The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg (review)

Gabriel Rosenberg’s The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America is the latest work in a growing field of scholarship that investigates the history of sexuality in nonmetropolitan areas. Despite the incredible growth and diversity of this literature since the publication of John Howard’s Men Like That in 2000, Rosenberg’s book highlights that there is still much we do not yet know and many more promising areas of research.¹ The 4-H organization might not seem to be a natural object of analysis for historians of sexuality, but Rosenberg’s volume illustrates convincingly that 4-H is best understood as a biopolitical organization, placing it firmly in the wheel-house of scholars of sexuality. Rosenberg utilizes a queer lens to investigate the power structures that uphold heteronormativity, thereby illustrating the continued relevance of queer studies, even in—or perhaps especially in—instances where the main objects of analysis are not sexual minorities.

This volume provides readers with a number of important insights; most importantly, it historicizes heteronormativity and underscores the state’s role in its formation. Indeed, it likely will surprise many readers to learn that 4-H—an organization often seen as synonymous with rural America— is actually administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), making it, as Rosenberg states in the book’s introduction, “the full legal property of an immense federal bureaucracy” (3). Thus, the heart of The 4-H Harvest is an exploration of the ways in which the state has utilized 4-H as a means to produce desired outcomes not only in crops and animals but also in families and human behavior. Rosenberg’s volume thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring the relationship between the state and sexuality.²

The narrative and analytical arc of The 4-H Harvest “proceeds successively from the gendered bodies of rural youth, to the familial and community bodies in which their productive and reproductive capacities were elaborated, and to the national and global bodies that defined their reproductive horizons” (4). Six chapters are ordered chronologically, and each one is charged with mapping a particular biopolitical unit. In chapter 1, Rosenberg grapples with rural degeneracy and what he terms “agrarian futurism,” “an ideology linking the governance of human social and biological reproduction to the practice, theory, and language of agriculture” (12). The following two chapters discuss localized embodiments of gender in rural boys (chapter 2) and rural girls (chapter 3). Historians of sexuality may be particularly interested in chapter 4, “Conserving Farm and Family in New Deal 4-H,” which explores how the USDA sought to use 4-H as a “means to conserve the family farm, rural society, and national fertility” (18). Chapters 5 and 6 expand outward, investigating how the state deployed 4-H to harness and direct the labor of rural youth. For example, chapter 5 argues that the growing threat of totalitarianism in the 1930s motivated the USDA to mobilize 4-H as a means to prepare rural Americans for war. When World War II did break out, “the USDA used nationalist sentiment and the existing biopolitical capacities of 4-H to transform rural youth labor into valuable wartime commodities” (153). The final chapter explores the formation of international 4-H programs after World War II and connects this development to the state’s broad agenda of anti-Communist development, especially in the global South.

Overall, The 4-H Harvest makes a significant and important contribution to the field of the history of sexuality and deserves wide readership. Not only will Rosenberg’s provocative insights transform the way we view the 4-H clover signs as we drive on country roads, but, more importantly, it will also change the way we understand the relationship between the state, rural America, and sexuality.