Uncivil Attention and the Public Runner

While violence among the fans of competitive sports has received much scholarly attention (e.g., Elias & Dunning, 1986; Giulianotti, 2005), far less has been written about aggression targeted at community athletes like public runners. Yet accounts of such harassment figure prominently in runners’ own narratives. This article explores the phenomenon of runner harassment through these accounts and my own experiences as a long-time public runner, drawing first from the literature on fan aggression and second, from sociological work concerning behavior in public places more generally (e.g., Gardner, 1980, 1995; Goffman, 1963). It argues that jogger harassment can be understood in relation to the particular bodily form that running takes—that is, to the sweating, disheveled, panting body of public running—which both violates rules of public vs. private bodily display and signals an unacceptable degree of “involvement” (Goffman, 1963) in the activity and, ultimately, the self.