UCLA Center for the Study of Women

This paper continues my examination of horse-crazy girls, contrasting two representations of girl-horse love in order to argue for a revaluation of this love. I suggest that popular framings of girl-horse love reconfirm existing systems of power and powerlessness, for girls, the women they become, and for horses. I begin with an analysis of Hasbro’s popular My Little PonyTM line of toys, which, I argue, sexualizes girls and girl-horse love, demeaning female subjectivity and agency and dismissing the significance of cross-species interactivity. I argue that these toys enforce conventional heteronormative developmental narratives in which horse-love is considered a transitional phase, with horses as transitional objects, giving way, with maturity, to reproductive heterosexuality. I continue with a reading of Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, which, I argue, presents its girl protagonist as both a quintessential horse-crazy girl and as very queer. Employing theories of female fetishism, queer embodiment, and companion species philosophies, my analysis focuses on the agency of girls and the types of subjectivities that they enact with their horse partners. My critique of popular representations of girl-horse love and my presentation of an alternative reading take seriously the premise that how we imagine what we are shapes what we can become. In conclusion, I ask how alternative imaginaries for girls, the women they become, and horses, by re-appraising the embodied relationships as co-constitutive and intra-active, might open up possibilities for different practices, subjectivities, and agencies that challenge heteronormative and androcentric ideologies and practices.