” 2 . Such portraits became central in the implementation of“improved breeds” 3 . Artists were often encouraged to emphasize certain desirable features, so much so that it was noted that owners would not be happy until the likeness of their animals appeared“monstrously fat” 4 . Fig. 1:“Rosie-Champion Cow”, painting hanging in my office by M. Wiscombe The fascination with bodily excess in animal por­traiture has much in common with the media trope known as“the headless fatty”. The term refers to images where the heads of fat people are cropped from visual media, leaving untethered bodies that Majida Kargbo describes as“excessively bodied” 5 . All individuating characteristics are stripped away, leaving the fat body as an emblem of laziness and greed. In a similar fashion, side views of cows in ani­1 See Museum of English Rural Life(MERL),“Consuming the fat cows”, https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/merl/2015/10/25/consuming-the­fat-cows/(accessed 24 May 2023). 2 Emily Pawley,“The Point of Perfection: Cattle Portraiture, Bloodlines, and the Meaning of Breeding, 1760–1860”, Journal of the Early Republic , 36/1(Spring 2016), 37–72 at 40. 3 Ibid. 4 MERL,“Consuming the fat cows”(see n. 1). 5 See Majida Kargbo,“Toward a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject”, Fat Studies , 2/2(2013), 160–172.