DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 23 that may exist beyond them being seen as entirely disposable. Fat, Queer and Anti-social Fat activism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the US and deployed practices such as protests, sit-ins at diet clinics, conferences, and books, with the aim to critique and fight against fat discrimination in medical discourse and society at large. 8 The disci­pline of Fat Studies has ties to fat activism and is a broad field organised around critical scholarship surrounding discourse relating to“obesity”, in parti­cular challenging links made between fatness and ill health. Queer theory and queer studies are similarly broad disciplines with indeterminacy at their heart; as Annamarie Jagose has written:“[q]ueer describes those gestures or analytical models which drama­tize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual de­sire.” 9 In this section of the essay, I argue—following Francis Ray White—that there is conceptual room for fatness to fall into the realm of queerness, set­ting the scene for the cooptation of cows into these discourses. 10 Fat Studies scholars have frequently drawn on queer studies to aid in their thinking around fat issues. 11 In this piece, I will be concentrating on one particular example of the generative overlaps of Fat Studies and Queer Studies. Lee Edelman’s influential book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive , hin­ges on the premise that Western society is predica­ted on the notion of“reproductive futurism”(that is, the confining of political discourse to heteronor­mativity) that denies a queer resistance that would open up other ways of doing and being. 12 Edelman believes that this insistence of seeing queer futures as“other,” as not possible, amounts to queerness being equated with the death drive, the drive to nothingness, oblivion. 13 Francis Ray White in their 2012 article“Fat, Queer, Dead:‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive” applies the same conceptual lens to the case of narratives surrounding the Change4Li­fe campaign, an anti-obesity campaign launched by the UK government in 2009 with the aim of encou­raging behavioural changes leading to all individu­als being able to maintain a healthy weight. 14 White suggests that there is room enough in Edel­man’s definition of“queer” for the concept of fat­ness to be included. This is because Edelman ack­nowledges that there are many in the LGBTQIA+ community who do conform to“reproductive futu­rism” and so conceives of“queer” as something that disrupts the social order. Edelman contends that “[t]he queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such—on disturbing, therefo­re and on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization” 15 . White believes that this defini­tion has sufficient scope to encompass the theorisa­tion of fat as queer, because being fat is to commit a“catalogue of transgressions[…] against norma­tive standards of gender and sexuality, health and morality” 16 . 8 See Vikki Chalklin,“Obstinate fatties: Fat activism, queer negativity, and the celebration of‘obesity’”, Subjectivity , 9/2(2016) 107–125. 9 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York, 1996), 3. 10 See White"Fat, Queer, Dead"(see n. 7). 11 See Kathleen LeBesco,“Quest for a Cause: The Fat Gene, the Gay Gene, and the New Eugenics”, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay(eds.), The Fat Studies Reader (New York, 2009), 65–74; Samantha Murray, The‘Fat’ Female Body (Basingstoke, 2008). 12 See Edelman, No Future (see n. 6). 13 The concept of the death drive was originated by Freud. To learn more about it see Matei Georgescu,“Freud’s Theory of the Death Drive”, Review of Contemporary Philosophy , 10(2011), 228–233. 14 See White,"Fat, Queer, Dead"(see n. 7). 15 Edelman, No Future, 17(see n. 6). 16 See White,"Fat, Queer, Dead", 5(see n. 7).