Body pedagogies, P/policy, health and gender

Abstract

Schools within a ‘knowledge economy’ nurture and endorse particular ‘corporeal orientations’, that is to say, ascribe value, meaning and potential to ‘the body’ (particular bodies) in time, place and space. Such processes reflect wider (national and global) socio‐economic trends. In contemporary culture, these processes increasingly celebrate particular virtues—‘flexible identities’, the manifest aspects of ‘performance’ and ‘corporeal perfection’ (usually defined as ‘the slender ideal’). Calling on the voices of a number of young women (aged 11–18) the article illustrates how these processes can intersect to seriously damage some people's health, perhaps especially those of young women and girls. The analyses suggest that the expectations of a ‘knowledge economy’ relating to the body and health enter the school system through two forms of P/policy: ‘formal’, state‐sanctioned, usually legislated education Policy; and ‘informal’, mainly medical and health institution‐based, state ‘approved’ but non‐legislated, pseudo policy initiatives often merely reflecting expectations and pressures laundered through the popular media. Together, these P/policies define not only formal education but increasingly encode other aspects of school life, in effect, making ‘pedagogy’ everyone's concern, everywhere. The article highlights the relentless and inescapable nature of pedagogical activity in the Totally Pedagogised Micro Societies (TPMS) which schools have become.

Notes

1. From a Bernsteinian perspective these are qualities strongly associated with and tacitly acquired through the ‘invisible pedagogy’ that characterises the family interactions of the ‘new’ middle classes.

2. In any field, how legitimate knowledge, including policy texts, are assembled and transmitted, is a systematic activity whose rules are expressions of society's wider distribution of power and control.

3. ‘A code is a regulative principle, tacitly acquired, which selects and integrates: meanings, realizations contexts’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 14), later redefined as orientations to meanings; textual productions, and specialised interactional practices.

4. Since the 1980s in the UK (as elsewhere, see Bonal & Rambla, 2003) the state has effectively colonised the pedagogical recontextualising field (PRF) by a process of appropriation of specific pedagogic discourses and the production of new curriculum policy (in the UK, for example, a National Curriculum Physical Education (NCPE)). The relative autonomy of the PRF has been weakened by the Official Recontextualising Field through ‘co‐option practices’ (Bonal & Rambla, 2003, p. 176). Leading figures (‘experts’) from the worlds of sport and health have been successfully incorporated into the state apparatus to advise, among other things, on both the form and content of PE and health education in schools. Although these processes have not happened without struggle and are not without contradiction (see Penney & Evans, 1999), they have effectively meant the privileging of particular pedagogical orientations: performance (generic) and perfection codes.

5. Stated simply, pedagogy constitutes ‘any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another’ (Watkins & Mortimore, 1999, p. 3); but no matter how apparently straightforward the event, ‘both the what and how aspects of pedagogic discourse and its associated modalities of practice contain ideological elements and are never wholly utilitarian’ (Bernstein, 1996, in Fitz, et al., 2005, p. 5). All pedagogies socialise, often as they skill; all are value laden and help lay down the rules of belonging to a culture and class. And all pedagogical activity is embodied (Shilling, 2005). By ‘body pedagogies’, however, we refer to: any conscious activity taken by one person, organisation, or a State, designed to enhance an individual's understandings of their own and/or others' corporeality. They define the significance, value and potential of the body in time, place and space. Body pedagogies and their derivative body pedagogics produce particular embodied subjectivities that are essentially corporeal orientations to self and others. And because they define whose and what bodies have status and value, they also constitute acts of inclusion and exclusion. Body pedagogies therefore, tend to carry particularly strong moral overtones in the notions of the body they prescribe and define. An individual's character and value, their sense of self, comes to be judged essentially in terms of ‘weight’, size or shape.

6. It would be quite wrong to portray these young people as cultural dopes. Their radical actions are intended to subvert performative culture; shedding weight a way of saying, now I have ‘no body’, I am in control, see me as a person, for who I really am.