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.

Chapter One Women Running

Chapter Two Woman, Running

Chapter Three Real Women Run

Chapter Four Women Running Online

Chapter Five Running as Feminist Embodiment

Sandra L. Faulkner is Professor of Communication and Director of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her research interests include qualitative methodology, poetic inquiry, and the relationships among culture, identities, and sexualities in close relationships. Faulkner is the recipient of the 2013 Knower Outstanding Article Award from the National Communication Association, and the 2016 Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award.