Gabe Rosenberg - How Meat Changed Sex: Intimacy with Animals After Industrial Reproduction

This talk explores the recent history and structure of statutes in the United States criminalizing sexual contact between humans and animals. In place of philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” the talk argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure as well as interspecies sexual violence and reproduction as vital technologies of speciation.Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University and former Postdoctoral Associate in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His research investigates the intersections of gender, sexuality, food systems, and political economy in the contemporary world. His first book, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), is a gendered and sexual history of the USDA’s iconic “4-H” rural youth  organization.