DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023)25in both sexual and environmental discourses.22Oneexample of research in this area is Shiloh Krupar’sresearch into the cleanup of a former plutoniumfactory in Colorado which centres performances ofthe drag queen Nuclia Waste.23Another example isresearch into anxieties around the“gay frog,” whichare argued to be rooted in sexual and racist discrimination called forth by the blurring of borders.24Both STS and queer ecology provide tools to seecows as actors. Returning to Lee Edelman’s conceptof queerness as disturbing the social order and thusprompting the queering of our own relations with society, I believe the intense debates around cows anddairy farming in recent years—in relation to thingslike breeding practices and separation from theircalves—prompt this queering of society and in particular the agrifood sector. A strong argument canbe made for cows being queer creatures within thiscontext. This is something that I will expand on in thenext section by discussing how measures such as carbon footprints are imbued with long-standing ideologies present within agriculture, and what this meansfor cows.In terms of agriculture and food production, thereis one particular version of this logic of reproductive futurism: that each generation of animals shouldbe bigger, better, and more efficient than the last,achieved through genetic intervention. There arenumerous articles on the subject of the agrifood system that are predicated on the imperative of futurepopulation growth.26Starting out with this future inmind often leads to neglecting current problems inthe food system in favour of solving assumed problems of the future. Such an argument ties the reproductive futures of cows to the reproductive futuresof humans. Dairy cows must continue producing children to continue to provide vast quantities of milk fora growing human population. Clay and Yurco definesuch a narrative as the imperative of“more milk” thathas dominated the dairy industry since the onset ofthe twentieth century and in particular after WorldWar II, since when milk output per farm and per cowhas massively increased.27The Reproductive Futuresof CowsLee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism argues against“terms that impose an ideological limiton political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity byrendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance tothis organizing principle of communal relations”25.Fig. 3: Image of a Holstein cow taken on a farm in Lancashiretaken by myself during fieldwork22See Nicole Seymour,“Queer Ecologies and Queer Environmentalisms”, in Siobhan Somerville(ed.),The Cambridge Companion toQueer Studies(Cambridge, 2020), 108–122.23See Shiloh R. Krupar,“Transnatural ethics: revisiting the nuclear cleanup of Rocky Flats, CO, through the queer ecology of NucliaWaste”,Cultural Geographies, 19/3(2012), 303–327.24See Hannah Boast,“Theorizing the Gay Frog”,Environmental Humanities, 14/3(2022), 661–679.25Edelman, No Future, 2(see n. 6)26See, e.g., Alexander Y. Prosekov and Svetlana A. Ivanova,“Food security: The challenge of the present”, Geoforum, 91(2018),73–77; Martine Helms,“Food sustainability, food security and the environment”,British Food Journal, 106/5(2004), 380–387.27 See Nathan Clay and Kayla Yurco,“Political ecology of milk: Contested futures of a lively food”,Geography Compass, 14/8(2020), 12497, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12497(accessed 3 July 2023).
