Feeding Desire

Generative Environments, Meat Markets, and the Management of Sheep Intercourse in Great Britain, 1700-1750

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3924607
AutoresEmily Pawley (autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen33
Número1
Páginas47-62
Fecha de publicación2018-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaOsiris (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/699233
OpenAlexW2898379272
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas34

As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different aspect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of-season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally dependent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge

Agriculture · Animal husbandry · Biology · Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Ecology