After Woman

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

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The stable offers becoming through ritual: leather boots laced, stirrups fastened, hooves hand-washed, bodies readied for action. Here, routine produces a coherent sense of self, enveloping feminity within the safety of repeated gestures and regimented performance. For a moment, the subject experiences becoming through feeling, rather than through how she is seen.

Within the confines of the stable, something shifts, too. The rituals that once cemented her in the world outside begin breaking down. Heels sink into mud and tulle grazes straw as her body lowers to the earth she previously tried to float above. She no longer rides for spectacle. She desires a different kind of freedom.

The woman’s horse is an accomplice in this quest, for the animal companion knows her neither as a woman nor as a subject. Within the stable, she begins to truly exist without an audience—her body desiring to remain forever in that zone where feminine subjects don’t pass into feminine objects.

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