An amuse-bouche
Something Allen Esterson pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago and which I had to share. From Brandt, K. J. (2005). Intelligent bodies: Women’s embodiment and subjectivity in the human-horse communication process.
The cowboy’s stranglehold on the label of expert in human-horse relationships, as well as mythic construction of the woman-horse bond, have effectively silenced women’s voices and rendered their experiences with horses non-authentic. This dissertation takes women’s knowledge of horses seriously as data and draws from three years (2001-2004) of ethnographic research of in-depth interviews and participant observation. I explore the human-horse communication process and argue that the two species co-create what I call an embodied language system to construct a world of shared meaning. I problematize the centrality of verbal spoken language and the mind in theories of subjectivity, and maintain that the privileged status of verbal language has left untheorized all non-verbal language using beings, human and non-human alike. I bring questions of embodiment–in particular women’s embodiment–to the center and examine how lived and felt corporeality shapes human subjectivity. I call for an understanding of embodiment not as deterministic but as a lived process that has a meaningful impact on how individuals understand themselves and others. Further, the women’s experiences of embodiment when working with horses propose a way to subvert oppressive dominant constructions about female bodies as inherently flawed and allow for a re-imagining of women’s bodily comportment.
Pesky privileged status of verbal language…
It’s about time someone started a discussion about embodiment. It’s so constricting and oppressive. We need to set our spirits free of the mundane demands of bodily comportment.
Wait a minute! Aren’t there some oppressive dominant constructions of bodies here that are being resolutely ignored? I mean of course oppressive dominant constructions of equine bodies. Did not K. J. Brandt ever wonder whether horses <I>wanted</I> to take part in “human-horse relationships”? Human-horse relationships indeed! Brandt seems to assume that breaking horses, riding them, etc., are entirely wholesome activities for the horse. If horses could speak that pribileged verbal language they might express another opinion.
Where’s the RSPCA or some Humane society when you need it?
OK, I try to be open-minded and tolerant about other people’s, um, personal preferences. I mean, problematization and subverting oppressive dominant constructions and all those other practices of the post-modern life-style — well, they’re OK between consenting adults, I guess.
But doing it with innocent horses? I’m sorry, but that’s just….unnatural.
Anybody who can write like that would make a terrific theologian. But what does it mean?
Can someone translate this for me? Seriously, WTF is this?
I’d make fun of this – except that that would doubtless be scientism.
I do love how, while taking on the scope of all language, both verbal and non verbal and subjects both human and non human, the writer manages to out themselves as parochially North American in their very first sentence; “The cowboy’s stranglehold on the label of expert in human-horse relationships”.
Also, PONIES!
Please someone, tell me this is the output of a po-mo generator and no actual trees died.
I didn’t think the archetypical cowboy was considered particularly verbal… the singing cowboy, maybe?
Aj hits the nail on the head here. Try telling Princess Anne that her experiences with horses are non-authentic…
Jan Frank: it seems to mean that because of cowboys, womens’ conversations with horses have been ignored. Further having a woman’s body makes you different from a cowboy and in fact influences how you think and act in relation to horses. Bottom line women and cowboys are different. Who knew?
I think there’s a flaw in the argument since I don’t think cowboys were/are particularly expert in communicating with horses:
“don’t try to understand’em
just rope and throw and brand ’em”
doesn’t just refer to cows. But then, if she didn’t start off this way she couldn’t get her little victim snipe in, could she?
BTW: for those who believed this was a joke I’m sorry to have to say that it was presented in all serious at an “academic” seminar in the USA.
well sailor,
if you explain what it all means using language which even I understand then I’m afraid there are not going to be any cushy jobs for you. And the same applies to all those nice gentlemen who write about the Old Man Upstairs. After all, if we put it into plain language, even us dimwits might begin to see that there’s large dollops of the end product of the hborse being ladled out.
George Orwell had a nice go at translating
Here it is in modern English:
Well this one produced a string of consistently amusing comments! Nothing is wasted…
<i>Further having a woman’s body makes you different from a cowboy and in fact influences how you think and act in relation to horses.</i>
Well, there used to be all that stuff about having to ride side-saddle. ‘Cuz like, a woman must never on any account spread her legs for anything except the whims of the man who owns her….
But I thought that went out with the Victorians.
I’m afraid that having read the abstract, and not being sure whether it was a Sokal, I sought the original paper on the internet. It is indeed distressingly real. However, I took some comfort from the counterpoint of Google Ads that appeared as I paged through the document on the allacademic site.
They seemed to me to provide a more meaningful commentary than anything I found in the paper itself…
Ah, yes. Gotta love the po-mo version of feminism where the basis for the oppression of women is the devaluing of the “feminine” ways of thinking or doing things, never questioning the sexism in the assumption that there are strong, fundamental differences between women and men. As though we women can emote and intuit our way to parity, using the stories of our mistreatment at the hands of the patriarchy to shame the world into raising yet more fuzzy wish-thinking up to (or beyond) the level of esteem granted rational, critical “male” thought.
Me, I’d rather have a real, working epistemology, not a pink and non-functional alternative to what the boys get. I’d rather “feminize” science by being active in and excelling at it, and encouraging others to do so. It’s still our only “way of knowing” proven to work; the alternative is to adopt ignorance, to wall ourselves into a philosophical ghetto while pretending it’s a paradise. No fucking thank you.
As French cartoonists have known for decades and decades, the relationship between English women and horses is so authentic that Englishwomen actually look like horses. And, no, I would never suggest that Princess Anne looks like a horse. (Over bred English men, of course, produce a peculiar braying sound when they speak, particularly after a few glasses of something.)
@Jan frank and his George Orwell example of an academese version of some nicely poetic verbiage:
Reminds me of a story from my fundie upbringing. My parents’ church was distributing Bibles in “modern English” to the heathen (er, that would be the neighbors, I think it was). My husband, who grew up the child of anthropologists and with no religious teaching, had heard enough of the Bible just by spending a certain amount of time in the Bible belt to find that he rather liked some of the poetry. He was browsing the modern English Bibles and was dismayed to find that “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” had been translated as “everyone using swords will be killed”.
Mary Ellen – oh yeah – you can get that effect with “Shakespeare made easy” and the like, too. Groan.
A Noyd, have you read Janet Radcliffe Richards’s “Feminist Epistemology Isn’t”? A classic – and you would obviously like it if you haven’t.
Nooo, I haven’t, but I shall check it out, certainly. Thanks for the recommendation!