Readers Up #15: Making Her Mark
Did I just read a Renee Dahlia romance for issue 11 of ye old newsletter? Yes. Am I about to talk about the new one, Making Her Mark, right now? Yes! It’s my birthday week and I do what I want! Smash that unsubscribe if you’re not here for smoochies.
More to the point, maybe do unsubscribe if you’re not here for jockeys.
Racing has a hard time showing up for jocks. A few times a year there’s a telethon or a dunk tank, and racegoers bring out their pocketbooks; a few times a year a rider is catastrophically injured or even killed, and racegoers remember that human life undergirds our animal sport--and every day in between, the typical horseplayer attitude falls somewhere on a spectrum between blase disregard and active resentment. Even in the pettiest of cases, there’s a bone-deep lack of curiosity, and when--God forbid--the industry attempts something new, fans purport confusion. Why should I care? Why would I care? Why would you think I’d care? Thus, when someone cares, to the tune of book publication no less, it sticks out.
Finally, after eight years of race riding and hundreds of minor winners, she had the ultimate prize.
Rachel Bassett, the heroine of Making Her Mark, appeared as a side character in Dahlia’s first Merindah Park novel along with her twin sister. Scions of an Australian stud farm, both women are professional jockeys, and although the thrust (har har) of Making Her Mark is the romance plot, the author takes time to develop Rachel’s career, as well as the ways in which it diverges from Serena’s. Most jockeys in Thoroughbred fiction function as set dressing, with little time devoted to their career ambitions, their horsemanship, or--God forbid!--their inner lives. It’s rare enough in the US, at least, for race-riders to even be termed horsemen, an interesting contrast to various recent UK jocks’ room studies, which emphasize the importance of treating riders as athletes, with all issues and concerns attendant to professional sportsmen. American jocks’ athletic prowess is the positive most likely to be touted by fans, as witnessed more than once this past spring and summer when riders including Tyler Gaffalione and Chris Landeros were lauded for keeping their mounts and themselves safe during bad breaks or close quarters. Yet the other side of praise is damnation; the same ride is bold and tactical for a winning player and aggressive and dangerous for a loser, and it’s not quite coincidental how often the latter terminology is applied to Latino riders. Although women jockeys have had incredible impact on US sport, the biggest names remain outliers, the exception rather than the norm, with little systemic change occurring since women first obtained licenses in the late 1960s. In the US, those female riders building careers generally do so not at the banner tracks of Saratoga or Del Mar but at Ellis Park or Laurel--"country" jockeys, as Serena is, trading a longshot at Flemington on a big day for regular full cards of lower-rung runners at Wodonga for the season. Rachel’s experience mimics the common trajectory of women whose careers can be measured in Group/Grade 1 races: stop-and-start opportunities, tokenism, thin reasons for exclusion, circular logic and grasping at straws… a concentrated, gendered microcosm of the larger sphere in which all jockeys operate.
"And before you say anything, yes, the horses are held in higher esteem and better looked after than the jockeys."
Whether by chance or intent, race-riders work at a remove, where unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Jacob, the footballer quickly falling for Rachel’s brazen charms, has inherited a disdain of racing from his broader culture, associating it with cheating and scandal. Similarly, the real world of US racing assigns riders dishonesty, shifty tendencies, and perhaps above all desperation. Race-riding is often not a career to be taken seriously, nor one that requires serious skill, nothing inherently ambitious, a gig no one with other options would gun for. In the US, at least, it was originated by men without rights, a network of roots not grown past but funneled into the ever-changing face of American marginalization. In this corner, as in most corners of all sports, racing is inescapably political. Rachel’s career and life, as with her real-world analogues, can’t avoid being politicized: as a queer woman, her body has always been litigated, interrogated, examined, and used as a projection point by both detractors and putative allies. After a point, certain personalities tend to turn the tables. If I’m refused the privilege of a blank slate, if I’m continually written upon by outside perspectives, best believe I’ll twist how my reality is perceived into something confrontational, disturbing--or even happy. Happiness is the ultimate upset to the status quo.
Art often exists to confront (as does sport), but it also serves to soothe, to deliver dreams, to imagine new realities nearly close enough to grasp, to reflect the heroes we both need and deserve. So, Rachel gets her time in the sun, her Group 1 wins and her good horses. She has her voice heard, in defense of her sport and her heart. She knits her family back together, damsels a hot guy's friends (pro tip: the sure path to a hot guy is not his stomach but his bros), and carves out an undeniable place for herself in the sport she loves. If art is a gift and fiction is art, romance is not the gift's natural opposite, a commodity (yes, my side-piece this month is yet again Lewis Hyde, who is not a fan of category romances). Making Her Mark is a gift in very tangible ways, the sort of gift that the recipient likes to believe was created specifically for them. Holding your own particular corner of a beloved thing in your hands feels flagrant, occasionally dangerous. Seeing oneself depicted in fiction is always a gift, and fundamentally political, as art and reality can never be untangled. Sport and art: these are also the affairs of cities, the right of public life. The question of the happy ending can never be apolitical.
Yours in the Women In Racing exhibit, finally,
Diana