āA wild, rollicking ride into the heart of horse countryāthese essays get at what it means to love horses, in all that love's complexity.ā āAnton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
A compelling and provocative essay collection that smashes stereotypes and redefines the meaning of the term āhorse girl,ā broadening it for women of all cultural backgrounds.
As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcusā imagination. When she wasnāt around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reins. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as āhorse girls,ā weird and overzealous, absent from the social worlds of their peers.
Decades later, when memes about āhorse girl energy,ā began appearing across social mediaāHalimah reluctantly recognized herself. The jokes imagine girls as blinkered as carriage ponies, oblivious to the mockery behind their backs. The stereotypical horse girl is also white, thin, rich, and straight, a daughter of privilege. Yet so many riders donāt fit this narrow, damaging ideal, and relate to horses in profound ways that include ambivalence and regret, as well as unbridled passion and devotion.
Featuring some of the most striking voices in contemporary literatureāincluding Carmen Maria Machado, Pulitzer-prize winner Jane Smiley, T Kira Madden, Maggie Shipstead, and Courtney MaumāHorse Girls reframes the iconic bond between girls and horses with the complexity and nuance it deserves. And it showcases powerful emerging voices like Braudie Blais-Billie, on the connection between her Seminole and Quebecois heritage; Sarah Enelow-Snyder, on growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas; and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, on the colonialist influence on horse culture in Pakistan.
By turns thought-provoking and personal, Horse Girls reclaims its titular stereotype to ask bold questions about autonomy and desire, privilege and ambition, identity and freedom, and the competing forces of domestication and wildness.