Big Boys, Physical Education, and the Ethics of Bodily Difference: a Poststructural Analysis

Big Boys, Physical Education, and the Ethics of Bodily Difference: A Poststructural Analysis

Rogerio Paulo Pinto Bernardes

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Big Boys, Physical Education, and the Ethics of Bodily Difference: A Poststructural Analysis

Rogerio Paulo Pinto Bernardes

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

2019

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to explore: 1) body, health, and movement discourses – particularly those advanced by the physical education and biomedical health communities – that shaped the embodied movement experiences of boys, with a focus on bigger boys; 2) how boys negotiated accusations of fatness, discourses of health, and what I have termed physical education-through-sport; and, 3) how we might move forward ethically in the conceptualization of embodiment and encounters with bodily difference. Making selective use of authors and theories in the process of plugging in (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), I used a theoretical framework informed by poststructuralist theory and a philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992; Pronger,

2002). Working with six boys ages 12 to 14 years old, I employed semi-structured interviews, participant observation sessions (developed as part of a physical activity program specific to this study), and focus groups to theorize a shift from fatness to bigness that redeemed oversized bodies as intelligible in gendered constructions of masculinity. For the boys in this study, constructions of health and physical activity were more strongly connected to mental health concerns and maintaining positive social relations than to disease prevention and ill-health.

These understandings opened up a space to conceptualize ethical encounters with bodily

difference that challenged dominant constructions of the individual, separate, independent, sovereign self. Drawing on a philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992), a conceptualization of the connected, self-in-relation was proposed in terms of the ethic of alterity (Cornell, 1992;

Pronger, 2002). This is an ethic of compassionate openness that endorses encounters with

‘difference’ without fear of otherness. In this view, this ethic of alterity confronts the territorialisation of difference present in discourses of (systemic) inclusion by conceptualizing an already interrelated and interdependent self as a condition of subjectivity.

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Acknowledgments

I thank my participants without whom this work would not be possible. Your trust in me, in the activities we did together, and your willingness to share your personal experiences and ideas will always be a source of gratitude. May your embodiment continue to unfold in positive ways.

I am forever grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Heather Sykes. I have been blessed by your guidance, knowledge, wisdom, gentle support, and understanding. You have shaped not only my academic progress but also my becoming. My once positivist eyes now see the world in different colours because of you. Many blessings.

I am grateful to Dr. Margaret MacNeill and Dr. Michael Atkinson for agreeing to serve on my committee. Your support and feedback throughout my process have been invaluable. Our meetings and discussions have helped me envision different possibilities and future directions. I thank and admire you both.

Thank you to my examiners, Dr. Carla Rice and Dr. Stephanie Springgay. To Dr. Rice: your thoughtful, knowledgeable, generous, and insightful review of my thesis supported my work and guided me to extend my thinking in a masterful balance. Your feedback provided both energy and direction, without reproach, and is an example that I will seek to emulate in all interactions with my own students and their work. To Dr. Springgay: I am most appreciative of your attention to embodiment as fractured, and what the ethic of alterity might look like in physical education.

Thank you to the brilliant Dr. Brian Pronger whose book, Body Fascism, was the sign post I needed during a difficult time. It was when I read your book that I knew I could finish this work. You handed me the thread to guide me in the mangle of data and theory.

Thank you Dr. Nancy Maynes for your amazing editing skills, boundless energy, enthusiasm, and unwavering belief in me and my work. You are a most generous colleague, always willing to give of your expansive knowledge and limited time, and a true friend.

Thank you Mom and Dad, Ana and Jose Maria Bernardes, for the unconditional love that has always been the wellspring for my growth and wanderings. Your acceptance of what you did not understand was a teaching I am only now beginning to grasp. It is to your deep, silent strength and perserverance that I return to when things get difficult.

Thank you to my dear brother and his spouse, Jose Eduardo and Melanie, whose major commitment, in time and effort, to our aging parents provided me with the emotional security to focus on my academic pursuits. I am forever grateful for your support and belief in me and my work.

