“Like That Between Two Humans”: Girls Imagining Horses in Early Pony Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many young female readers love stories about horses. Attempting to account for the enduring popularity of the genre, critics have pathologized readers by interpreting horses as symbolic representation of girls’ sexual yearnings. Other critics argue that horses provide a means for girls to transcend gendered strictures and the demands of heterosexual femininity. Whether celebrating or denigrating the genre, scholars have focused on questions of female identity while ignoring what girls themselves say about horses. However, the question of how girls themselves envision horses is particularly relevant to understanding a genre that features horses as central characters and that was in many ways invented by girls publishing in the 1930s. Building on a growing body of research exploring posthuman representations of animals in children’s literature, this essay uses Donna Haraway’s theory of companion species as a framework to analyze the representation of horses in early girls’ pony stories. Rather than betraying girls’ unconscious desires, pony stories reveal girls’ thoughtful and groundbreaking consideration about the reciprocal nature of human-animal relations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".