Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 307 – Our F/Favorite Tropes: Sword-Lesbians and Horse-Girls

Saturday, February 15, 2025 - 16:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 307 – Our F/Favorite Tropes: Sword-Lesbians and Horse-Girls - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/02/15 - listen here)

I was lying awake brainstorming for this month’s podcast and thinking about topics for the “Our F/Favorite Tropes” series and it occurred to me that a panel topic from last year’s Worldcon made a good springboard. The central theme of the tropes series is to examine how popular historic romance tropes can work differently for female couples than for mixed-gender couples, but I’ve also been throwing in a few tropes that don’t necessarily have a direct correspondence. Furthermore, a sub-theme of the tropes series is that tropes exist because of a specific social and historical context, and don’t make as much sense outside of that context. The necessary socio-historical context is a negotiation between the text and the reader—if the essential elements are present from either side, then the trope can ring true. Anyway, today we’re talking about sword-lesbians and horse-girls.

Tropes—as understood in romance literature—refer to a motif or scenario that recurs often enough across multiple works that it develops its own associated expectations or resonances. It could be a situation, such as “only one bed,” or a mini-script, such as a training montage. It can be a type of relationship structure for the protagonists, such as “friends to lovers,” or it can be a character type or occupation, which is the sort we’ll be talking about today. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose horses and swords, not only because they’re both based on character types, but also because many of the cultural resonances have similar roots in the tensions around the gendering of attributes and interests. And both rely on very specific cultural dynamics for their validity, but it can be the reader that brings the necessary dynamics. Here I’m going to be reprising some topics I’ve covered in the past, but examining them from a different angle.

So let’s start with horse girls and why they just naturally fit into sapphic narratives. The traditional theory about why horses and girls go together in fiction tends to lean on two motifs. One is the idea of the horse as best friend—the friend who is affectionate and supportive, but will never compete with you in human interactions. The girl can project her own emotions and motivations onto the horse-friend. Even if we move into the realm of fantasy horse-friends and horse-analogs that have human levels of sentience, the relationship remains eternally separate from human connections and therefore can never be disrupted by them.

The second layer of the horse-girl is the idea that a person marginalized by gender and often relatively powerless in society can develop a relationship with this large powerful animal in which she is the one in control—the one who guides the horse into lending her its power. Thus the horse-girl represents a fantasy of alliance with a powerful being outside of human gender hierarchies that creates at least a temporary illusion of mobility, freedom, and agency.

But the horse-girl motif isn’t simply an intersection of female characters and the presence of horses. In a historic or social context where everyone interacts with horses as an everyday function, the specialness of the horse-girl as distinct from other girls becomes diluted. And in a hypothetical context where interactions with horses are not variable based on gender (the gender of the person that is, not the horse), then the specialness of a horse-girl as opposed to a horse-boy is eroded.

So how does sapphic romance fit into this? Here I think we need to circle back and look at the historical gendering of horsemanship. The idea that horses and girls go together like…well, like a horse and carriage is relatively recent. (And by that I mean, within the last century or so.) For quite a long time, the riding of horses was coded as inherently masculine. You can see that as early as classical Greek images of Amazons, who demonstrated their defiance of expected gender roles not only by wielding weapons, but by riding horses. At regular intervals across western history, ideas about modesty and propriety have put barriers in the way of horsewomen in the form of restrictions on posture and dress. To some extent women accepted this gendering, such that when they developed a riding culture, they adopted and adapted hyper-masculine styles, borrowing from military uniforms for the tailoring and decoration of riding habits—at least for the part of the habit above the waist.

Riding—and especially hunting and racing—were considered the purview of men. To the extent that women claimed a space to participate, they were often viewed as unfeminine, or were permitted on an isolated basis as “not like other girls” rather than allowed entry as a class.

Within this context, the horse-girl has stepped outside the restrictions of gender in ways similar to the lesbian. She has claimed masculine prerogatives and privileges. In a context that frames same-sex relations in terms of gender difference, the horse-girl has positioned herself as a natural partner for a woman, regardless of where that woman herself falls on the butch-femme scale. As I noted in the trope episode on bluestockings and amazons, a stock character type in the 18th and 19th century was the pairing of the masculine horsewoman and the more feminine bluestocking. But those eras also give us the image of groups of horsewomen riding out together in their military-tailored habits, in defiance of the pressures to remain passive home-bodies.

But curiously enough, the horse-girl as a stock literary character emerges as horses become less a part of everyday life. With this shift, horses become something of a “special interest,” differentially available to young women based on either socio-economic standing or within increasingly smaller subcultures where horses still had viable functions. In parallel with the marginalization of horse culture, that culture became less masculine-coded. So there is a narrative tension between the horse-girl as gender outlaw and the horse-girl focusing on the personal and individual dynamic between rider and steed. The modern literary horse-girl is generally not coded as potentially sapphic (even though she may be coded as a tom-boy). It is the intersection between the older image of the sapphic amazon (in its early modern sense) and the more modern motif of the horse-crazy female protagonist that gives meaning to the trope of the sapphic horse-girl.

