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

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.