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Racialized Runners: Life Stories of Middle-Class Black Women

Smith-Tran, Alicia
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1523195798958536

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Sociology.
This dissertation explores how middle-class black women narrate race, class, and gender as shaping the experience of recreational running and the development of a runner identity. Theoretically, I approach this study from both a life course and black feminist perspective. The former emphasizes trajectories over time, the process of moving through life’s institutionalized stages, and the significance of contextualizing individuals’ lives within particular social settings. The latter is an intersectional perspective that acknowledges the power in centering black women’s voices and learning about their experiences in their own words. Both of these theoretical perspectives complement my goal of eliciting storytelling that is illustrative of development and change over the course of my participants’ lives. Based on multiple life story interviews with 25 middle-class black women between the ages of 26 and 59, my findings focus on three themes that emerged from their narratives. First, I argue that running can be understood as a cultural routine that is engaged in as a means for successfully operating in middle-class, dominant institutions. Running is a middle-class leisure sport and cultural practice for which participation is a marker of status, a means for connecting with others of similar status, and a vehicle for promoting intergenerational social mobility. Second, I identify several mechanisms for enabling or hindering the ability to have a salient, “thick” runner identity in order to better understand how health lifestyles such as running can be better routinized by members of racial minority groups with suboptimal health outcomes. Third, I argue that Black Girls Run!—a fast-growing recreational running group for black women in the United States—facilitates efforts in racial uplift, provides an outlet for escaping racial tokenism, and gives middle-class black women a unique sense of like-minded community. This study makes contributions to our understandings of the latent functions of health-promoting leisure activities, while centering the voices of middle-class black women. Running helped many of my participants manage the challenges of being a middle-class black woman in a racist society.
Mary Patrice Erdmans (Committee Chair)
Dale Dannefer (Committee Member)
Cassi Pittman Claytor (Committee Member)
LaShanda Korley (Committee Member)
209 p.
African Americans; Gender; Health; Recreation; Social Research; Sociology
black women; middle-class; intersectionality; narrative methods; life stories; health; leisure; racial tokenism; exercise; sport; running; identity; life course; black feminism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Smith-Tran, A. (2018). Racialized Runners: Life Stories of Middle-Class Black Women [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1523195798958536

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Smith-Tran, Alicia. Racialized Runners: Life Stories of Middle-Class Black Women. 2018. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1523195798958536.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Smith-Tran, Alicia. "Racialized Runners: Life Stories of Middle-Class Black Women." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1523195798958536

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1523195798958536
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© 2018, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.