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WORK TITLE: The 4-H Harvest
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Rosenberg, Gabriel Nathan
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https://today.duke.edu/2013/11/rosenberg * http://www.humcenter.pitt.edu/news-story/gabriel-n-rosenberg-2016-2017-early-career-fellow * https://scholars.duke.edu/person/gabriel.rosenberg
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Brown University, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Duke University, Durham, NC, assistant professor, 2015—; University of Pittsburgh, Humanities Center Early Career Fellow, 2016-2017.
AWARDS:K. Austin Kerr Prize, Business History Conference, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Boundaries of the State in U.S. History, edited by J. Sparrow, W. Novak, and S. Sawyer, University of Chicago Press, 2015; and Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies, edited by M. Gray, C. Johnson, and B. Gilley, New York University Press, 2016. Contributor to periodicals, including American Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Gabriel N. Rosenberg earned his doctorate from Brown University in 2011 and went on to receive the K. Austin Kerr Prize in 2012. He joined the faculty at Duke University as an assistant professor in the Women’s Studies department in 2015, and he also served as the Humanities Center Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, from 2016 to 2017. Rosenberg’s research interests explores gender and sexuality, but it does so through the lens of rural culture and agricultural practices. In fact, the author connects history and farming practices with the cultivation of gender roles. His articles on related subjects have appeared in the American Quarterly, and he has also contributed chapters to such books as Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (released by the University of Chicago Press in 2015) and Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (released by New York University Press in 2016).
Rosenberg’s first book, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and released in 2015. It, too, examines gender politics through the unique practices of 4-H clubs. The author presents a brief but complicated history of 4-H agrarian clubs, noting that they sought to apply complex farming research in an agricultural youth club. The goal, Rosenberg notes, was to keep farming culture alive, but that culture was inherently white, heterosexual, and “Christian.” USDA scientific research was disseminated through 4-H clubs, but given the cultural influence of local chapters, the organization served as a strange combination of the American state and rural values. On fact, the 4-H club not only focuses on white, heterosexual families, but also offered training to enforce these values. This training included athletic competitions for the boys and cooking classes for the girls.
Thus, Rosenberg describes 4-H practices as the end point for a series of intertwined cultural and political intesections, resulting in a literal and figurative body politic. In this manner, Rosenberg applies complex cultural theories and gender theories to anecdotes of 4-H experiences. In addition, Rosenberg explores the complex science of modern farming as they mix with age-old cultural hegemonies of race, sexual orientation, and family-making. Furthermore, the author notes that some rural areas with 4-H clubs were predominantly black, but 4-H officials and testers ignored the clubs based there.
Discussing The 4-H Harvest on the Duke Today Web site, Rosenberg explained: “There was an emphasis on how to be healthy and proper young men and proper women. To be a good man, one has to be a good farmer.” Thus, if your plan is to have the best kids stay, you have to figure out who the best kids are . . . Their ideals of beauty had a lot to do with pristine white skin. Eugenics emerges organically from that type of environment.” Praising the author’s insights in Choice, S.D. Reschly declared: “Seldom have these fields of study been so productively blended. For all scholars of agriculture, gender, sexuality, and politics.” Another positive assessment was proffered by Andrew C. Baker in the Journal of Southern History, and the critic declared: “It is no exaggeration to say that Rosenberg has written one of the most important works in American rural and agricultural history of the last decade. The 4-H Harvest builds on the best of the field with insight, analytical depth, and an impressive amount of nuance and discretion, weaving together the histories of the nation-state, gender, and agricultural production in a way that demands attention.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Andrew C. Baker, review of The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America.
Choice, April, 2016, S.D. Reschly, review of The 4-H Harvest.
ONLINE
Duke Today, https://today.duke.edu/(March 29, 2017), author interview.
