Bovine Regimes : When Animals Become Technologies

This special volume centers on bovines to analyze the circumstances in which the management and understanding of animals are intertwined and merged with technological systems. The geographically diverse historical and anthropological contributions employ temporality as a central lens to examine the changing proximity of animals to technology over time. Collectively, they demonstrate how bovine bodies have been important sites for manifesting the relationship among people, technology, and power structures. Such a relational animal-technology approach ultimately enriches the understanding of both technology and animality.

keywords: Animals; technology; bovine; temporality

Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin, collaborative article by Lucy Beech and Tamar Novick

‘Freemartinism’ is a biological phenomenon in genetically female cows born from a dizygotic twin pregnancy. An exchange of blood and hormones between the freemartin and their male twin through placental connections renders the cow intersex and unable to conceive. This article examines the many attempts of farmers and scientists to harness the indeterminacy of the freemartin’s liminal sex characteristics and analyzes how dairy farmers sought to transform the freemartin into a heat detection technology to maximize the reproductive performance of other fertile cows. Moreover, unabated scientific and agricultural engagement with freemartins inspired new ways of thinking about the biological self and marks the reinsertion of non-procreative sexual pleasure into industrial farms. The freemartin emerges in this article in a constant state of flux: between waste and use; becoming a technology and supplemented by other technologies; defined by human anxieties about gender, but also as a tool for underscoring dominant gendered ideas about normative family life, human sex, and sexuality. This article was developed by Beech and Novick into a performative lecture, a video essay and short film titled Flush (2023)

Tamar Novick writes about agriculture, technology, animals, bodily waste, and fertility research in Palestine/Israel. She is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and author of Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023). This text was part of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Dept. III colloquium series and the 2021 workshop “Bovine Regimes.” The authors are grateful for participants’ comments, and they especially thank Joe Dennis, Daniel Liu, Marcy Norton, Marianna Szczygielska, and Janina Wellmann.

keywords: Freemartin; cows; technology; reproduction technologies; breed- ing; hormones; senses

Read more here