Weil is an important voice in animal (or human–animal) studies. This new collection of wide-ranging but tightly linked chapters culminates her research since 1999 about horses in nineteenth-century France. The chapters harness several threads that now define interdisciplinary animal studies—animal ethics, continental philosophy, feminism, and visual culture. Weil’s lively and witty prose is refreshingly restrained in academic baggage. This enjoyable and effervescent book does a remarkable amount of work in around 200 pages.
Though not a historian’s history, the book is deeply historical. Its interdisciplinary perspective will interest scholars who study animals, culture, France, gender, race, and the nineteenth century. Weil reads literary sources, visual sources, and historical documents through the lens of American and French critical theory, particularly from human–animal thinkers like Derrida and Haraway, and she reminds readers that Foucault framed his idea of biopower around the horse-training term dressage.1
Weil’s sources foreground famous French figures...