Duke University Web site, https://scholars.duke.edu/(March 29, 2017), author profile.*
Gabriel Nathan Rosenberg
Assistant Professor in the Program in Women's Studies
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 (... more)
Current Appointments and Affiliations
Assistant Professor in the Program in Women's Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2015 -
Contact Information
email icon gabriel.rosenberg@duke.edu
Education and Training
Ph.D., Brown University 2011
In the News
OCT 12, 2016
What We Talk About When We Talk About Locker Room Talk
SEP 7, 2016 lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
Gabriel Rosenberg, co-author: Chill out. Political history has never been better
MAY 4, 2016 New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Word of Mouth”
Gabriel Rosenberg: Family farm fetish
APR 11, 2016
America's Family Farm Fetish
APR 11, 2016 The Boston Globe
Gabriel Rosenberg: Fetishizing family farms
Subject Headings
Agriculture Animals Environment Food Gender History, Modern Queer Theory Sexuality
Awards and Honors
Gilbert C. Fite Best Dissertation Prize. Agricultural History Society. June 2012
K. Austin Kerr Prize. Business History Conference. March 2012
Postdoctoral Fellowship. Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University. January 2012
Grant-in-Aid. Rockefeller Archive Center. January 2011
Professional Activities
Outreach and Engaged Scholarship
Pig Out: Hogs and Humans in Global and Historical Perspective. Organizer. Yale University. October 16, 2015 - October 18, 2015
Subnature and Culinary Cultures. Co-Convenor. Humanities Writ Large, Duke University. August 2014 - November 2014
Presentations and Appearances
A Race Suicide Among the Hogs: Animal Bodies, Racial Knowledge, and the Biopolitics of Meat. Working Group on Feminism and History. January 31, 2013
‘How is Race Suicide to Be Prevented When the Cholera Gets Among the Hogs?’: Animal Bodies and Racial Knowledge in Late 19th and Early 20th Century America. Program in Agrarian Studies. January 31, 2013
4-H and the Biopolitics of Agricultural Reform in Early Twentieth Century America. January 31, 2012
Inventing the Family Farm: Rethinking the Role of Gender, Sexuality, and Agrarianism in Alternative Food Movements. January 31, 2012
Service to Duke University
Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University. Humanities Writ Large, Steering Committee. July 2015
Service to the Profession
Organizer. Workshop on the Study of Animals in History. Agricultural History Society. June 2015
Program Committee. Annual Meeting. Agricultural History Society. June 2015
Global Scholarship
Expertise
United States of America (Country)
Selected Publications
Books
Rosenberg, GN. The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. (Monograph) Link to Item
Book Sections
Rosenberg, GN. "A Classroom in the Barnyard: Reproducing Heterosexuality in American 4-H." In Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies, edited by M Gray, C Johnson, and B Gilley. New York University Press, 2016. (Chapter)
Rosenberg, GN. "Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in the 1920s Rural United States." In Boundaries of the State in U.S. History, edited by J Sparrow, W Novak, and S Sawyer. University of Chicago Press, 2015. (Chapter) Link to Item
Journal Articles
Rosenberg, GN. "A Race Suicide among the Hogs: The Biopolitics of Pork in the United States, 1865-1930." AMERICAN QUARTERLY 68, no. 1 (March 2016): 49-73. Link to Item
Rosenberg, GN, and Honeck, M. "Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth and Cold War International Relations, 1945-1980." Diplomatic History 38 (April 2014).
Other Articles
Rosenberg, GN. "Where are the Animals in the History of Sexuality?." Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality (September 2, 2014). (Scholarly Commentary) Link to Item
Recent Courses
ENVIRON 209: Food, Farming, and Feminism 2017 -
GLHLTH 225: Food, Farming, and Feminism 2017 -
GSF 202S: Introduction to Study of Sexualities (DS4) 2017 -
GSF 275: Food, Farming, and Feminism 2017 -
SXL 199S: Introduction to Study of Sexualities (DS4) 2017 -
SXL 386S: Politics of Sexuality 2016 -
WOMENST 386S: Politics of Sexuality 2016 -
LIT 475S: Queer Theory 2015 -
SXL 470S: Queer Theory 2015 -
WOMENST 101: Gender and Everyday Life 2015 -
WOMENST 202S: Introduction to Study of Sexualities (DS4) 2015 -
WOMENST 275: Food, Farming, and Feminism 2015 -
WOMENST 370S: Queer Theory 2015 -
WOMENST 891: Independent Study 2015 -
EVENTS APPLY CONTACT
Gabriel N. Rosenberg: 2016-2017 Early Career Fellow
Gabriel N. Rosenberg (Duke University)
2016-2017 Humanities Center Early Career Fellow
Gabriel N. Rosenberg is assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2011. His research investigates the intersections of gender, sexuality, food systems, and political economy in the contemporary world. His first book, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America(University of Pennsylvania Press 2015), is a gendered history of the iconic rural youth organization from its origins in US rural social reform and state-building efforts to its current role in global development. His next book project, entitled "Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in Modern America," uses the history of purebred livestock animals to explore the simultaneous construction of the contemporary global food system and technologies of biopolitical governance. In 2016-2017, he will be on leave from Duke as an Early Career Fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 6, 2013 IN ACADEMICS, RESEARCH
MEET THE NEW FACULTY: GABRIEL ROSENBERG
New women's studies faculty member studies gender issues and animal reproduction in rural communities
Gabriel Rosenberg's new book explores how industrial reproduction of farm animals has affected our beliefs and policies concerning human reproduction. Photo by Les Todd/Duke University Photography
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CAMILLE JACKSON
When Gabriel Rosenberg started unraveling the relationship between farm animals, rural reformers and breeding, he found clues about the history of human reproduction.
