DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023)22Fig. 2: Painting of a dairy cow from the MERL collectionmal portraiture emphasise their bodies as well asfeatures—such as a large udder—that indicate superior breeding reflecting the skills of their owner.In this article, I discuss intersections in the way thatthe lives and futures of queer and fat people andqueer 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 blackand white spotted cows that have become synonymous with dairy farming and were imported into theUK after the Second World War. Since then, therehas been an emphasis on productivity within the dairy industry, with the philosophy being that each cowshould produce as much milk as possible. Holsteincows, bred for their large udders, have been able toproduce huge amounts of milk. In order to keep upmilk production, their diet needs to be supplemented with high-protein fodder concentrates such ascereals and soya. Therefore, there are many whosee Holstein cows as not natural and as inefficient asthey are eating crops that could be fed directly to humans. As debates around climate change have gained ground, Holstein cows have become even moremaligned because they produce methane, a potentgreenhouse gas.I will be exploring cows as queer creatures.In order to do this, I will draw on literature from fatstudies and queer theory, paying particular attentionto the queer theorist Lee Edelman.6Edelman arguesthat Western society rests on the notion of“reproductive futurism”; that is, relying on the phrase“thinkof the children” to impose limits on possible futures.By embracing queerness, though, it is possible tosubvert these possibilities.Francis Ray White, a Gender and Fat Studies scholar, argues that fat people can be incorporated inthis notion of queerness, and I extend this to ask ifit might also be possible to incorporate cows.7In thefollowing sections, I consider how concepts of cows’lives and futures are often approached via the reproductive futures of humans, both in the dairy industryand in sustainability narratives. I will end by speculating on what possibilities this opens for cow futures6See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive(Durham, NC, 2004).7See Francis Ray White,“Fat, Queer, Dead:‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive”,Somatechnics, 2/1(2012), 1–17.
