Horses, Girls and Agency

Subcultures serve as private places for girls where they can momentarily escape gender-related expectations in acceptable ways.  “Riding horses is a popular hobby for young girls,” explains Karolina Ojanen, who has studied girls’ horse riding, and argues that the culture created around it enables girls to establish a space that they can themselves control and master. Girls not only ride horses, they spend their time collectively in stables, feeding, grooming, and taking care of horses. They develop power hierarchies and social norms such as codes for how to dress and what to talk about. Simultaneously as these practices build on, sustain, and even confirm traditional gendered categories, they also offer the possibility to vary and modify them, and to use them in rehearsing agency in the group.

The terms ‘stable girl’ and ‘horse girl’ are commonly to describe girls who ride horses. Also, the expressions “be mad about horses” and “horse-crazed” are typical when girls’ horse-related subcultures are described. Although the popularity of ‘stable girl’ culture seems to be mainly a North European phenomenon, little girls’ fondness for horses is more widespread. For example, Seiter notes in her analysis of My Little Pony, a popular toy from the 90s, that the company got the idea for the product by asking little girls, “‘What do you see when you go to bed and close your eyes?’, and the answer was often ‘Horses’” (Ellen Seiter, “Sold Seperatly: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture,” 1995).

Play is also the medium of mastery, indeed of creation, of ourselves as human actors. Without the capacity to formulate other social scenes in imagination there can be little force to a sense of self, little agency...Through play our fancied selves become material. (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, “Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds,” 1998).

*Anna Pauliina Rainio, Horses, Girls, and Agency: Gender in Play Pedagogy, Outlines, No. 1, 2009