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Two versions of the same children’s story have pride of place on my office shelf: a large-format illustrated pulp paperback version of The Little Red Hen, produced by the Saalfield Publishing Company in Akron, Ohio, in 1928, and a glossy child-sized hardback version of The Little Red Hen (Rand McNally Junior Elf Book) published in 1957. These children’s books provide my point of entry to an exploration of the relations between women and the most liminal of livestock —the chicken. In the old children’s folktale, Little Red Hen finds a wheat seed, asks the other farmyard creatures for help planting it, and when they refuse her, she goes on to plant, reap, thresh, and take the wheat to be ground at the mill. She mixes and bakes the bread, still without help, and in the end she eats the bread, ignoring the pleas of her fellow creatures to share it with them. As a folktale, The Little Red Hen has generally been read as exhorting young children to work hard, accept responsibility, and share with others. Children’s stories are more than simple didactic tracts, however. Feminist critics have shown that because such texts reflect their time and place, they frame what is considered gender-appropriate behavior at the time, even modeling that behavior to its young audience. But these folktales do even more than that, I want to suggest: they raise a number of linked questions about women and agriculture , and they do so through the figure of the chicken—or specifically, the little red hen. Whether due to their widespread domestication, their small size, their relative ease of management, or their ability to subsist by scavenging, the chicken holds a potent liminal position between backyard and farm fields, between the “egg money” of the farm wife and the formal farm economy, between the private world of women and the public world of men, between the realms of animal agriculture and human reproductive medicine, and between the practices 138 Gender “Why are women like chickens and chickens like women?” —subRosa Art Collective, Cultures of Eugenics bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 7 of traditional farming and the new world of industrial meat and egg production and pharming (breeding chickens genetically engineered to lay eggs that express pharmaceutical-grade proteins, used to create profitable new drugs).1 I use the term liminal to refer to “those beings marginal to human life who hold rich potential for our ongoing biomedical negotiations with, and interventions in, the paradigmatic life crises: birth, growth, aging, and death” (Squier 2004, 9). As liminal livestock, chickens play a central role in our gendered agricultural imaginary: the zone where we find “the speculative, propositional fabric of agricultural thought . . . which supplements the more strictly systematic, properly scientific, thought of [agriculture], its deductive strategies and empirical epistemologies” (Waldby 2000, 136).2 Looking at chickens and chicken farming as they are explored in art of various kinds, we can uncover the basic unarticulated assumptions that help to shape the role of women in farming and the role of farming in women’s lives. Because different artistic media offer us access to, and catalyze, different aspects of the agricultural imaginary, I turn in what follows to several children’s stories, a novel, and a film to ask, adapting subRosa Art Collective’s memorable question: “What does it mean, to feminism and to agriculture, that women are like chickens and chickens are like women?” (subRosa 2005). Art and the Agricultural Imaginary From the ancient children’s fable The Little Red Hen to contemporary works of art in a number of different media, chickens are frequently represented as liminal livestock, and as such they articulate the complex intersection of women and agriculture. I will sketch out how this operates, beginning with analysis of the changes in the anthropomorphic character Little Red Hen that testify to the U.S. agricultural transition from family farming to intensive confinement agriculture . Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats further complicates the simple dyad of woman and chickens by exploring the connections between animal agriculture and human reproductive medicine and dramatizing the racialized nature of chicken consumption and distribution in the United States. John Fiege’s documentary film Mississippi Chicken, an exploration of the lot of chicken processing workers in contemporary Mississippi, reveals the interlinked gender-, race-, and ethnicity-based oppression of women that are part of the contemporary poultry business. Another children’s tale featuring a little red (or...

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