‘I'd rather wear out than rust out’: autobiologies of ageing equestriennes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Horse–human relationships expressed as a kind of co-embodied engagement or mutual physicality between horse and rider receive note in emerging literatures on equine sports and multi-species ethnography. Less attention focuses on the impacts of equestrienne activities on ageing female bodies. This study is based on analysis of narrative data collected from open-ended qualitative interviews with 36 women, aged 40–70, who participate in a variety of equestrian activities and sports in the North American Midwest and Arctic Norway. Although ageing informants associate animal partnerships with the maintenance of health, and although informants' narratives show some accord with master narratives of ageing athletes identified by sports sociologists, the natures of horse–human relationships invite more explicit, horse- specific contexts of analysis. The phrase ‘autobiologies of ageing’ denotes how women's narratives of equestrienne ageing privilege and centre a subjective sense of physical identity or embodied self where the rider's experience of her body becomes entangled with and impartible from that of the horse or horses she rides.

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