ABSTRACT
Dressage is a performance practice that humans and animals share. This chapter outlines the theoretical base of this book and introduces the concept of dressage animality, which derives from my more than 26 years of experience working with riding horses in Austria, the United Kingdom, and Germany. It connects the etymology of the term dressage to Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre's writing on dressage and animality and brings their materialist critique of human and animal dressage together with the work of feminist scholars Donna Haraway and Lauren Berlant. To outline nuanced differences between cultural understandings of dressage, the chapter also includes a discussion of a range of other German, French, and English theories of dressage, such as those by Immanuel Kant, Marcel Mauss, Simone Weil, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Carrie Noland.