To Kathy, my dear wife and amazing scholar, and our daughter Seraphina: you are always the shining light that can brighten my day. Your love, encouragement, and assistance, in tangible and intangible ways, has sustained me during this long process. Kathy, your thoughtful consideration of my ideas and careful editing is present everywhere in this thesis. Seraphina, the brightness in your eyes and gentleness of your spirit allow me to experience daily what is important in life. Thank you.

To Tony Nagee, you are my life-long friend and born philosopher, with whom I can talk poststructuralism and never say the word. Your intellectual brilliance and curiosity are only outdone by the expansiveness and generosity of your spirit. Your unrelenting faith in everyone you meet continue to amaze and inspire me.

It takes many hands to write a thesis and here I able to name a few. To my friends at the Toronto District School Board, and especially Mira Nam-Wong, who have supported me emotionally and practically in accessing the time I needed to complete my dissertation, I thank you all. I thank fellow scholar and friend Dr. John Rossini for your reading and supportive feedback of my work. I thank my cousin Paul Simoes for your technical assistance in quickly getting me back up to speed when my computer crashed. To my mother-in-law, Pagona Mantas, for opening your home to us when were are in Toronto, and for your long-term help with childcare. “Ya-ya”, with your love and care, you have made challenging times a lot more manageable. Lastly, I wish to thank all the present and former members of Dr. Sykes’ thesis group. Throughout my journey you have all created for me a space of belonging and security where ideas could be engaged and explored, in non-judgemental ways. Our thesis group is my secure, physical place of connection to the doctoral program and to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I thank you all, and many others that have gone unmentioned, and blessings to all.

Table of Contents ABSTRACT ...... II ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... IV LIST OF FIGURES ...... VIII LIST OF APPENDICES ...... IX CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY ...... 1

RATIONALE ...... 1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...... 4 THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS ...... 5 Orientation to knowledge and reality...... 5 The researcher and positionality...... 8 CONCLUSION AND THESIS ORGANIZATION ...... 11 CHAPTER 2. SITUATING THE STUDY IN THE LITERATURE ...... 13

REPRESENTATION AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM ...... 13 EMBODIMENT AND BOUNDARIES ...... 17 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS, SUBJECTIVITIES, AND FAT ...... 18 Physical capital...... 20 Fat and masculinity...... 22 Biomedical constructions of the body...... 26 Body discourses and biopower as forms of control...... 32 PROBLEMATIZING PHYSICAL EDUCATION ...... 35 Curriculum...... 35 Physical literacy or sports literacy? ...... 37 Ability and social class...... 41 Gender...... 44 Building healthy bodies...... 46 Healthism...... 48 CONCLUSION ...... 51 CHAPTER 3. DATA CONSTRUCTION AND ANALYSIS ...... 53

OVERVIEW AND TERMINOLOGY ...... 53 RECRUITMENT OF PARTICIPANTS: IT’S A MATTER OF FAT ...... 55 SETTING ...... 60 INTERVIEWS AND VOICE ...... 60 PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION AND LOOKING ...... 63 FOCUS GROUPS ...... 64 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION ...... 66 Criticisms and strengths of discourse analysis...... 70 Plugging in...... 72 Philosophy of the limit...... 73 Parergonality...... 75 Secondness...... 75 Alterity...... 77 CONCLUSION ...... 77

CHAPTER 4. THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF THE FAT BODY ...... 78

THE REPRESENTATION AND PRODUCTION OF FAT ...... 78 DISCOURSES OF BIGNESS: AVOIDING THE FAT BODY ...... 80 THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF FATNESS ...... 82 CONCEPTUALIZING THE SHIFT FROM FAT TO BIG ...... 86 CONCLUSION ...... 89 CHAPTER 5. CONSTRUCTIONS OF HEALTH ...... 91

CORPOREAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF HEALTH ...... 91 CHALLENGES TO DOMINANT CONSTRUCTIONS OF HEALTH ...... 97 NON-CORPOREAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF HEALTH ...... 99 CONCLUSION ...... 102 CHAPTER 6. SPORT DISCOURSE IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION ...... 103

