Real Women Run: Running As Feminist Embodiment

Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment is a series of linked essays, haiku, and analysis of women’s embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women’s activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. This ethnography investigates how women’s narratives and experiences of running subvert mainstream discourses of what being female and being active mean in terms of identity, motivation, and practice. Through ethnographic investigation, including interviews with women runners, poetic inquiry, participant observation at the 2014 Gay Games, and textual analysis of women’s web-based writing about running, Real Women Run paces readers through women’s embodied running experiences: identities in motion, the inseparable mind-body connection, and running as social and solitary, pleasurable and painful, dangerous and empowering.