‘You're no-one if you're not a netball girl’: rural and regional adolescent girls’ negotiation of physically active identities

Abstract

Despite the widely articulated health implications of physical inactivity, declines in youth participation levels, particularly for adolescent girls, have fuelled social and moral panics about the importance of regular physical activity. Recent attempts to explain these participation trends have focused on the institutional and cultural discourses that are drawn on to construct particular identities and social practices connected with sport, physical education and leisure interests. In this paper we report on the findings of data collected through interview and focus group sessions with 138 females ranging from 14 to 16 years of age across six rural and regional communities in the state of Victoria, Australia. Adopting a feminist poststructuralist methodology and drawing on the work of Foucault, we explore the impact that dominant discourse-power relations operating in the context of rural and regional sport and physical education can have in the negotiation of physically active identities for adolescent girls.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Grant (LP0990206) along with industry and community partners including The Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), Department of Planning and Community Development – Sport and Recreation Victoria, Tennis Victoria, Football Federation Victoria, YMCA Victoria, and Helen MacPherson Smith Trust. We would also like to acknowledge the research team who were involved in the broader project – Professor Warren Payne, Associate Professor Amanda Telford, Dr Jack Harvey, and Dr Rochelle Eime.