4-H and the Family Farm as Historical Materialist Connection Between Trans and Animal Struggles: A Response to Trans* New Materialism

Trans* new materialism (TNM) is a relatively recent trend in trans studies which attempts to conjoin analyses of transness with insights from posthumanism and animal studies. As of yet, it represents the most substantial corpus of literature engaged with fostering connections between trans people and animals. TNM has, however, come under criticism from within trans studies. Andrea Long Chu provocatively called it “the worst possible direction for trans studies to go in” and authors like Kadji Amin and Josch Hoenes warn that TNM runs the risk of decentring actual lived experiences of trans people and neglecting the specific historical situatedness of power structures. Rather than dismissing TNM’s project of fostering trans-animal connections, I am interested in addressing the concerns of TNM’s critics by linking the struggles of trans people and animals in a historical materialist way. In this paper, I create such an analysis by drawing on Gabriel Rosenberg’s work on the US agricultural youth organisation 4-H and the heteronormative family farm. Extending the purview of Rosenberg’s account to include cisnormativity, this case study reveals that: firstly, the elimination of transness from the bodies of rural youth via 4-H and the family farm was inextricably tied to the capital-intensification of agriculture in the early twentieth century, which aggravated animal domination both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, secondly, the normalisation of children’s bodies according to a eugenic ideal of healthy, white, hetero, and cis bodies was informed by the biopolitical governance of animals and vice versa. Reproduction signified a vital link between the two.