DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 22 Fig. 2: Painting of a dairy cow from the MERL collection mal portraiture emphasise their bodies as well as features—such as a large udder—that indicate supe­rior breeding reflecting the skills of their owner. In this article, I discuss intersections in the way that the lives and futures of queer and fat people and queer and fat cows are discussed and imagined. Please note that when I talk about cows I will usual­ly be referring to Holstein cows. These are the black and white spotted cows that have become synonym­ous with dairy farming and were imported into the UK after the Second World War. Since then, there has been an emphasis on productivity within the dai­ry industry, with the philosophy being that each cow should produce as much milk as possible. Holstein cows, bred for their large udders, have been able to produce huge amounts of milk. In order to keep up milk production, their diet needs to be supplemen­ted with high-protein fodder concentrates such as cereals and soya. Therefore, there are many who see Holstein cows as not natural and as inefficient as they are eating crops that could be fed directly to hu­mans. As debates around climate change have gai­ned ground, Holstein cows have become even more maligned because they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. I will be exploring cows as queer creatures. In order to do this, I will draw on literature from fat studies and queer theory, paying particular attention to the queer theorist Lee Edelman. 6 Edelman argues that Western society rests on the notion of“repro­ductive futurism”; that is, relying on the phrase“think of the children” to impose limits on possible futures. By embracing queerness, though, it is possible to subvert these possibilities. Francis Ray White, a Gender and Fat Studies scho­lar, argues that fat people can be incorporated in this notion of queerness, and I extend this to ask if it might also be possible to incorporate cows. 7 In the following sections, I consider how concepts of cows’ lives and futures are often approached via the repro­ductive futures of humans, both in the dairy industry and in sustainability narratives. I will end by specula­ting on what possibilities this opens for cow futures 6 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive(Durham, NC, 2004). 7 See Francis Ray White,“Fat, Queer, Dead:‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive”, Somatechnics , 2/1(2012), 1–17.