Horse Crazy

Girls and the Lives of Horses

Jean O'Malley Halley

• Verlag: University of Georgia Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820355269
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Children's Studies in Sociology

Horse Crazy explores the meaning behind the love between girls and horses. Jean O'Malley Halley, a self-professed "horse girl," contends that this relationship and its cultural signifiers influence the manner in which young girls define their identity when it comes to gender. Halley examines how popular culture, including the "pony book" genre, uses horses to encourage conformity to gender norms but also insists that the loving relationship between a girl and a horse fundamentally challenges sexist and mainstream ideas of girlhood.

Horse Crazy looks at the relationships between girls and horses through the frameworks of Michel Foucault's concepts of normalization and biopower, drawing conclusions about the way girls' agency is both normalized and resistant to normalization. Segments of Halley's own experiences with horses as a young girl, as well as experiences from the perspective of other girls, are sources for examination. "Horsey girls," as she calls them, are girls who find a way to defy the expectations given to them by society-thinness, obsession with makeup and beauty, frailty-and gain the possibility of freedom in the process.

Drawing on Nicole Shukin's uses of animal capital theories, Halley also explores the varied treatment of horses themselves as an example of the biopolitical use of nonhuman animals and the manipulation and exploitation of horse life. In so doing she engages with common ways we think and feel about animals and with the technologies of speciesism.

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Horse Crazy

Girls and the Lives of Horses

In 1983 John E. Schowalter, chief of child psychiatry and professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Yale University, wrote about the phenomenon of American girls’ passion for horses: “I have been struck by a relatively common but not much studied phenomenon, the ‘horse-crazy’ girl.”¹ Schowalter noted that this passion existed as far back as the late nineteenth century. Still today, this prevalent phenomenon is, as Schowalter said thirty-five years ago, “not much studied.” This is surprising given that girls’ love of horses in the United States continues to be very common and fed by a plethora of popular culture books and toys.

Girls love horses, but why? What does this love say about what it means to be a girl? And what does it say about the meaning of horse lives? I explore these meanings, and this love, of girls with horses in the United States. I am interested in the girls’ experience of the horse-girl relationship. I am also interested in the lives of horses and what horse lives reveal about their significance in human existence. The love of horses and the girl-horse relationship in some ways reproduce traditional gender norms. In other important ways, girls’ experiences of riding horses and their love of horses offer a challenge to sexist ways of thinking about being female and to mainstream ideas about girlhood. Finally, I investigate the ways U.S. horses are a type of capital—animal capital—and produce profit that is both symbolic and material. These are interrelated forms of capital. Horses as symbolic capital normalize girls while horses also exist as more traditional economic capital offering the possibililty of material profit.

This is a book about love, and about the life-giving possibilities of love. As a girl I loved horses, and my horse—the relationship I had with him, the calm and sense of well-being (rare in my childhood) the strength I gained through being with him—helped me survive being a girl, allowed me to become an adult. In some ways, I was raised by nonhuman animals, by a small gray Siamese cat, a dusty brown Shetland pony, and a chestnut quarter horse.

While my relationship with my cat was not fetishized by consumer culture, looking back on my childhood, I see now that girls and horses were a thing, and they still are. We are sold girls and horses, and linked to that consumption is a popular culture of horsey girls in the United States, Great Britain, and other places.

Girls are many things, horses and fashion, thinness and dissatisfaction. I believe horsey culture offers girls something, a kind of freedom, that fashion does not. My earlier work explored the grip of social power. This book looks at the ways we shake power loose and make (a) life in spite of power. Horsey girls are girls who, to some perhaps small extent, resist mainstream culture’s death grip of frail-girl, skinny-body, make-up-and-beauty demands. Horsey girls find a way to something else.

While some girls had fantasies of thinness and boys who will protect and keep them, men who will validate their existence, I had fantasies of horses. I dreamed of being with horses, raising horses, training horses, riding horses, and being myself a horse. At school when my body was alone—and merely a small girl—I was silent. On my horse, Snipaway, I became huge and powerful and beautiful. On my horse, I mattered in both senses of that word: in becoming someone with significance in the world and in becoming embodied, physical and real.

My family had little money for toys. Yet I did have and prized plastic Bryer horses and the small wooden stable where they lived. I read about horses as much as I could, although my reading material came to me by happenstance. (Oddly, for all the reading I did, I only discovered the public library as an adult.) I read around the edges of other people’s lives, the books my mother and stepmother kept on their shelves, and those given to me by family members for Christmas or my birthday. The paucity of my horsey reading material, however, did not stop me from filling my mind with horses.

