Gabriel N Rosenberg | Duke University (original) (raw)

Papers by Gabriel N Rosenberg

The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sex- ual contact be... more The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sex- ual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological condi- tions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities. It notes that the majority of these statutes have been enacted within the past three decades and most contain language that explicitly exempts animal husbandry and veterinary medicine from prosecution. The article explores the legislative politics that produce these exemptions and exposes an underlying ambiguity: in the age of industrial reproduction, the “accepted practices” of animal husbandry can be dis- tinguished from bestiality only through legal at. The structure of the laws exempt human sexual contact with animals when it reproduces biocapital and produces “perverse” bestialists and “normal” farmers as mirrored categories, distinguished not by their relations to animals but by their relations to capital. Finally, the arti- cle reads this insight against the biopolitical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s concept of anthropogenesis and notes that such exemptions reveal a limitation in his the- ory. In place of the timeless ritualism of Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” the article argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure, the critical role of sexual violence and reproduction, and processes of trans-speciative procreation.

"A Classroom in the Barnyard: Reproducing Heterosexuality in Interwar American 4-H" in Queering the Countryside, Gilley, Gray, and Johnson eds. (NYU Press, 2016): 88-106.

"Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America" in Boundaries of the State in US History, Novack, Sparrow, Sawyers, eds. (UChicago Press, 2015): 183-208

Published in *Diplomatic History* 38.2 (April 2014): 233-239

The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, rac... more The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality that spanned human and non-human animals. Livestock breeders and commentators alike parsed animal bodies for their susceptibility and resistance to “race suicide,” a popular early twentieth century concept that, when applied to humans, signaled concern that the white middle-class reproduction and masculine vigor were faltering. Race suicide discourses gained traction in breeding literature precisely because animal breeding functioned as a popular laboratory of racial knowledge and biopolitical management. Porcine racial categories stabilized the rapidly reconfiguring infrastructures of American meat consumption and discourses of racial decline and contamination that spanned both human and non-human animals. These categories both reflected and constituted understandings of human race, and thus the article demonstrates how human and non-human racial knowledges were locked in a fluid conversation about what types of lives were livable and what types of bodies were fit to receive violence.

"Gabriel N. Rosenberg's masterful history of 4-H is the first in-depth study of an institution th... more "Gabriel N. Rosenberg's masterful history of 4-H is the first in-depth study of an institution that every historian of agriculture, not to mention every rural American, recognizes as an essential component of the modern rural landscape. The project delivers a sophisticated mix of cultural, political, and economic history that exposes the hidden hands and visible bodies at work in constructing twentieth-century U.S. governance in the American heartland."—Shane Hamilton, author of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy

"This beautifully crafted study offers a braided history of the state, the body, and the countryside. At its center is the 4-H club, which Rosenberg brilliantly reveals not as a nostalgic relic of an agrarian past but as an active engine of modern biopolitics. Whether or not you have ever set foot at the county fair, The 4-H Harvest is an absorbing and utterly original read."—Margot Canaday, author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

4-H, the iconic rural youth program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has enrolled more than 70 million Americans over the last century. As the first comprehensive history of the organization, The 4-H Harvest tracks 4-H from its origins in turn-of-the-century agricultural modernization efforts, through its role in the administration of federal programs during the New Deal and World War II, to its status as an instrument of international development in Cold War battlegrounds like Vietnam and Latin America.

In domestic and global settings, 4-H's advocates dreamed of transforming rural economies, communities, and families. Organizers believed the clubs would bypass backward patriarchs reluctant to embrace modern farming techniques. In their place, 4-H would cultivate efficient, capital-intensive farms and convince rural people to trust federal expertise. The modern 4-H farm also featured gender-appropriate divisions of labor and produced healthy, robust children. To retain the economic potential of the "best" youth, clubs insinuated state agents at the heart of rural family life. By midcentury, the vision of healthy 4-H'ers on family farms advertised the attractiveness of the emerging agribusiness economy.

With rigorous archival research, Gabriel N. Rosenberg provocatively argues that public acceptance of the political economy of agribusiness hinged on federal efforts to establish a modern rural society through effective farming technology and techniques as well as through carefully managed gender roles, procreation, and sexuality. The 4-H Harvest shows how 4-H, like the countryside it often symbolizes, is the product of the modernist ambition to efficiently govern rural economies, landscapes, and populations.

Online Writings by Gabriel N Rosenberg

Milo Was the Wrong Voice on the Real Complexity of Age, Sex, and Consent

Where are Animals in the History of Sexuality?

Inventing the Family Farm: Towards a History of Rural Heterosexuality

"Fetishizing Family Farms"

This essay, featured in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas Section, explores the political mythology... more This essay, featured in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas Section, explores the political mythology and social realities around rural family life in US history.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Locker Room Talk"

This essay places discussions of "locker room talk" during the 2016 presidential election in the ... more This essay places discussions of "locker room talk" during the 2016 presidential election in the context of the scholarship on the sociology and history of masculinity in the United States.

Chill Out. Political History Has Never Been Better.

A response to the New York Times Op-Ed by Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop ... more A response to the New York Times Op-Ed by Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?”

