Thinking with “cow-forming” (De la Cadena)

Thinking with "cow-forming" (De la Cadena) Roxane Gabet, ULiège
How can we think current practices and modes of re-mediation between cows and the "environment"? To do so, I propose to unfold the concept of "cow-forming" (de la Cadena, 2020) in three interrelated ways. First, cow-forming as the trans-formation of actual bodies of cows on a genomic level in order to create a "climate friendly cow". Whether it is as victims of climate change or as causes of it, their roles translate into different interventions - such as increasing their resistance to heat, or reducing their methane emissions. Through a lab ethnography, I will examine how cows' bodies are (re)formed as they become sites of intervention for environmental engineering projects. On a second level, the forming of new cows is at the heart of the current cattle farming industry, relying on artificial insemination. While paying particular attention to reproductive technologies - as they allow for the dissociation of sex and reproduction - I want to inquire into what cow sex is or could be, within and beyond these breeding practices, through an eco-feminist perspective that centres multispecies reproductive justice. Finally, I will focus on the role of cows in forming the land. Based on ethnographic and archival research, I will propose a genealogy that follows how cows were enrolled in colonial projects in Alberta, Canada. Through the massive and forced displacement of people, animals, plants, bacteria and viruses, settler colonialism reshaped entire ecosystems in a process of terra-forming, of which cows are part of: that is, a process of cow-forming.