Abstract

In Mugido, a book of poems published in 2017, Marília Floôr Kosby adds a new chapter in this long and complicated history of the relationships between humans and oxen in Brazilian literature. Drawing from her personal and professional experience as an anthropologist and the daughter of a veterinarian that took care of farm animals in Rio Grande do Sul, Kosby reconstructs the existential space of small towns in the south of Brazil, where the food consumed in the big city is produced. Embedded in this reality are the gender and class distinctions familiar elsewhere, but also a diversity of boundaries between species. With the poems of Mugido, together with the narrative that is scattered in small sections throughout the book, it is possible to reconstruct the systems of exploitation that can be seen from the perspective of those small towns: how the practices of manhood are molded by their relation with women, horses and cows; how practices of womanhood constitute themselves in relation with figures of masculinity, femininity and care towards animals; how this bundle of gender and species relations are connected to the food industry, that in its turn links small towns to the big city, in a large territorial distribution of positions and effects.