Vegetable women: Agricultural education, indigenous knowledge, and becoming settlers in early twentieth century Palestine.

This paper deals with agricultural training for Jewish women settlers in Palestine, and focuses on the first school established by the Jewish botanist and settler Hannah Meisel in 1911. The school was modeled after European schools for horticulture, but grew to serve the settler community and students' need to overcome financial challenges as well as the gendered structure of the labor force. As they pursued agricultural work, proximity to the land, and native status, the women taking part in the training program ultimately combined ideas about scientific progress and European theoretical foundations with Palestinian indigenous knowledge and practices. By appropriating Palestinian agricultural techniques and adopting vegetables as the main sphere of work and production, women settlers both struggled to shift gendered social hierarchies and became deeply involved in the settler-colonial project.

Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin.

Freemartinism is a biological phenomenon in genetically female cows born from a dizygotic twin pregnancy. Placental connections-blood and hormones between the freemartin and their male twin-generate an intersex cow unable to conceive. In this study, the freemartin emerges in a constant state of flux: between waste and use; becoming a technology and supplemented by other technologies; defined by human anxieties about gender; and a tool underscoring dominant gendered ideas about normative family life, human sex, and sexuality. It examines farmers and scientists' numerous attempts to harness the indeterminacy of the freemartin's liminal sex characteristics, and how dairy farmers transformed the freemartin into a heat detection technology, thus maximizing other cows' reproductive performance. Unabated scientific and agricultural engagement with freemartins has inspired new ways of thinking about the biological self and nonprocreative sexual pleasure on industrial farms.

Introducing Bovine Regimes: When Animals Become Technologies.

Are animals technologies? This special issue centers on bovines to analyze the circumstances intertwining and merging the management and understanding of animals with technological systems. The geographically diverse historical and anthropological contributions employ temporality as a central lens to examine the changing proximity of animals to technology over time. Collectively, they demonstrate how bovine bodies have been important sites for manifesting the relationships between people, technology, and power structures. Such a relational animal-technology approach ultimately enriches the understanding of both technology and animality.

On the Cover: Speculations with Vaginal Specula.

Close analysis of an image coupled with documents and material culture draws attention to complex connections between political ideas and material realities. Zoltan Kluger's 1940 photograph of a woman manufacturing cow vaginal specula was framed by the campaign for Zionist settlement. The essay explains how relationships between people, animals, and technologies were formed and displayed in the context of settler colonialism in Palestine.

On All Fours: Transient Laborers, the Threat of Movement, and the Aftermath of Disease.

African horse sickness (AHS) plagued the Middle East in 1944 for the first time. It spread into Palestine during a transformative period, as the role of animals as global migrant-laborers was shifting; soon after, automated machines would relieve their burden and transform the relations between farmers, traders, the state and its policing powers, and the global market. By following the movement and management of this outbreak of the disease, along with medical knowledge and tools of prevention and treatment, the article demonstrates that animal health and mobility were substantial matters of concern in British Palestine. It shows, furthermore, that AHS became a catalyst in dismantling the economic, social, and cultural value of animals of burden and their handlers.