ABSTRACT
The writer, journalist, and runner Catriona Menzies-Pike wrote a memoir about running from a feminist perspective, using her background in literature. The understandings of what it means to have a runner's body and to be a "real runner" may differ for those not situated as the recipients of privileged race, gender, and normative understandings. An embodied ethnography defies the mind–body split; a feminist ethnography pays attention to the material and the discursive by taking up emotional, physical, and ideological space. The body as it is lived and constructed through gender, sexuality, and other social positioning is important for feminist theorists to attend to and connect women's actual experiences in their bodies with the political project of deconstructing the mind–body split. "It needs to explicitly tackle the relationship between the symbolic and the material, between representations of the body and embodiment as experience or social practice in concrete, cultural, and historical contexts".
