Seminar with Ginevra Sanvitale

From chicken fiat to chicken nuggets. Notes on gender, technology and poultry processing in 20th century Italy (1920s-1990s)

Research Seminar – Eindhoven History Lab (Atlas 9320)

June 8th 2023, 10:45-12:00

10:45-10:50

Introduction. Erik van der Vleuten, Eindhoven History Lab

10:50-11:10

From chicken fiat to chicken nuggets. Notes on gender, technology and poultry processing in 20th century Italy (1920s-1990s). Ginevra Sanvitale, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin

Poultry meat is one of the main sources of animal protein in human diets worldwide. Historically, female labor has been crucial in poultry farming and processing. I discuss the interconnected histories of women and poultry in 20^th century Italy, focusing on the technologies which enabled or facilitated this relationship, from the “rationalisation” of rural poultry farming under the fascist regime to the rise of a large scale poultry processing industry from the 1960s onward. I look at these technology-enabled encounters between women and chickens from three intersecting domains of feminist food studies: the material, the socio-cultural, and the corporeal (Allen and Sachs 2007).

11:10-12:00

Follow the chicken. Looking for non-human animals in the history of technology. Informal discussion.

Several non-human animals inhabit the history of technology. Some have a destructive effect on technology, such as the metaphorical and actual bugs altering the functioning of computer systems (Kidwell 1998). Other were the reason why technologies were developed or modified: a plough can be dragged by a human or by a horse, but it will have a different design, depending on the animal operating it. Non-human animals have also been equated with technologies. For example, the modern broiler chicken can be envisioned as a “protein machine” designed to transform vegetable calories into animal proteins (Galusky 2022), while pigs and sheep under fascist regimes were fundamental “technoscientific organisms” for the maintenance of political power (Saraiva 2016). Mutual dependency relationships between human and non-human animals, and the techno-scientific advancements facilitating them, often imply significant transformations of ecosystems, notably in global agri-food system: intensive animal farming histories are deeply interconnected with soy production histories (van der Vleuten and de Hoop 2022). In other words -or better, in Donna Haraway’s words: “follow the chicken and find the world”. In this informal discussion we seek to find the many words which have been created, or could be created, by past, present and future interactions between technologies and animals (human and not). Which non-human animals are most impacted by which technologies? How is their perception of these technologies different from that of humans, e.g. in spatial and temporal terms? Do non-human animals create technologies, or is it a prerogative of humans? If they do, what can humans learn from other animals’ technological systems and processes?

12:00-12:15

History Lab planning meeting

Bibliography

• Allen, Patricia, and Carolyn Sachs. ‘Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food’. In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, 23–40. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
• van der Vleuten, Erik, and Evelien de Hoop. “Crisis narratives from the Dutch Soyacene: Regional sustainability hi/stories at sites of soy consumption.” In The Age of the Soybean.: An Environmental History of Soy During the Great Acceleration, pp. 265-288. White Horse Press, 2022.
• Galusky, Wyatt. Protein Machines, Technology, and the Nature of the Future. Springer Nature, 2022.
• Haraway, Donna. When species meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
• Kidwell, Peggy Aldrich. “Stalking the elusive computer bug.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 20, no. 4 (1998): 5-9.
• Saraiva, Tiago. Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism. MIT Press, 2016.