Paper short abstract:

Through auto-ethnographical notes from a trip to the women-only running race ‘Women’s Mini 10K’ in New York City, this paper will discuss how togetherness of being runners, women, and Swedes, arises in connection to running the race among the race travellers.

Paper long abstract:

Through auto-ethnographical notes from a trip to the women-only running race 'Women's Mini 10K' in New York City, this paper will discuss how togetherness of being runners, women, and Swedes, arises in connection to running the race. With a focus on a T-shirt in yellow and blue with SWEDEN printed across the chest, the paper will discuss femininity, nationality, ethnicity, and whiteness as constitutive features of a runner's community of women engaged in recreational sports. The paper is part of the ethnological research project "Women-only sports races as a cultural phenomenon - conditions for women's recreational sports," in which the project group does an ethnograhical study of women-only races, based on fieldwork and a call for written stories, and a historically oriented study, based on archive materials. The theoretic framework of the project is positioned within discourse theory, post structuralism and feminism, with influences primarily from Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Judith Butler.