ABSTRACT
During the fall and winter of 1994/1995 I completed data collection for a research project the focus of which was to understand qualitatively a group of non-athletic women’s perspectives on their lived-body experiences of physical activity and exercise in general, and their involvement in aerobics and wilderness canoeing more specifi cally (McDermott 1998, 2000, 2004). Of particular interest was grasping how these experiences related to their lived comfortableness of being their bodies, and the implications of this for questions of empowerment and identity (McDermott 1998, 2000, 2004). Central to this earlier analysis was a process of initiating a conversation that theoretically (i.e., feminist) and methodologically (i.e., phenomenology) sought to conceptualize physicality in a way that both embraced and conveyed the women’s bodily experiences in order to broaden dominant representations of physicality as inherently masculine.
