Current projects: The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States

Gabriel Rosenberg's research investigates the historical and contemporary linkages among gender, sexuality, and the global food system. In particular, he studies spaces of agricultural production as important sites for the constitution and governance of intimacy – intimacy both between and among humans, animals, and plants. Although central throughout history to human knowledge about reproduction, agriculture has been peripheral to accounts of the governance of sexuality. In tandem, while historical accounts of American state power have productively questioned matters of governance through the lens of agriculture, they have largely overlooked sexuality as its own formative analytic. His research looks to agriculture as a site of knowledge/power formation that inscribes and mobilizes both human and non-human bodies and desire. Reflecting his training as a historian of the modern United States, he uses the archives of the America’s agricultural past to exhume the tangled relationships between agricultural practices and the governance of human gender and sexuality, a relationship that now conditions America’s relationship to the agricultural peripheries of the global South.