PHYSICAL EDUCATION-THROUGH-SPORT ...... 104 CURRICULUM ORGANIZATION IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION ...... 106 PERFORMATIVE EMBODIMENTS IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION ...... 107 GENDER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION-THROUGH-SPORT ...... 113 Abjection and anxiety...... 115 CONCLUSION ...... 118 CHAPTER 7. THE PARERGONAL LOGIC OF MOVEMENT DISCOURSES ...... 120

MOVEMENT AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF SOCIAL LOCATIONS AND SPACES ...... 120 PUISSANCE AND POUVOIR: THE DESIRING, MOVING BODY AS SOURCE AND RE-SOURCE ...... 122 FUNCTIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE CENTRE AND THE MARGINS IN PARERGONAL SYSTEMS OF MOVEMENT ...... 125 CONCLUSION ...... 130 CHAPTER 8. THE ETHIC OF ALTERITY ...... 132

RESEARCHING DIFFERENCE ...... 133 THE ENFRAMED SUBJECT OF POUVOIR ...... 135 SECONDNESS ...... 139 John...... 139 Jason...... 142 THE SELF IN-RELATION ...... 146 CONCLUSION ...... 150 CHAPTER 9. SUMMARY AND REFLECTIONS ON PHYSICAL LITERACY, AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION ...... 152

THESIS SUMMARY ...... 152 REFLECTIONS ON MY THESIS JOURNEY ...... 156 REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING PRACTICE ...... 157 REFLECTIONS ON PHYSICAL LITERACY...... 157 A NEW INTENTION FOR PHYSICAL EDUCATION? ...... 160 REFERENCES ...... 163 APPENDICES ...... 182

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List of Figures

Figure 5.1: Body and health discursive formation ………………………….………..94

Figure 5.2: Photo #1. Body image………………………………………….…………95

Figure 5.2: Photo #2. Body image …………………………………………………....96

Figure 5.2: Photo #3. Body image ……………………………………………………96

Figure 5.2: Photo #4. Body image ……………………………………………………96

Figure 5.2: Photo #5. Body image ……………………………………………………97

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List of Appendices

Appendix A: Original participation recruitment poster ………………………………182

Appendix B: Revised participation recruitment poster ………………………………183

Appendix C: Media images of ideal bodies ………………………………………….184

Appendix D: Original participation recruitment poster ………………………………185

Appendix E: Pre-study interview questions ………………………………………… 188

Appendix F: Post-study interview questions………………………………………… 189

Appendix G: Outline of participant observation and focus group sessions ………….190

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Study The purpose of this thesis was to explore the embodied physical activity experiences of boys, with an emphasis on bigger boys. In a society that privileges, in males, the lean athletic body and its physical performances (Pronger, 2002), fatness continues to be stigmatized in a variety of social contexts (Beausoleil & Ward, 2010; Norman, 2009; Sykes, 2011a). With particular attention to issues of fatness, I explored how boys understood and negotiated health and body discourses – particularly those advanced by the physical education and biomedical health communities. In theorizing difference, I looked at how we might ethically encounter bodily difference. Throughout this thesis, it is not my intent to use the words overweight, fat, obese and other similar terms in any pejorative manner. I fully recognize how they are often used as weapons to categorize, discriminate, and exclude. To distance themselves from the biomedical model, many researchers use the terms preferred by bigger people themselves (Duncan, 2008). During the writing of this dissertation, I have come to prefer the terms big or bigger when referring to larger bodies or individuals. I have learned that using fat to refer to specific bodies is extremely pejorative, whereas, there is an element of positivity and acceptance in the gendered masculine construction of big or bigger. In this thesis, and following Murray (2008) and others, I use all terms related to fatness, as if in scare quotes because I wish to challenge the notion that fatness is simply an empirical fact. Rationale International health experts tell us that overweight and obesity represent a rapidly growing threat to the health of populations in developed and developing countries (Kuraanyika, Jeffery, Morabia, Ritenbaugh, & Antipatis, 2002), and for the first time in recorded history, children may have shorter life expectancies than their parents due to the amount of fat they carry (Olshansky, Passaro, Hershow, Layden, Carnes, Brody, & Ludwig, 2005). The McKinsey Global Report (2014) has estimated the world-wide economic cost of obesity at 2.0 trillion dollars annually which is equivalent to the global impact from armed violence, war, and terrorism combined; and the World Health Organization (WHO) has gone as far as to declare obesity a disease (WHO, 2000). Children are the group most implicated in the ‘obesity epidemic’ because of the anticipated burden they will place on health care systems. As a result, schools have been identified as appropriate points of intervention due to their ability to reach almost every child (Fox, Cooper, & McKenna, 2004; Kirk, 2006), and physical education has been recruited as an expedient cure to the problem (National Prevention Council, 2011). The prescription is to involve students in physical education so they will develop “the skills and knowledge that will enable them to enjoy being active and healthy throughout their lives” (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8, 2015, p. 6).

