Running While Fat: How Women Runners Experience and Respond to Size Discrimination

This study examines fat women runners and their experiences of institutional and interactional inequality. Using a constructionist approach, this study examines inequality in its interactional context, paying attention to incidences of size discrimination, women’s responses to size discrimination, and how these are perceived. The study employs ethnographic methodology to center the experiences of fat women in the analysis and contextualize inequality. Data include twenty qualitative interviews with self-identified fat women runners and participant observation of running events in the California Central Valley. The results indicate that fat women runners experience varying degrees of both institutional and interactional inequality but all participants, at some point, experienced body shame triggered by their social environment. However, not all experienced inequality in the same way. Novice runners, for example, reported experiencing more shame. Responses to size discrimination most frequently came in the form of preventative practices that involved gathering resources to avoid, control or anticipate inequality. Women also resisted inequality by finding and/or creating communities of support.