“Running makes me feel …”: The production of emotion through leisure

ABSTRACT

Using data from twenty ‘running autobiographies’ – written or voice-recorded reflections – we examine runners’ changing emotional relationship to running during the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the complex, often fluid, and occasionally contradictory ways that leisure pursuits produce emotion, and how emotions shape subjects and communities. Mainstream conceptualisations of amateur running often frame it as a tool with which runners modulate their emotions. For example, running is commonly celebrated as a way of controlling stress or improving mental health. This approach is premised on the interiority of emotion – the idea that emotions reside within the runner. Conversely, our approach is concerned with how the practice of running and the circulation of the running body as an object produces emotion. We argue that understanding why and how people run, and what the running body does hinges on understanding the productive capacities of the running body – not only what emotions they bring into a run – and how, through its circulation, the running body produces social affects and emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Running
• leisure
• affect
• emotion
• archive of affect

Acknowledgements

Bridgette Desjardins is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Jean Ketterling is supported in part by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Bridgette Desjardins

Bridgette Desjardins (she/her) is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University. She studies sport as a cultural artifact, often through the lens of gender and sexuality, or nationalism and militarism.

Jean Ketterling

Jean Ketterling (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of game studies and pornography studies, with a particular focus on affect and emotion.