Unbridled: Queering Animality with Human & Horse

Abstract

Though in the Global North, domesticated horses have been largely retired from their historical labouring roles, their bodies have continued to be instrumentalized to meet human desires. Not only does the classic interspecies dyad of the “Man on horseback” pervade in contemporary equine roles—as a symbol of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and elitism—but also so often as a failure to meaningfully empathically engage horses. Unbridled is a major research portfolio that responds to these biopolitical and anthropocentric dilemmas through three interwoven projects. Each engages my own lived experiences to queerly reimagine being-with horses in our shared worlds, as reminder of our mutually embodied animality. The first project intervenes in the dominant horse-human pedagogical relationship as it unfolds in the riding school at which I currently teach as a riding instructor. I engage the literature of animal and critical animal pedagogies, as well as my own lived experience, to inform my discussion of some of the challenges and opportunities for achieving less anthropocentrically oriented relationships to horses in these educational settings. The second project invokes Warkentin’s phenomenological interspecies etiquette (2010), along with queer theories of performativity, to explore how notions of power and agency are co-creatively enacted during my encounters with the horses with whom I work. Incorporating arts-based methodologies, including life writing and figurative drawing, I challenge dominant cultural constructions of human and horse by attending to the embodied encounter as a possible site for more empathic relationships to blossom. The third and final component is a visual project that responds to traditional representations of horses in Western art history. Through six digitally composited portraits, I remix the work of animal portraitist George Stubbs (1724–1806) to queer the cultural symbol of the horse-human dyad—re-centring the affective, body-to-body intimacies that have always existed between our two species. Attending to the domains of pedagogy, performativity, and representation, this portfolio marks only the beginning of a larger project of challenging anthropocentrism and queering horsehuman intimacies. I intend to carry on exploring these themes and more as I continue to study contemporary relationships with horses in the Environmental Studies doctoral program