Goals, motives and collisions of women's running practices in the light of gender approach

Abstract

According to the ideas dominating in scientific discourse, female stayers of the twentieth century had to overcome gender stereotypes for a long time and in a tense struggle, according to which long running deprives them of "femininity" and threatens reproductive function. The article shows that the reasons for the long negative attitude of society towards physical culture and sports women's running are much more diverse and historically deepened, they go far beyond the sphere of training and competitive activity and "pure" physiology, having a socio-culturally determined ideological basis. The objectives of the article: to determine the types of women's running practices; to analyze the goals and motives of the running activities of their participants; to identify the causes of social conflicts generated by these practices and ways to overcome them. The main types of women's running practices are ritual competitive and out-of-competition running, festive competitive running, wellness and sports running. Running was used by women to achieve the following goals: marriage, material reward, pleasing the gods, transition to a new social group, magical influence, emancipation, physical development and setting records. The motives of running practices were gaining patronage, ensuring the well-being of the community, confirming their gender and age fullness, acquiring magical abilities, overcoming the scarcity of life, health care, self-realization, achieving equality with men in competitive activities and opportunities provided by society to outstanding athletes. The collisions of women's running practices are mainly associated with the mythological, religious and philosophical misogyny of traditional societies and gender stereotypes of modern times, according to which prolonged running locomotion does not correspond to the gender expecta-tions of society, the norms of decency and causes irreparable harm to women's health. Largely due to the selfless struggle of runners for equality in realizing their athletic potential, women's identity today is associated not only with femininity, and at the last Olympics in Tokyo, gender parity of participants was achieved for the first time.