Rosenberg, a new assistant professor of the practice in Duke's Program in Women's Studies, researches the history of gender roles in U.S. agriculture after the Civil War. His focus is on feminism and how food has historically been produced, from farm to table. This semester he is teaching a course on "Food, Farming and Feminism."
Rosenberg's research on food production and genders roles on farms led to his first book, "Breeding the Future: 4-H and the Roots of the Modern Rural World," which explores 4-H clubs and their efforts to economically develop rural spaces.
The clubs educated people on correct farming and homemaking techniques, Rosenberg said.
"There was an emphasis on how to be healthy and proper young men and proper women. To be a good man, one has to be a good farmer," Rosenberg said, adding that the goal of reformers in the early 20th century was to arrange for the best rural kids to stay on the farm, get married and have children instead of leaving the countryside for the city.
"If your plan is to have the best kids stay, you have to figure out who the best kids are," Rosenberg said. "Their ideals of beauty had a lot to do with pristine white skin. Eugenics emerges organically from that type of environment."
Rural reformers of the early 20th century who wanted to modernize the countryside, like E. A. Ross, Kenyon Butterfield, and Seaman Knapp, claimed cities were decadent, allowed too much freedom between the sexes and between ethnicities, and encouraged socially irresponsible behavior. They advocated instead for modern agricultural practices, homemaking techniques, and cleanliness.
The reformers created health contests where youth competed to determine who is the most physically fit. They also created social venues for youth, where boys could meet girls, receive sex education and dating advice.
Farm kids were already learning about reproduction from breeding animals, Rosenberg said. The increasing systemization of animal reproduction on American farms forms the basis for his second book.
"Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in Modern America" will be about purebred livestock animals and the history of what happens to them in a capitalist system. He's curious about how the industrial systemization of animal reproduction has changed human reproduction. Most notably, the process behind human in vitro fertilization originated with livestock.
"A considerable amount of the [fertility] technology deployed on humans originates with the market demand to provide more meat to American consumers," he said. "They applied what they learned about breeding animals to men and women, primarily to regulate women's bodies."
As farmers become better integrated into the global meat market, "you have an increasing overriding market concern, which pushes out any other consideration as to how you should relate to animals," said Rosenberg citing the cruelty of the contemporary system.
"If humans are always learning about their own reproduction from animals, how does that transformation affect how we think about human reproduction?" he said.
Reproduction can be separated from an animal's body. Semen and eggs are harvested. Genetic characteristics can be controlled. Does this predict an application to humans? Rosenberg said that in the early 20th century animal breeders frequently talked about animal "races" in magazines, livestock expositions and fairs, and they used their expertise with animals to make arguments about how to control human reproduction.
"Once they start talking about it in terms of race, it affects how their contemporaries think about human racial categories as well and all of the political controversies that surround it," Rosenberg said, referring to forced sterilization and immigration, as examples. "Ultimately I'm interested in how society organizes the space between bodies and desire."
Since joining Duke's faculty, Rosenberg has grown to love Durham and teaching at Duke.
"My students are wonderful. The food scene is great and I love the weather," he said. "As a native of Indiana, Durham often reminds me of home -- particularly the intense passion for basketball."
Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America
Andrew C. Baker
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p958.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Full Text:
The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America. By Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 290. $55.00, ISBN 978-08122-4753-4.)