Although commonly portrayed as fact, that argument needs to be challenged on a variety of fronts. There is less consensus on the science of obesity than one might expect. Physical education in schools, rather than helping all children, has contributed to the marginalization of students already stigmatized by society. In short, I challenge the physical education and biomedical discourses and practices that construct bigger boys as problematic subjects in need of being fixed. Like others, I refuse to believe that pathologizing anyone as fat helps them lead healthier lives (Lupton, 2014; Puhl & Heuer, 2010). I look for ways to make fat subjectivities a survivable experience in physical education (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2016; Sykes, 2011; Wright & Burrows, 2006), and explore ways in which this marginalized group can positively re-imagine themselves doing physical activity. Critical researchers claim there is little factual evidence to support the existence of the ‘obesity epidemic’ (Campos, 2004; Gard & Wright, 2005). Even if we were to accept that people are, in general, getting bigger, the question remains whether this is a health threat. Interestingly, the biomedical community itself has now documented the “obesity paradox”, defined as the protective effect of obesity compared to normal body weights in certain high-risk populations including patients undergoing coronary artery disease procedures (Ellis, Elliot, Horrigan, Raymond, & Howell, 1996; Horwich, Fonarow, Hamilton, MacLellan, Woo, & Tillisch, 2001). Furthermore, there is recent empirical evidence supporting the existence of a considerable percentage of overweight and obese persons who are metabolically healthy (Wildman, Muntner, Reynolds, McGinn, Rajpathak, Wylie-Rosett, & Sowers, 2008), and moderate fitness (i.e., brisk walking) is reported as countering many of the health risks associated with obesity (McAuley & Blair, 2011). This has led to the medical community’s acknowledgement of the possibility of being fat, fit and healthy (McAuley & Blair, 2011). On the other hand, the dangers of dieting and weight loss have long been documented (McAuley & Blair, 2011). There is also a growing body of evidence of unintended harm associated with negative experiences during physical education and school weight reduction programs, including body dissatisfaction, eating and physical activity disorders, identity construction dilemmas, avoidance behaviours, future non-participation in physical activity, and size-based bullying, discrimination, and violence (Allender, Cowburn, & Foster, 2006; Beltran- Carillo, Devis-Devis, Peiro-Velert, & Brown, 2010; Brooks & Magnusson, 2006; Larkin & Rice, 2005; O’Dea, 2005; Shelley, O’Hara & Gregg, 2010; Sykes & McPhail, 2008, Trout & Graber, 2009). Additionally, obese persons are blamed for their weight, with the belief that stigmatization is justified in motivating individuals to adopt healthier behaviours (Critser, 2003). Thus, it appears that the ‘cure’ for obesity can be more dangerous than the ‘disease’ itself. Since there have been literally thousands of studies and interventions that have poked, prodded, measured, and categorized bigger bodies or otherwise regarded fat as a pathology, one