Syllabi and Teaching by Gabriel N Rosenberg

Transgender Studies & The Humanities

Website for 2016-17 project in the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies program (GSF) at Duke Uni... more Website for 2016-17 project in the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies program (GSF) at Duke University, funded by Franklin Humanities Institute. Includes curricular developments, lectures, and workshops. Coordinated by Ara Wilson & Gabriel Rosenberg (GSF), assisted by Cole Rizki (Literature). Website http://gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu/events/transgender-studies-the-humanities. Speakers include Gayle Salamon, Kai Green, C. Riley Snorton, Paisley Currah, and others.

Reviews of *The 4-H Harvest* by Gabriel N Rosenberg

nineteenth-century families would presumably require us to complicate considerably the idea that ... more nineteenth-century families would presumably require us to complicate considerably the idea that the household formed a domestic space in which authority was mediated through kinship and from which market forces and interclass relationships were absent. Similarly, the meanings of the words public and private changed significantly over time and were deployed in context-specific ways, and this requires considerable care when attempting comparisons across long periods of time or, as in this book, across cultures. The way in which 'separate spheres' is invoked in this collection frequently signals the need for more detailed study of the peculiarities and varieties of domestic cultures in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, even those who find anachronistic models of public and private analytically useful have increasingly sought to differentiate between different kinds of public sphere, as Kathryn Gleadle has done by distinguishing between a public and a "parochial" sphere; one might equally wish to differentiate between different forms of private sphere. Secondly, recent work has stressed the utility of treating male domestic authority as an object of inquiry independent of arguments about separate spheres. Following this insight would have allowed the authors of these essays to engage more deeply with the history of masculinities. Many of the essays examine how particular constructions of masculinity were defined against "effeminate" or "unmanly" others, but few consider that the form of masculinity thus valorized was just one of a number of competing models vying for legitimacy and authority at any one time. The muscular Christianity described by Ebel, for example, or the "fierce masculinity" described by Schneider, was not the only form of masculinity claiming legitimacy in the periods covered by these authors, and understanding how they were situated relative to their rivals would have a significant bearing on the arguments presented here. Future research might therefore usefully examine how there were multiple competing models of fatherhood and interspousal relationships, competing ideas about how men's control over their families' religion ought to be exercised, and competing ideas about the "manliness" of priests, for example.

The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sex- ual contact be... more The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sex- ual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological condi- tions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities. It notes that the majority of these statutes have been enacted within the past three decades and most contain language that explicitly exempts animal husbandry and veterinary medicine from prosecution. The article explores the legislative politics that produce these exemptions and exposes an underlying ambiguity: in the age of industrial reproduction, the “accepted practices” of animal husbandry can be dis- tinguished from bestiality only through legal at. The structure of the laws exempt human sexual contact with animals when it reproduces biocapital and produces “perverse” bestialists and “normal” farmers as mirrored categories, distinguished not by their relations to animals but by their relations to capital. Finally, the arti- cle reads this insight against the biopolitical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s concept of anthropogenesis and notes that such exemptions reveal a limitation in his the- ory. In place of the timeless ritualism of Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” the article argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure, the critical role of sexual violence and reproduction, and processes of trans-speciative procreation.

"A Classroom in the Barnyard: Reproducing Heterosexuality in Interwar American 4-H" in Queering the Countryside, Gilley, Gray, and Johnson eds. (NYU Press, 2016): 88-106.

"Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America" in Boundaries of the State in US History, Novack, Sparrow, Sawyers, eds. (UChicago Press, 2015): 183-208

Published in *Diplomatic History* 38.2 (April 2014): 233-239

The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, rac... more The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality that spanned human and non-human animals. Livestock breeders and commentators alike parsed animal bodies for their susceptibility and resistance to “race suicide,” a popular early twentieth century concept that, when applied to humans, signaled concern that the white middle-class reproduction and masculine vigor were faltering. Race suicide discourses gained traction in breeding literature precisely because animal breeding functioned as a popular laboratory of racial knowledge and biopolitical management. Porcine racial categories stabilized the rapidly reconfiguring infrastructures of American meat consumption and discourses of racial decline and contamination that spanned both human and non-human animals. These categories both reflected and constituted understandings of human race, and thus the article demonstrates how human and non-human racial knowledges were locked in a fluid conversation about what types of lives were livable and what types of bodies were fit to receive violence.

"Gabriel N. Rosenberg's masterful history of 4-H is the first in-depth study of an institution th... more "Gabriel N. Rosenberg's masterful history of 4-H is the first in-depth study of an institution that every historian of agriculture, not to mention every rural American, recognizes as an essential component of the modern rural landscape. The project delivers a sophisticated mix of cultural, political, and economic history that exposes the hidden hands and visible bodies at work in constructing twentieth-century U.S. governance in the American heartland."—Shane Hamilton, author of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy

"This beautifully crafted study offers a braided history of the state, the body, and the countryside. At its center is the 4-H club, which Rosenberg brilliantly reveals not as a nostalgic relic of an agrarian past but as an active engine of modern biopolitics. Whether or not you have ever set foot at the county fair, The 4-H Harvest is an absorbing and utterly original read."—Margot Canaday, author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

4-H, the iconic rural youth program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has enrolled more than 70 million Americans over the last century. As the first comprehensive history of the organization, The 4-H Harvest tracks 4-H from its origins in turn-of-the-century agricultural modernization efforts, through its role in the administration of federal programs during the New Deal and World War II, to its status as an instrument of international development in Cold War battlegrounds like Vietnam and Latin America.

