Run Body
thunder with your thighs
running is like being born
saying yes to cheese
AUDIO: Munich 10K Oktober 12, 2014
Listen to your body. Love your body. Enjoy the ride.
– Sarah
Last Run
like this is the last
like this is your dead last run
like this cigarette
Women Running Online focuses on a critical content analysis of the gendered expectations in popular women’s running websites and women-focused running blogs. Faulkner weaves her interviews with women runners with content of women’s running blogs to show real women’s experiences running with their mother, fat, queer, and average bodies. The online narratives women runners present subvert the salient cultural image of the white, thin, straight runner who runs solely to maintain aesthetics. Embodiment for women who run means self-determination, choice of identities, and integration of health and running as women react against the image of the dominant female running body. Running offers women an important marker of embodied identity in the everyday moments of difficulty related to work, relationships, and health, and many online sources now support women’s embodied running selves with writing, images, and sounds from our various perspectives.
This web-based material is an accompaniment to the book Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment by Sandra Faulkner.