Keeping abreast of gendering practices in health and physical education and physical culture: breastwork, breastism and breast pedagogies for (de)gender justice

ABSTRACT

At an embodied and personal level this paper plays with what Evans, J., & Davies, B. (2011. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment. Sport, Education & Society, 16(3), 263–278) suggests are ‘the complexity and nuances of biology in culture and the influence of body pedagogies in the production of social inequalities and hierarchies.’ (p. 263). Despite extensive attention to gender order, sexualization, sexual subjectification, sexual and gender representation in physical culture (sport, active lifestyles and health and physical education), research/scholarship has paid little attention to the positioning of and constitution of practices by body parts, such as breasts specifically. Given that gendered cultural pedagogies teach humans how to understand their selves, physical culture has potentially extensive affordances for learning the self. Drawing on narrative inquiry and content analysis, six diverse participants’ breastories are examined for breast pedagogies and how the materiality of breasts constructs and position humans and their gendered representations in physical culture. This paper suggests the recognition of breastism and employment of breastwork to work towards gender justice and dismantling some of the oppressions of gender. While others argue that productions of the gendered body lead to discipline and control of body parts, actions, and gender presentation, I consider instead the material and symbolic role of body parts, their actions and the gendered construction of those parts and how these gendered constructions act to discipline and control body pedagogies and engagement for more equitable futures in physical cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Breast
• gender
• health education
• physical education and health and physical education
• sex
• sexuality
• active lifestyle
• intersex
• breast pedagogies

Acknowledgements

Participants were very generous with their time and their emotions in explaining practices and feelings that were sometimes quite difficult so I thank them and hope the process of member check and sharing a penultimate draft of the paper was enough reward for them. Even one suggested copy edits! Thanks to elke emerald who read drafts and offered support (intelligent copy edits and care) to move to publication. To the special editors and Editor in Chief whose idea stimulated the paper’s completion and to reviewers whose advice and support was invaluable, I thank you all for your generous time and expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I adopt ^HPE to signal acknowledgment of formulations of physical education that name not just imply a health relationship.

2 One reviewer asked ‘me’ to indicate ‘my’ positioning. Whilst problematic, as ‘I’ attempt to sidestep identity categories ‘I’ have been positioned as human, mammal, stocky, tomboy, girl, nonbinary gender, partner, euroceltic, working class, able bodied, convict-settler-descent, immigrant, white, queer, abnormal … some which this contextualised ‘self’ could understand and at times even accept without necessarily identifying.