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'Horsy and Persistently Queer: Imperialism, Feminism, and Bestiality'

Landry, Donna (2001) 'Horsy and Persistently Queer: Imperialism, Feminism, and Bestiality'. Textual Practice, 15 (3). pp. 467-485. ISSN 0950-236X. (doi:10.1080/09502360110070402) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:6036)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360110070402

Abstract

This article is a study in bestial attachment so thoroughly conventional that no one has thought to give it a name. Yet British imperial adventuring gave it international scope. The eighteenth-century travellers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth, Lady Craven establish a pattern of bonding with and mastering foreign equines repeated by their twentieth-century counterparts Freya Stark and Christina Dodwell. Such opportunities for gender-bending, enabled by the high-mettled intelligence and sensitivity of the Eastern blood horse, invited upper- and middle-class women's participation in the expansion of empire or at least British influence abroad, however idiosyncratically. Tracking human-animal attachments in the literature of English travel reveals a distinct but vexed convergence of propensities: often bestiality and reflections upon or denials of queerness and homosexuality shadow each other - in the writings of Wilfred Thesiger and T.E. Lawrence as well as Montagu and Stark.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/09502360110070402
Subjects: P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Kate Smith
Date Deposited: 18 Sep 2008 12:21 UTC
Last Modified: 09 Mar 2023 11:30 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/6036 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Landry, Donna.

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