Title: “Carthorses, Jades, and Equine Disability”
Abstract: This chapter explores eighteenth-century definitions of ‘disability,’ ‘disabled,’ and ‘deformity’ as multi-species and historical concepts. In doing so, this chapter thinks about these terms in relation to equines while analysing other labels common to ableist discourse that conflate equine and human under a broad system of oppression. As this chapter argues, this system was highly gendered, constructing mares as naturally lesser, weaker, and deformed. Such constructions, in turn, created and promoted ideas of who is ‘good to mistreat’ or ‘good to be good to,’ while actively painting such treatment as a naturalized language based on period medical and moral knowledge. Thus, as this chapter shows, during the eighteenth century not only is equine disability gendered, but such gendering, and the ableist systems that support it, is directly connected to widespread equine suffering and the widespread acceptance of such suffering during the most sentimental of centuries.
Bio: Monica Mattfeld: is Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Northern British Columbia. She has written on the history of animal and human disability in “Animal” (Bloosmbury, 2021) and on horse-human relationships and performances of gender in Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State 2017). In collaboration with Kristen Guest she has edited Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity, and the Making of the Modern Horse (Routledge 2020), Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity (University of Chicago Press 2019), and a special issue of Humanimalia focusing on breed as a category of identity. Mattfeld is currently interested in questions of animal disability and agency; breed, type and purity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; along with questions relating to equine performance and Romantic hippodrama.
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