Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Exeter)
Learning From The Herd?: Ethics and Intercorporeality in Equine-Assisted Therapy
The term 'intercorporeality' has gained currency in many spheres of political discourse, as a way of envisioning a form of ethics and politics that would be rooted in embodied responsiveness and interdependence. The equine herd might be considered an exemplary model of such a co-operative corpus: certainly, the moral reasoning used by UK-based equine-assisted therapists resonates with this feminist ethos of intercorporeality. Equine-assisted therapists hold that, not only individual human minds, but human society at large could be remedied, if we only we could learn from animals like horses how to notice ourselves and one another anew: as interactive, safety-seeking, bodies in space. But in this talk I’ll demonstrate the cultural construction, and material orientation, of 'herd' and 'prey' animals as exemplary creatures in therapeutic settings. In so doing, I'll denaturalise the sorts of lessons that young people learn within these programs, and I’ll re-harness the term 'intercorporeality' as a descriptive tool, rather than a prescribed ethos. As descriptive, that term can encourage us to look comparatively and critically at the ethical affordances offered within particular material and moral environments. This is important, lest intercorporeality become merely the latest skillset that appears deficient in struggling youth.