Author: Sandra Faulkner
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.
I’m finally doing the research project I’ve thought about for years…
– Sandra L. Faulkner
I’m running toward the feminist ethnographer I want to be.
The web-based material that here accompanies each chapter of Real Women Run presents aspects of the embodied fieldwork through sound and image. Using video as a component in this ethnography is a way to help readers think differently about women and running; it offers another nuanced layer of women’s embodied experience of running. In addition, the soundscapes help present author Sandra Faulkner’s embodied presence in this ethnographic project. The sounds of running—the noise, the grunts, the breathing, the encouragement, the disappointment—jog listeners through training runs, races, and the in situ embodiment of a sport women both enjoy and loathe.
Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment can be purchased on the Routledge website.
Real Women Run webpages designed by Sarah Abbott.
An online community for all women-identified runners, a space for all of our bodies, abilities, and running experiences—pleasurable and painful, dangerous and empowering. We are all real women running.
Chapbook: Haiku as Running Log
First Mile
legs leaded down tight
hips fisted like a wish-bone
sleepy muscles bite
Women Running
safety dressed in form
Caution: RUNNERS on the road
dogs cat call danger
Chapter 4: Women Running Online
Run Body
thunder with your thighs
running is like being born
saying yes to cheese
Chapter 5: Running as Feminist Embodiment
Cat Calls
don’t call us a girl
don’t call us a girl jogger
fierce women running