Abstract

This analysis deals with the Pattuelli’s family album of sires, in Lugo di Romagna (Italy). At the heart of this reflection are the «champions» of cattle competitions, allowing us to study the policies and technologies of production and selection of livestock. These animals with exemplary characteristics show us the material and symbolic value of the animal productive and reproductive labour, from a unique and significant perspective as that of a family narrative, in a time span from the early Twenties to the Sixties. The broader purpose of this contribution is to research whether there is a continuum – albeit with specificities – in the economic, social and symbolic expectations of capitalism, patriarchy and speciesism that materially produce the animal. Reconstructing a political and technological genealogy of how the animal has been seen and produced at different historical moments helps to recognize a continuity even within the more contemporary infrastructures of genome selection. Finally, this observation aims for recording the traces of the animal in order to recognize how the manifestation of a body persists as a consistent limit for extractive expectations on cattle. This reflection, which lies at the intersection of feminist critical animal studies and cultural studies, will take place through the analysis of the visual discourse of a family archive, specifically an album that collects 32 photos of 11 bulls, dated from 1922 to 1955. In order to analyse the regime of truth in which the animal is produced as a regime of visibility in these family archive materials, I will use the methodology of visual discourse analysis as proposed by Gillian Rose (2001) inspired by Michel Foucault (Foucault 1964) and the tools of family album analysis inspired by Annette Kuhn (2002).