Gendered enskilment: becoming women through recreational running

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss how women learn to use their bodies, move, and become a different kind of being than men. I focus on the embodiment of gender in recreational running enskilment. The materiality of our bodies and the social expectations of girls and women affect their running enskilment. The environment of gendered, racialized, and otherwise minoritized people differ from that of white, cis-gendered men, who often form the base construct in social science research on running enskilment. Studies on the embodied knowledge of movement that are not written from a feminist perspective assume that how people are taught to move is gender-neutral or, worse, gender-less. By zooming on the kinesthesia of running, proprioception in public space, and the sense of being looked at, I critically rethink the sensuous engagement between embodied selves and environments and argue that the often-neglected social structures of an environment are key in understanding the enactment of the self through movement.