Producing the young biocitizen: secondary school students' negotiation of learning in physical education

Abstract

Given that the health of the nation is often interpreted in and through the health of the nation's youth, the threat of the ‘childhood obesity epidemic’ garners much attention and it is hardly surprising that physical education has been recruited in the ‘war on [childhood] obesity'. This paper explores how students aged 13–15 years, at a secondary school in Toronto, Canada, make sense of, negotiate and embody the health messages embedded within the obesity-informed Health and Physical Education (HPE) curricula. A post-structural analysis of student narratives reveals the ways in which notions of biocitizenry constitute a visibly ‘healthy’, gendered, engaged, normalized body. The ‘good’ HPE student negotiates health discourse in productive and responsive ways, constructing a virtuous subjectivity and alienating the unruly or undisciplined, unhealthy body in HPE.

Keywords:

• Physical education
• Pedagogy
• Healthism
• Biocitizen
• Gender
• Curriculum
• Fitness
• Healthy living

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants and teachers for participating in this research, Dr Moss Norman for his insightful comments on earlier drafts and the reviewers of the paper for their valuable critique.