Naive Boars and Dummy Sows: Porcine Sex and the Politics of Purity

Marianna Szczygielska co-authored a chapter on porcine sex for the edited volume Feminist Animal and Multispecies Studies: Critical Perspectives on Food and Eating published with Brill Press. The whole collection is available in the open access.

The chapter titled “Naïve Boars and Dummy Sows: Porcine Sex and the Politics of Purity” investigates discourses on purity and sterility mobilized for the sake of biosecurity to explore how the interstice between domestication and wildness informs porcine-human relations. Since the 2014 outbreak of the African Swine Fever in Poland, wild boars have been culled en masse for the protection of the pork industry. The chapter analyzes the porous intraspecies boundary between pigs and wild boars from queer and feminist materialist perspectives as the source of insecurities in the face of the disease to show how control over porcine sex in factory farming and wildlife management is key for the politics of purity at stake.

Szczygielska, Marianna, and Agata Kowalewska. “Naïve Boars and Dummy Sows: Porcine Sex and the Politics of Purity.” In Feminist Animal and Multispecies Studies: Critical Perspectives on Food and Eating. eds. Kadri Aavik, Kuura Irni, and Milla-Maria Joki (Brill, 2023): 45-69. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004679375_003 

Top image: Dummy sow diagram from Queensland Government Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. A dummy sow is a piece of equipment used for collecting boar semen in pig breeding.