By the way, in recognizing this image of the lesbian pursuing masculine-coded interests, I want to emphasize that this is only one of the archetypes of female same-sex desire in history. There is another entire group of archetypes that emphasize attraction based on feminine similarity. But this is the archetype that connects our two topics today. So let’s turn to the sword-lesbian and set this up with the context of the panel discussion I referred to.

At last year’s World Science Fiction and Fantasy convention, I was on a discussion panel titled “Sword Lesbians: Discuss” with Ellen Kushner (author of The Privilege of the Sword), Samantha Shannon (author of The Priory of the Orange Tree), and Em X. Liu (who was a finalist for the Astounding Award for best new writer). This means that the panel was considering the trope of the sword-wielding lesbian not within the realm of historical fiction, but primarily within speculative fiction. Which raises not simply the question of “why lesbians with swords” but “why swords at all” given the scope of the possible settings.

There were a lot of great discussions during that panel, and I won’t try to summarize what other panelists said—much less remember all the great books that were recommended—but here are my thoughts on the central topic, which lay out why the sword-lesbian is a historically-rooted trope regardless of fantasy or science fictional settings that, in theory, should be free of real-world assumptions about gender and sexuality.

Within the historic context, and particularly in literature, the sword is not simply a weapon, but a symbol. There are many possible weapons that a protagonist could use, often to better effect in any particular situation. The sword is a weapon of the elite—it represents an upper class warrior, whether due to the difficulty and expense of obtaining a sword in very ancient times, or due to the time and training required to master it in medieval times, or due to its inherent irrelevance for serious combat in more modern times. The associated social status is why mounted cavalry officers carried swords up through the first World War—cavalry, because the horse, too, reflected upper class resources. The caché of the sword is why dueling with swords remained a viable, if rare, practice into the 20th century.

So one context the sword-lesbian operates within is an association with high social status, perhaps even aristocratic status if her culture has such a thing. She needn’t actually have that status, but by picking up a sword she lays claim to it.

The other thing she lays claim to, of course, is a penis. We all know that swords are phallic symbols, right? It says so right there on the tin. This returns us to the symbolic context that assumes that desiring a woman is an inherently masculine act. By picking up a sword, our heroine as much as states her right to desire women and to act on that desire. It also gives her the right to be desired by women. I examined a number of examples in historic literature where these dynamics are made explicit in the podcast episode on female knights.

All this makes sense for fiction in a real-world historic setting, but what is the logic behind the trope of the sword-lesbian in a purely fantasy setting, or a space opera? My own personal opinion is that the sword-lesbian can only be meaningful within a context that reflects both heteronormativity and sexism. Even if those attitudes are not features of the secondary world of the setting, the trope derives its meaning from the background of the reader (and author). Whatever our own personal beliefs and experiences regarding gender and sexuality, our literary expectations have been shaped by a society that assigns gender to sword use and considers same-sex desire to be a marked state.

To be meaningful as a trope, as opposed to a simple character description, the sword-lesbian must be a transgressive figure. She must be understood as clearly standing outside social norms and expectations. This makes her dangerous and desirable, but also occasionally vulnerable. Without sexism, it is not a marked action for a woman to bear a sword. Without sexism, she does not transgress any norms and attracts no special attention. Without sexism, a sword is not a penis.

Without heteronormativity, there is no special meaning to a woman adopting male-coded symbols. Without heteronormativity, there is no motivation for assigning masculinity to people who desire women. This doesn’t mean that in a speculative secondary world that was free of sexism and heteronormativity that there would be no women who happened to be lesbians and happened to use swords, but that the specific dynamics and relationship to society that we invoke with the label “sword-lesbian” would not exist. Not any more than being a girl and living in California makes you one of the California girls that the Beach Boys sang about. But I digress.

It's this contextual meaning that gets to the heart of romance tropes. And it’s one of the reasons I enjoy developing this series of episodes. (Because if there’s one thing I love, it’s over-analyzing something.) As I discussed in the first trope episode on “only one bed,” the trope loses its meaning if there is nothing marked or special about your two protagonists sharing a bed. That act is highly meaningful if there are expectations and taboos and consequences to sharing a bed. But while the social meanings assigned to two women sharing a bed can be vastly different from those assigned to a man and a woman sharing a bed, the trope still exists in sapphic romance because those resonances exist in the reader’s mind. Even if the author presents bed-sharing between two female protagonists as utterly expected and non-sexual within the story’s setting, the reader sees that single bed being introduced and sets up expectations that will either be fulfilled or turned on their head.

In the same way, the horse-girl and the sword-lesbian draw their meaning as tropes from the social forces, symbolism, and expectations assigned to their actions and situations, and especially those expectations that make their existence transgressive against social norms. And if they’re going to transgress, how about we set the two up on a date and let them transgress a few more norms together?