In spite of my deep love, the horses in my life died with so little fanfare, so little peace. We humans tend to keep our horses as long as they are useful to us and not much longer. A horse’s life might be good for a time, but a horse’s death is too often an ugly affair.

Perhaps I wanted to write this book only to honor my horse family, to honor the love I shared with them, the life that they gave me. Still today, when I turn my mind to peace, I shut my eyes and return to my horse. I am once again riding him through pine forest, the forest rising up from my little mountain town. Snow falls gently around us and all the world is quiet.²

This book explores the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals—between girls and horses—focusing on the United States. Many people understand that real love happens between girls and horses, between humans and other animals. Yet this love is also sometimes viewed suspiciously, even as childish. The adult who claims her dog is her best friend may be seen by her work colleagues and acquaintances as odd. Horse Crazy takes seriously human and animal relationships. It explores my own growing up with a horse and my own and other “horse-crazy” girls’ experience of loving horses, while also analyzing popular culture’s celebration and exploitation of girls and horses, investigating the history and lives of horses, and studying the ways girls’ agency emerges through their connections with horses.

Some girls become “girls”—they take on the mainstream culture’s demands to be “normal” and “feminine”—through horsey relationships. This happens in part through their consumption of horse stories, movies, and television shows, of which girls are often the main and intended audience, like the popular My Little Pony television series. Yet simultaneously, such girls defy the demands of normal “girlishness” through the actual experience of riding and being with horses. The focus in this book is on the world of middle- and working-class girls who largely ride for pleasure rather than the predominantly male world of racing or the elite and extremely expensive world of horse shows. In this world, the world of horseback riding simply for the love of it, horses open for girls the possibility of some freedom from the constraints of normative gender. This book also explores the realities of horse lives and deaths, too often brutal realities—brutal in spite of the love of girls—juxtaposing horse lives with the love of girls, horse lives as they happen beyond that girl love.

From a theoretical standpoint, I draw on Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization, that is, the construction of the subject through various social powers. Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers explore the meaning of life, girl life and horse life, and the ways power works on and through and around all of us. While the cultural meanings of horse-girl relationships, or what I call the symbolic capital produced by horses, can normalize and restrict girls, the horse-girl relationship also embodies Nikolas Rose’s idea of a politics of vitalism, in which a form of life resists normalization, inspires experiments in living, and is, to use Rose’s phrase, its “own telos.”

Girls develop a complex agency through their relationships with horses. In much of their lives—in their families, in school, in religious institutions—girls are socialized as “normal”; they are normalized. Yet there are outs, ways that girls burst through the grip of normalization, challenging it and demanding a kind of freedom. I claim that in three respects, girls’ love for horses enables them to mount such challenges. One, horse-crazy girls often develop counternormative combinations of self-assertion and caregiving. Two, these girls acquire an embodied connection to horses, and to themselves, through riding. Three, their love of horses allows them to, in some part, refuse the heteronormative social demand to prioritize relationships with and desire for boys above all else.

First, with regard to self-assertion, relationships with horses offer girls another way to be persons in the world. I contend that girls become something more with horses. This is what the women I spoke with told me: they described feeling bigger, stronger, freer, and more powerful. And they also described being more powerful, that is, more able to manage their lives as girls and, for many, as girls on the margins.

Such self-assertion, moreover, arises in tandem with the caregiving. Horse-crazy girls move beyond the stark duality of nurturing girl (as in the conservative thinking that girls are “naturally” caring and nurturing) versus self-assertive girl (as in mainstream liberal feminist thinking wherein girls should prioritize entering the public world of work over inhabiting the world of domestic caregiving). I show the political importance of the girl-horse relationship for its embodiment of a kind of girlhood that defies the categories in conventional debates about gender politics. Girl-horse love’s combination of nurturing and self-assertion does not fit neatly into either conservative or liberal ideologies of gender. The both/and quality of girl-horse love suggests a way of thinking about gender that conforms neither with the ways it is discussed in the work of such important contemporary conservative writers as Ryan T. Anderson, nor as it is defined in the ongoing work of such liberal feminist communities as the National Organization for Women.

