Boys, Bodies, and Physical Education

Problematizing Identity, Schooling, and Power Relations through a Pleasure Lens

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 both 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 problematize these pleasures and their articulations with gender, bodies, and spaces.