Abstract

The female sporting body has been studied in myriad ways – both theoretical and methodological - over the past 30 years, including via a range of feminist frameworks. Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the worked-out, sweating, panting, pulsating, lived female sporting body (Allen-Collinson 2011) and a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological-sociological perspective (Allen-Collinson & Pavey, 2014) is needed to enrich our sociological understandings of women’s sporting/exercising ‘bodywork’. In this paper, I suggest that employing a sociological, feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore narratives of the richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and physical activity. Drawing on data from a 3-year autoethnographic and autophenomenographic research project on female distance running, this paper examines the shifting interplay of structure and agency experienced in the lived sporting body, and specifically focuses upon the changing nexus of pleasure and danger as corporeally experienced whilst running in ‘public’ space and place.