Second as for my argument that horse-crazy girls experience counternormativity in their embodied connection with horses: horseback riders work to attain physical connection, oneness, with the horses that they ride. As one woman I interviewed said about her experience riding, “I become one with the horse, and bond.”³ This is a starkly different experience of embodiment than mainstream U.S. culture demands of girls, wherein they must make themselves thin and frail, and even disassociate themselves from their bodies. Animal studies scholars Lynda Birke and Keri Brandt write about gender and body connection with horses: “The desire to achieve that oneness also enables a transcendence of the constraints implied by learning to perform femininity … learning to communicate bodily with horses permits women to experience their embodiment in more positive ways.”⁴ Girls and women who ride literally rein in and collaborate with a large, powerful animal, one that might intimidate but ultimately can help liberate them. This is a profound and unique form of empowered embodiment that is congruent with Rose’s idea of vitalism, which I will explore in this book.⁵

Third, the friendships girls have with horses provide an alternative to the relationships that a heteronormative culture pushes girls to have with boys, and the girl-horse relationship empowers girls considerably more than the conventional girl-boy relationship does. Even in the fantasy horse games girls play, the girls are strong because in their imagining they are on horseback, or they are themselves horses. And the girls who have access to actual horses have an opportunity to become themselves, by which I mean they develop according to experiences valued for themselves, not according to norms in which they subordinate themselves to boys. They find a place where they have control and choice. They make decisions not only for themselves but for and with and on the horses too. In this relationship, girls are often the leaders. Helen, a former horse-crazy girl I interviewed who is now a horse-crazy woman, told me that when she rides, “I feel very independent, like I am free.”⁶ And the girl-horse relationship supports this feeling and state of being. Horses and girls are, in Donna J. Haraway’s terms, “significant others.”⁷

Horse Crazy contributes to the field of animal studies in its exploration of the significant bispecies relationship between girls and horses, and it addresses the important cultural phenomenon of horse-crazy girls. Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of writing on human relationships with other animals in this rapidly developing area of animal studies by environmentalists and animal-rights activists. Haraway’s When Species Meet (2008) offers a helpful entry point to examine the girl-horse/human-animal relationship. Haraway’s notion of “companion species” challenges conventional ways of thinking about humans and other animals as two sides of a binary split, with humans/men and rationality on one side, nature (and women), other animals, instincts, and things of the body on the other side. Haraway refuses this dualism and argues that we are all inextricably connected.⁸ We are nature, and it is us. And as all things in life (and death) grow and change, forever becoming something else, we grow and change in relationship with all that is around us; we become in the midst of relationship, including relationship with nonhuman animals. Haraway writes, “Beings do not preexist their relatings. … There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends.” Haraway clarifies that our relationships—with humans and other animals—are always contingent and always changing or, as she writes, becoming. “In Judith Butler’s terms,” Haraway notes, “there are only ‘contingent foundations’; bodies that matter are the result. A bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time trump the imaginings of even the most baroque cosmologists.” Haraway writes, “[T]hat is what companion species signifies.”⁹

Being companion species means that human and horse become together. To explore companion species is to explore that being-in-relation, the collaborative becoming of woman and dog, of girl and horse. In this becoming and in the possibilities inherent in it, girls with horses find a kind of freedom.¹⁰

Girls in their relationship with horses experience new ways of being girls, ways of being that challenge and subvert normal gender identity. Elspeth Probyn’s term for this being-in-relationship of girls with horses is to “be-long.”¹¹ In this, the becoming of girls with horses includes but moves beyond the girls being empowered as girls. The girl-with-horse is a being unto itself that is more, indeed that is bigger, faster, more beautiful, safer, than just the girl or just the horse. This is not merely a matter of the girl being on top of the horse and being in control (and, I might add, “control” is a tenuous and mutual affair when it comes to riding horses). With a horse, and often one particular horse, the horsey girl becomes the girl-horse. In this transformation, qualities that inhere in the horse can also inhere in the girl. As one woman I interviewed said about her beloved childhood horse, “He was my beauty”—not in the sense that he was her beautiful possession, but in the sense that his beauty became hers too. Alone, she explained, she was not beautiful; and that is of course what girls are supposed to be in our dominant culture: beautiful, an object worth gazing upon. But when she was a girl-with-horse, she became beautiful and shared other qualities with him as well—active qualities like bravery and strength and speed.¹²

Physical contact, bodies touching bodies, plays a significant role in girl-horse relationships. Touching horses also plays an important role in healing, as practitioners of various forms of equine therapy understand quite well. In my first book, Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy (2007), I explore both the impact, and our thinking about the impact, of physical contact between human adults and children. One biological response to touch I discuss in the book is the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which plays a critical role for humans and other mammals in feeling connected as well as in giving birth, lactation, and orgasm.¹³ There is a growing literature on the biomedical impact on humans of contact with nonhuman animals, including the role of oxytocin. In part because contact with horses can cause the release of oxytocin in humans, horses and horseback riding are used as therapy for a wide range of conditions, including developmental, physical, and psychiatric disabilities.¹⁴ Research indicates that contact with horses helps calm anxious humans, focuses and connects humans limited in their abilities to engage socially, and develops other physical capacities of humans with disabil...