Is your first and second favorite animal a horse? Is your bedroom covered with horse posters on your walls and horse models on your shelves? Would you rather muck out a stall than clean your room? Then you are absolutely, undeniably horse crazy, and For Horse-Crazy Girls Only is the book for you! This is the only comprehensive book about everything a horse-crazy girl needs to know about horses. You'll learn everything from the different breeds of horses, to how a horse's body works, to the quirky little things that make the horse the BEST animal ever. Author Christina Wilsdon even shares ideas for horse-themed parties, and suggestions for the best horse movies to watch with your friends. And that's just the beginning.

Horse Crazy explores the meaning behind the love between girls and horses. Jean O’Malley Halley, a self-professed “horse girl,” contends that this relationship and its cultural signifiers influence the manner in which young girls define their identity when it comes to gender. Halley examines how popular culture, including the “pony book” genre, uses horses to encourage conformity to gender norms but also insists that the loving relationship between a girl and a horse fundamentally challenges sexist and mainstream ideas of girlhood. Horse Crazy looks at the relationships between girls and horses through the frameworks of Michel Foucault’s concepts of normalization and biopower, drawing conclusions about the way girls’ agency is both normalized and resistant to normalization. Segments of Halley’s own experiences with horses as a young girl, as well as experiences from the perspective of other girls, are sources for examination. “Horsey girls,” as she calls them, are girls who find a way to defy the expectations given to them by society—thinness, obsession with makeup and beauty, frailty—and gain the possibility of freedom in the process. Drawing on Nicole Shukin’s uses of animal capital theories, Halley also explores the varied treatment of horses themselves as an example of the biopolitical use of nonhuman animals and the manipulation and exploitation of horse life. In so doing she engages with common ways we think and feel about animals and with the technologies of speciesism.

"Text and photos introduce readers to general information about horses, including physical characteristics, historical origin, life cycle, body language, and horses in pop culture"--

"Is your first and second favorite animal a horse? Is your bedroom covered with horse posters on your walls and your shelves? Would you rather muck out a stall than clean your room? This book is for you! This is the only comprehensive book about everything a horse-crazy girl needs to know about horses. You'll learn everything from the different breeds of horses, to how a horse's body works, to the quirky little things that make the horse the BEST animal ever. Author Christina Wilsdon even shares ideas for horse-themed parties, and suggestions for the best horse movies to watch with your friends. And that's just the beginning." --

People have been riding horses for centuries. Horses were ridden for travel, for hunting, and on the battlefield. Today, riding is a favorite activity for many people. It is one of the best ways to enjoy nature and get exercise at the same time. Your readers will explore this fun pastime discovering its styles, history, and how to get started.

This nonfiction picture book about horses has a fresh focus: how people over the ages have decorated horses in special ways. Organized into three categories—warfare and hunting, performance and competition, performance, and ceremony—the book introduces horses such as the chariot-pulling war horse of the Persians to the rose-decorated winner of the Kentucky Derby.

In this highly readable book, Linda Duits investigates girl culture in the Dutch multicultural society. Her ethnographic account provides a thick description of life at school, still the most prominent setting foor todays youth. She followed young girls of diverse ethnic backgrounds in their transition from primary to secondary school, focusing on the ways they use the body, clothing and media in their "performance" of identity. Countering several media hypes, including the internet generation, the headscarf debate and the sexualisation of society, Duits shows how contemporary girl culture is a mundane culture that is reflexively negotiated in an everyday setting.

This book offers a detailed and thorough perspective on the psychological meanings of animals to human beings and on their role in the development of the human mind and its psychopathology. It presents a multitude of new observations on human interactions with animals.

For as long as Carole and Lisa have known their best friend, Stevie, she’s been at war with one – or all – of her three brothers. In fact Stevie never misses an opportunity to tease Chad about his current girlfriend, dye Alex’s underwear pink, or put stones in Michael’s lunchbag. But all that changes when Stevie’s twin, Alex, contracts meningitis, and becomes seriously ill. This time Stevie is looking for a way to show one of her brothers just how much she cares...

This book traces an evolution of equine and equestrian art in the United States over the last two centuries to counter conventional understandings of subjects that are deeply enmeshed in the traditions of elite English and European culture. In focusing on the construction of identity in painting and photography—of Blacks, women, and the animals themselves involved in horseracing, rodeo, and horse show competition—it illuminates the strategic and varying roles visual artists have played in producing cultural understandings of human-animal relationships. As the first book to offer a history of American equine and equestrian imagery, it shrinks the chasm of literature on the subject and illustrates the significance of the genre to the history of American art. This book further connects American equine and equestrian art to historical, theoretical, and philosophical analyses of animals and attests to how the horse endures as a vital, meaningful subject within the art world as well as culture at large. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, American art, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and animal studies.