@article{ref1,
title="My horse is my therapist: the medicalization of pleasure among women equestrians",
journal="Medical anthropology quarterly",
year="2014",
author="Davis, Dona Lee and Maurstad, Anita and Dean, Sarah",
volume="29",
number="3",
pages="298-315",
abstract="Pink t-shirts that proclaim &quot;My horse is my therapist&quot; 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. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0745-5194",
doi="10.1111/maq.12162",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maq.12162"
}