A freckled boy proudly raises a blue ribbon as he poses in front of his prizewinning hog. A beaming girl cradles her best-at-fair jar of pickles, satisfied that she has made the best better. Such scenes are a fixture of rural life. For those who grew up in the countryside, these 4-H competitions are simply a part of life, like high-school sports and church on Sunday mornings. Most metropolitan Americans, for their part, see 4-H as a quaint holdover from the rural past. These two perspectives, as Gabriel N. Rosenberg so deftly explains in The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, have left this arm of the state free to establish "a mode of governance implemented through the bodies of participating children" (p. 3). Leaders of the 4-H movement, he argues, "produce[d] a countryside both fertile and Modern and a state both powerful and hidden" (p. 19).
Rosenberg's use of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics provides new insights into the early-twentieth-century conflict between the agents of rural modernization (government, university, and business leaders) and recalcitrant farmers, resistant to "book farming" (p. 26). As these reformers saw it, breeding "quality" (white, heterosexual, middle-class) rural youth would be the nation's salvation from rural decay, urban degeneracy, "race suicide," and the collapse of the family farm. The 4-H program allowed access to rural youth, enabling business and extension leaders to preach the gospel of "agrarian futurism" directly to impressionable boys and girls (p. 12). These men acculturated rural boys into agricultural businessmen with the institutional connections and values ("financial intimacy") to pursue modern farming (p. 55). Extension agents coaxed rural girls out of agricultural production and into middle-class domesticity and modern, scientific homemaking. Embroiled in the eugenic science of the day, extension agents trained rural girls to literally score themselves according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved standards of health and beauty to ensure they were fit for marriage and motherhood. With this groundwork laid during the 1910s and 1920s, the government called on these rural youths to become the hands and bodies of the state, its anchors in rural communities across the nation during the Depression and war. Through the last third of the book, Rosenberg follows his narrative of rural state building at home (World War II) and abroad (Cold War) in a way that inextricably ties seemingly insular rural communities to the modern nation. Rosenberg ends with the American military's efforts to plant rural youth programs in Afghanistan and thereby shore up American empire abroad. This global turn is a well-executed twist that highlights the worldwide impact of this seemingly down-home organization, yet comes at a cost of losing much of the incisive gendered analysis that makes the earlier chapters so powerful.
It is no exaggeration to say that Rosenberg has written one of the most important works in American rural and agricultural history of the last decade. The 4-H Harvest builds on the best of the field with insight, analytical depth, and an impressive amount of nuance and discretion, weaving together the histories of the nation-state, gender, and agricultural production in a way that demands attention. It tells the story of rural progressives, USDA agents, and businessmen embedding the state in the countryside. These actors indoctrinated youth into the nation-state and set them on the path toward modern agribusiness. They acculturated these boys and girls into USDA-approved gender roles and thereby solidified the future of the rural white middle class. The 4-H Harvest explains 4-H's meaning for the nation, for reformers, and for rural America. It, however, never really asks what 4-H meant to the millions of rural youths who poured themselves into their projects. It is one of the great achievements of The 4-H Harvest that it has provided historians with the interpretive frameworks with which to answer that question.
ANDREW C. BAKER
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Baker, Andrew C.
Rosenberg, Gabriel N.: The 4-H harvest: sexuality and the state in rural America
S.D. Reschly
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1225.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Rosenberg, Gabriel N. The 4-H harvest: sexuality and the state in rural America. Pennsylvania, 2015. 290p index afp ISBN 9780812247534 cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9780812291896 ebook, $55.00
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Rosenberg (Duke) narrates the positioning of 4-H clubs in shaping "agrarian futurism" by utilizing postmodern and complex research strategies. The result is a fascinating fusion of "the assembly of the American state," an infrastructure of "scientific" agriculture directed by the USDA through extension services and the nearly ubiquitous 4-H clover, and compulsory heterosexual white farm families with 4-H training in masculinity and femininity. These historical developments produced intertwined biopolitical units, so that the state, agriculture, and gendered youthful bodies were mutually reinforcing, giving "body politic" a richer context. There is a narrative of 4-H history, but it is hardly a simple story, so this book is not a first read for persons with little or no background in rural, gender, or political histories. The juxtaposition of complex theory with folksy anecdotes is almost jarring, but such is the reality of 20th-century rural life. Rosenberg describes the geography of 4-H, particularly in terms of segregated clubs and locations where county agents ignored African American clubs. Maps would have enhanced these insightful sections. Seldom have these fields of study been so productively blended. For all scholars of agriculture, gender, sexuality, and politics. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduate students and above.--S. D. Reschly, Truman State University