Boys, Bodies, And Physical Education: Problematizing Identity, Schooling, And Power Relations Through A Pleasure Lens

Boys, Bodies, and Physical Education Using visual ethnography, this book explores the many forms of pleasures that boys derive in and through the spaces and their bodies in physical education. Employing the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Gerdin examines how pleasure is connected to identity, schooling and power relations and demonstrates how discourses of sport, fitness, health and masculinity work together to produce a variety of pleasurable experiences. At the same time, the book provides a critique of such pleasurable experiences within physical education by illustrating how these pleasures can still, for some boys, quickly turn into displeasures and can be associated with exclusion, humiliation, bullying and homophobia. Boys, Bodies, and Physical Education argues that pleasure can be seen as an educational and productive practice in physical education but also a constraint that both engenders and privileges some boys over others as well as (re)producing narrow and limited conceptions of masculinity and pleasures for all boys. This book works to problematise these pleasures and their articulations with gender, bodies and spaces. Göran Gerdin is Senior Lecturer of Physical Education and Sport at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education Series Editors: Wayne Martino, Emma Renold, Goli Rezai-Rashti, Jessica Ringrose and Nelson Rodriguez 1 Childhood Sexuality and AIDS Education The Price of Innocence Deevia Bhana 2 LGBT-Q Teachers, Civil Partnership and Same-Sex Marriage The Ambivalences of Legitimacy Aoife Neary 3 Masculinity and Aspiration in the Era of Neoliberal Education International Perspectives Edited by Garth Stahl, Joseph Derrick Nelson, and Derron O. Wallace 4 Boys, Bodies, and Physical Education Problematizing Identity, Schooling, and Power Relations through a Pleasure Lens Göran Gerdin Boys, Bodies, and Physical Education Problematizing Identity, Schooling, and Power Relations through a Pleasure Lens Göran Gerdin First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Göran Gerdin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-138-64997-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-62557-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC I dedicate this book to my three children, Oskar, Charlie and Olivia, may your lives be filled with pleasures and happiness, surrounded by great friends and family! Contents Preface Acknowledgements viii xv PART I Background 1 1 Boys Will Be Boys? 3 2 Gender, Bodies, Spaces and (dis)Pleasures 16 3 Boys’ Visual Representations and Interpretations of PE 62 PART II A Visual Ethnography of Kea College 87 4 Sporting and Masculinising Spaces: The Performative and Pleasurable Spaces of Boys’ PE 89 5 The Production of Masculine (dis)Pleasures in Boys’ PE 121 6 ‘Sporty