ABSTRACT
Perhaps most important are the socio-cultural influences on women who run, how women's running bodies are embedded in larger cultural discourse about appropriate ways of being. Embodiment for women who run means self-determination, their choice of identities, and an integration of health and running, even if women must react against the dominant image of a female running body and skirt the dialectic between safety and danger, empowerment and marketing, relationships and solitude. Real Women Run is a feminist embodied ethnography that defies the mind-body split because of the attention paid to the material and the discursive; this work takes up emotional, physical, and ideological space. Running is a way to build physical and emotional strength to challenge and resist normative running bodies, typical femininity, and said expectations. The online narratives women runners present subvert the dominant cultural image of the white, thin, straight runner who runs solely to maintain aesthetics.
