A ‘culture of everyone doing it’ and ‘playing games’ – discourses of pleasure in boys’ physical education

ABSTRACT

Gard [(2008). When a boy's gotta dance: New masculinities, old pleasures. Sport, Education and Society, 13(2), 181–193], Booth [(2009). Politics and pleasure: The philosophy of physical education revisited. Quest, 61(2), 133–153] and Pringle [(2010). Finding pleasure in physical education: A critical examination of the educative value of positive movement affects. Quest, 62, 119–134] argue that if critical physical education (PE) scholars want to change the social influence associated with dominated discourses of gender, which have previously been subject to sustained critique, there is a need to examine the discourses of PE pleasure. By drawing on visual ethnographic data from an all-boys’ secondary school this paper employs Foucault's [(1985). The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality: Volume 2. London: Penguin Books] discourse/power/pleasure combination to make meanings and understand the boys as gendered subjects. The findings from this study demonstrate how some boys derived pleasures from merely participating in PE whereas others seemed to relate their pleasures to instrumental/developmental goals based on discourses of fitness, health and sport. It is argued that PE teachers need to be aware that they not only enable students’ experiences of pleasures, but that they can also be influential in (re)producing gendered understandings about the pleasures (and displeasures) of learning in, through and about movement in PE.

KEYWORDS:

• boys
• gender
• fitness
• health
• masculinity
• physical education
• pleasure
• sport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Göran Gerdin is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sport Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research focuses on how issues of gender, bodies, spaces and (dis)pleasures shape students’ participation in and enjoyment of school health and physical education. As a fully qualified and still active tennis coach he is also interested in the sociology of sport and sport pedagogy. He teaches both at the undergraduate and graduate level within the Physical Education Teacher Education and the Coaching and Sport Management programme.