title: My Horse Is My Therapist: The Medicalization of Pleasure among Women Equestrians.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of South Dakota. ddavis@usd.edu.
authors.forename: Dona
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lee Davis
authors.affiliation: Tromsoe University Museum, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
authors.forename: Anita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maurstad
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of South Dakota.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dean
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D056447:Animal Assisted Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D039721:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; D005260:Female; D006736:Horses; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D062528:Medicalization; D008875:Middle Aged; D057181:Pleasure / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: CAMs; DSM 5; animal-assisted therapy; medicalization of pleasure