In domestic and global settings, 4-H's advocates dreamed of transforming rural economies, communities, and families. Organizers believed the clubs would bypass backward patriarchs reluctant to embrace modern farming techniques. In their place, 4-H would cultivate efficient, capital-intensive farms and convince rural people to trust federal expertise. The modern 4-H farm also featured gender-appropriate divisions of labor and produced healthy, robust children. To retain the economic potential of the "best" youth, clubs insinuated state agents at the heart of rural family life. By midcentury, the vision of healthy 4-H'ers on family farms advertised the attractiveness of the emerging agribusiness economy.

With rigorous archival research, Gabriel N. Rosenberg provocatively argues that public acceptance of the political economy of agribusiness hinged on federal efforts to establish a modern rural society through effective farming technology and techniques as well as through carefully managed gender roles, procreation, and sexuality. The 4-H Harvest shows how 4-H, like the countryside it often symbolizes, is the product of the modernist ambition to efficiently govern rural economies, landscapes, and populations.

Milo Was the Wrong Voice on the Real Complexity of Age, Sex, and Consent

Where are Animals in the History of Sexuality?

Inventing the Family Farm: Towards a History of Rural Heterosexuality

"Fetishizing Family Farms"

This essay, featured in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas Section, explores the political mythology... more This essay, featured in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas Section, explores the political mythology and social realities around rural family life in US history.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Locker Room Talk"

This essay places discussions of "locker room talk" during the 2016 presidential election in the ... more This essay places discussions of "locker room talk" during the 2016 presidential election in the context of the scholarship on the sociology and history of masculinity in the United States.

Chill Out. Political History Has Never Been Better.

A response to the New York Times Op-Ed by Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop ... more A response to the New York Times Op-Ed by Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?”

Transgender Studies & The Humanities

Website for 2016-17 project in the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies program (GSF) at Duke Uni... more Website for 2016-17 project in the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies program (GSF) at Duke University, funded by Franklin Humanities Institute. Includes curricular developments, lectures, and workshops. Coordinated by Ara Wilson & Gabriel Rosenberg (GSF), assisted by Cole Rizki (Literature). Website http://gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu/events/transgender-studies-the-humanities. Speakers include Gayle Salamon, Kai Green, C. Riley Snorton, Paisley Currah, and others.

nineteenth-century families would presumably require us to complicate considerably the idea that ... more nineteenth-century families would presumably require us to complicate considerably the idea that the household formed a domestic space in which authority was mediated through kinship and from which market forces and interclass relationships were absent. Similarly, the meanings of the words public and private changed significantly over time and were deployed in context-specific ways, and this requires considerable care when attempting comparisons across long periods of time or, as in this book, across cultures. The way in which 'separate spheres' is invoked in this collection frequently signals the need for more detailed study of the peculiarities and varieties of domestic cultures in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, even those who find anachronistic models of public and private analytically useful have increasingly sought to differentiate between different kinds of public sphere, as Kathryn Gleadle has done by distinguishing between a public and a "parochial" sphere; one might equally wish to differentiate between different forms of private sphere. Secondly, recent work has stressed the utility of treating male domestic authority as an object of inquiry independent of arguments about separate spheres. Following this insight would have allowed the authors of these essays to engage more deeply with the history of masculinities. Many of the essays examine how particular constructions of masculinity were defined against "effeminate" or "unmanly" others, but few consider that the form of masculinity thus valorized was just one of a number of competing models vying for legitimacy and authority at any one time. The muscular Christianity described by Ebel, for example, or the "fierce masculinity" described by Schneider, was not the only form of masculinity claiming legitimacy in the periods covered by these authors, and understanding how they were situated relative to their rivals would have a significant bearing on the arguments presented here. Future research might therefore usefully examine how there were multiple competing models of fatherhood and interspousal relationships, competing ideas about how men's control over their families' religion ought to be exercised, and competing ideas about the "manliness" of priests, for example.

A review of Allison Carruth's *Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food* and K... more A review of Allison Carruth's *Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food* and Kathryn Cornell Dolan's *Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850–1900* appearing in *American Literature* 88.2 (June 2016): 408-410.

This volume of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies engages feminis... more This volume of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies engages feminist, queer, and transgender perspectives on animals. Gender: Animals traces how non-human and human animals are crucial subjects in gender studies, especially when it comes to understanding matters of life and death, difference and diversity, carnality, and representation. Its 21 chapters examine such topics as feminist food politics, veterinary care, zoos, microbes, breeding, chattel slavery, industrial slaughter, and animal internet stardom. Chapters are written by eminent scholars, are peer reviewed, include illustrations, and offer bibliographies to encourage further research. The volume concludes with a glossary and a comprehensive index.