Playing Chicken: Queer Ecology and Anti-industrialism from Hawthorne to Wister

During the second industrial revolution, human-animal relations were standardized for the sake of increasing production. This article examines the recurrent image of chickens frustrating industrial standardization in the writings of Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Owen Wister, along with historical poultry-keeping documentation. The chicken’s unruliness makes visible the mechanisms of industrial standardization within domestic animal relations. Throughout, these chickens interact with prominent, scholarly models of nineteenth-century queer sociality, inflecting them toward anti-industrial forms of interspecies relations. Rather than sympathetic companionship, the interspecies pairs achieve productive conflict that generates modes of collective survival alternatives to the violences of industrial agriculture. Ultimately, this article presents a revision of queer ecology that centers resistance to the mass norming required of agricultural scalability, reflecting scholarly shifts toward thinking queerness from its relation to cultural materialism.