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Abstract
Human influence on the libido and sexual habits of animals in agricultural contexts are centuries-old practices. However, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, human intervention into animal sex moved well beyond selective breeding. In the case of horses used for athletic performance, a network of technologies has grown up around the technique of artificial insemination that makes it physically possible to breed two horses across vast geographical distances. In order for this to work, veterinarians must substitute for horses in order to complete the sexual encounter. This would be taboo, but for a triumvirate of tools, language, and laws that works as a coordinated system around artificial insemination to remove all acknowledgement of sexual pleasure from the act of human-assisted equine reproduction. Drawing from agricultural history, legal bestiality exemptions, and recent multispecies ethnographic work, this essay centers the presence of equine desire in order to consider how the systemic denial of pleasure allows the exploitative sexual work of horses to seem both “natural” and “scientific,” and also argues that accounting for desire can offer an alternative dynamic for those working at the crossroads of multispecies technological sexual labor.
Abstract
Human influence on the libido and sexual habits of animals in agricultural contexts are centuries-old practices. However, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, human intervention into animal sex moved well beyond selective breeding. In the case of horses used for athletic performance, a network of technologies has grown up around the technique of artificial insemination that makes it physically possible to breed two horses across vast geographical distances. In order for this to work, veterinarians must substitute for horses in order to complete the sexual encounter. This would be taboo, but for a triumvirate of tools, language, and laws that works as a coordinated system around artificial insemination to remove all acknowledgement of sexual pleasure from the act of human-assisted equine reproduction. Drawing from agricultural history, legal bestiality exemptions, and recent multispecies ethnographic work, this essay centers the presence of equine desire in order to consider how the systemic denial of pleasure allows the exploitative sexual work of horses to seem both “natural” and “scientific,” and also argues that accounting for desire can offer an alternative dynamic for those working at the crossroads of multispecies technological sexual labor.