My Horse Is My Therapist: The Medicalization of Pleasure among Women Equestrians

Pink t-shirts that proclaim My horse is my therapist are for sale in a wide variety of horse-sport catalogues. Literature on the healing power of human-nonhuman animal encounters and the practice of a variety of animal-assisted therapy programs, such as hippotherapy and equine-facilitated therapy, show dramatic growth over the last 30 years. Less attention is paid to the role that horse-human interactions may play in more popular accountings of well-being and impairment among a sample of everyday riders. Analysis of 50 lifecycle narratives, collected from accomplished but nonprofessional equestriennes, demonstrates the complex and ambiguous ways in which women draw from their experience of human-horse relationships as they challenge and transgress the borderlands between pleasure and impairment. Combining the perspectives of multispecies ethnography and medical anthropology that engages the complexities of well-being, analysis is informed by and contributes to recent controversies concerning the medicalization of normality and pleasure in DSM 5.