Hobbyhorse Revolution and the Finnish Hobbyhorse Girls on Parade

In 2012, Finnish filmmaker Selma Vilhunen discovered a community of hobbyhorse enthusiasts who manufacture, care for, and compete in the tradition of horse dressage. Vilhunen saw in their community a space for joy and empowerment—a narrative she captures in her 2017 documentary, Hobbyhorse Revolution. The film consists of interviews with Finnish hobbyhorse girls interspersed with scenes of competition, training, and play. Though negative backlash has deemed the hobbyhorsers “queer” in degrading terms, I read the hobbyhorsers as queer in celebratory terms, as figures who deconstruct patriarchal and species hierarchies.

The history of girl-horse relationships and their representation has decidedly queer elements. As horses became less central to social, agricultural, and war practices, the responsibilities of horse maintenance shifted from men to women. However, women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not supposed to ride the horse astride, as it was thought that this could break the woman’s hymen. Worse still, riding astride could arouse the woman sexually, perhaps even stimulating her desire for the horse. (Ashman)

Depictions of what Susan McHugh calls the “horse-crazy” girl are common in fiction, including Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel National Velvet, in which a fourteen-year-old girl, Velvet Brown, rides a horse to victory in the Grand National Steeplechase. In these narratives, the girl and her horse pose a threat to heterosexual norms: the horse distracts her from boys, and her sexual interests may turn to women or to the horse itself. Though the heteronormative narrative is usually recuperated by having the girl “outgrow” her horse obsession, it is difficult to deny the force of Velvet’s words: “I don’t ever want children” she says, “only horses.” Vilhunen’s film both extends and deviates from this girl-horse narrative tradition.

The elation portrayed in some scenes of Vilhunen’s film could be read as replacing the sexual excitement girls are expected to feel towards boys. This includes a scene in which a group of hobbyhorse girls gathers to count down to the registration for the national hobbyhorse championships. The girls scream and jump in anticipation, and many are nearly brought to tears when their registration is confirmed. This behavior is reminiscent of girls awaiting the arrival of a boy band: it is as if the hobbyhorse girls have appropriated this cultural trope for their own purposes.

Another scene shows how seriously the hobbyhorsers treat their sport. Aisku coaches Elsa on her riding, saying, “you need to stop hissing at him […] he gets extra energy from it.” “Yes,” Elsa agrees, slightly out of breath. Aisku continues, “if he overheats and does that, then just don’t jump. Stop and make an extra round.” Aisku then asks Elsa, “Can I try him?” Elsa agrees and passes her horse to Aisku. “He’s the biggest one in my stable,” Elsa says, then adds, “it’s nice to see your own horse being ridden by someone else.” Aisku replies, “you’ve done [a] good job in schooling him,” as Elsa looks on with pride. What is remarkable about this exchange is that there is no trace of pretense.

For some viewers, such scenes are disturbing: not only does the girl choose horses over boys, the horse in question is not “real,” making her behavior regressive. This is the position of one Youtuber who asks, “What do you think when you see, in the worst case scenario, a forty-year-old adult woman […] riding a hobbyhorse? What could she [be thinking]? Free her inner child? Deny reality? [Do it] because it feels good?” The video associates hobbyhorsers with “adults who play as children or babies, or those who are roleplaying different genders, like queer, nonbinary, [or] transgender.” The video ends by suggesting that the hobbyhorse trend—and supposedly related queer phenomena—may represent “the degeneration of minds in [the] Western world” and “Armageddon.”

Yet, these supposed threats are precisely what hobbyhorsers celebrate: as one hobbyhorser says, “I can be as childish as I want to be” (Barry 2019); one adult woman sees hobbyhorsing as a way “to run away from your boring and maybe exhausting normal life” (Barry 2019). If “denying reality” means denouncing the constraints of female adulthood in a patriarchal world, the hobbyhorsers appear to be on board.

So, if the hobbyhorsers are not civilization-wreckers, what are they? Three figures—the centaur, the thing, and the cyborg—are helpful in suggesting the girl on her hobbyhorse is a posthumanist figuration. Maurstad, Davis and Dean define “centaurability” as “the embodied feeling of being one and acting as one” (2015). This symbiosis is apparent in the film’s scenes of competitions, where a girl and her horse are judged as a team. Like “real” dressage, hobbyhorse competitions rely on total coordination of horse and rider.

Of course, the hobbyhorse is not a living animal, and the hobbyhorse girls are clear on this point. In describing the reactions of outsiders, one says, “they think that we think that the horse is alive, which we do not. We understand that it’s… ‘dead,’ made of fabric and stuffing” (“Finns Compete” 2017). The speaker puts air quotes around the word “dead,” and her friends laugh: clearly, it’s not the right term. In fact, most hobbyhorsers construct their horses from scratch and treat them with great care.

But what are they caring for? In her work on vibrant matter, Jane Bennet suggests humans are made up of the same stuff as so-called “things.” She argues that things have power and “produce effects”—much like the hobbyhorses in Vilhunen’s film that hiss and kick back. For Bennett, people and things rarely act on their own; rather, they are bound up in an “assemblage,” demonstrated, for example, by the girl whose legs become an extension of the hobbyhorse body.

This assemblage is also represented in Donna Haraway’s cyborg—a figuration in which “one is too few and two are too many” (60). Haraway says cyborgs “have a natural feel for united-front politics, but without the vanguard party” (9). It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of this tenet than the hobbyhorse march through the streets of Helsinki that concludes Vilhunen’s film. Instead of hoisting sticks with signs, the marchers straddle sticks with horseheads as they chant, “respect to the hobbyhorses!”

As my discussion suggests, the hobbyhorse girls of Vilhunen’s film can be understood as queer figures. Rather than reading them as regressive, as the patriarchal backlash to the film does, or even as bestial, as the anxious response to “horse-crazy” girls might have us do, I read the girl on her hobbyhorse as an inspiring posthumanist figuration that invites viewers to consider the possibilities of transgressing and transcending bounds of gender, species, and matter itself.

Works Cited

Ashman, Amalya Layla. 2017. “‘Oh God, Give Me Horses!’: Pony-Mad Girls, Sexuality,

and Pethood.” In Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies, edited by Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, 153–166. New York: Routledge.

Bagnold, Enid. (1935) 1999. National Velvet. New York: Avon Books.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. ProQuest Ebrary.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016a. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway, edited by Cary Wolfe, 3–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“Hobbyhorses—New Trend for Grown Up People in Finland.” n.d. Posted by Finnish Robotten. YouTube video, 8:06. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll_I0ahm7N4.

Maurstad, Anita, Dona Lee Davis, and Sarah Dean. 2015. “What’s Underfoot: Emplacing Identity in Practice Among Horse-Human Pairs.” In Affect, Space and Animals, edited by Jopy Nyman and Nora Schuurman, 107–119. New York: Routledge.

McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Project MUSE.

Vilhunen, Selma, dir. Hobbyhorse Revolution. 2017. Featuring Alisa Aarniomäki, Mariam Njie, Elsa Salo. Helsinki: Tuffi Films. https://www.tuffifilms.com/production/hobbyhorse-revolution.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ida Moen Johnson earned her PhD from the Department of Scandinavian at UC Berkeley in May of 2020 with the dissertation, "The Barn and the Beast: The Queerness of Child-Animal Figurations in Scandinavian Children's Literature and Culture." As of August 2021, she is the Permanent Lecturer in Norwegian at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.