3 might logically conclude that the considerable efforts and funding allocated to fighting the “war on obesity” (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 16) would have produced favourable results. Such is not the case. The reason could be that the vast majority of these approaches have employed conventional biomedical health (focused on disease prevention and identification of risk factors) or physical education models (focused on sport, competition, and fitness), which implicitly or explicitly use a type of reductive health logic that places experiences within a health framework that may have very little to do with how young people live their everyday lives (Ioannou, 2005). The WHO report, Taking Action on Childhood Obesity, notes that “[i]n just 40 years the number of school-age children and adolescents with obesity [worldwide] has risen more than 10-fold, from 11 million to 124 million (2016 estimates)” (2018, p. 1). These and other similar claims indicate that addressing fatness from a positivist perspective has not been helpful in improving health outcomes or in improving people’s relationships with their bodies. Fortunately, there have been some researchers who have directly addressed fatness as a lived experience. When studying the ages when bodily concerns begin to emerge, they have addressed the experiences of school-age children and adolescents.1 Some have improved our understandings of the general student population and their bodies (Beltran-Carillo, Devis-Devis, Peiro-Velert, & Brown, 2010; Brooks & Magnusson, 2006; Lee & Macdonald, 2010; Norman, 2009; Rail, Holmes, & Murray, 2010; Sykes & McPhail, 2008) while others have explored the relationship girls have with their bodies (Garrett, 2004a,b; Larkin & Rice, 2005; Rice & Russell, 2002; Shelley, O’Hara, & Gregg, 2010). In the context of secondary schools and boys, an edited collection of essays has explored the culture of masculinity and its intersection with health, body image, and physical activity (Kehler & Atkinson, 2010). Without debating the existence of the ‘obesity epidemic’ (for a thorough analysis see Gard & Wright, 2005), it is nonetheless prudent to look at the experiences of young people in physical activity contexts, and how fatness is currently understood and experienced. The body has become crucial to the acquisition of gendered self-image and identity, especially among teenage youth (Messerschmidt, 2005), and researchers continue to call for a more comprehensive understanding of student experiences in physical education (Koekoek, Knoppers, & Stegeham, 2009; Petherick, 2011). As a former fat boy and current physical education teacher, I am primarily concerned about the experiences of bigger boys, and how the heightened efforts to use physical education as a tool to eradicate obesity is affecting these students. In addressing the gap in the literature on the embodied effects of obesity discourses

1 Scholars have found it difficult to agree upon the transitional stage of psychological and physical development between childhood and adulthood when bodily concerns emerge. It is often referred to as early adolescence or pre-adolescence, and corresponds roughly to the chronological ages between 11 and 15 years for boys.

4 experienced by boys/adolescents, and my own experiences, I have chosen to focus this inquiry on the health and body discourses advanced by the physical education and biomedical communities, and how they impact a particular segment of the student population that has been identified at-risk: fat boys.2 This poststructuralist study recognizes the importance of language in lived experiences, the dynamics of discourse, and the workings of power in the study of obesity. A poststructuralist analysis is appropriate for an investigation of how overweight boys negotiate body and movement discourses from an embodied perspective. Taylor (2000) describes discourse as a body of knowledge or group of statements, socially and historically constructed, that designate or constrain ways of acting, thinking and experiencing and typically produce ‘taken-for-granted’ or ‘common-sense’ notions of ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ (p. 317). Notions of embodiment are meant to describe the integration of thinking, being, doing, and interacting in the ways young people live their bodies (Hocking, Haskell, & Linds, 2001). It is clear to me that the experiences of bigger boys, largely absent in the research, need to be explored. Research Questions The research questions explored in this study are: • What are the health and body discourses, particularly those advanced by the physical education and biomedical health communities, that shape the embodied movement experiences of boys, and especially bigger boys? • How do boys negotiate health and body discourses? • How might we move forward ethically in the conceptualization of embodied movement – the lived physical and psychic experiences of our moving bodies? This study places an emphasis on how boys in a mid-sized central Canadian city negotiated embodied subjectivities within a culture that places greater value on lean, muscular, athletic, heterosexual bodies. I have explored how body and health discourses provide a set of cultural resources that bigger boys must address, redefine, and subvert in order to create livable,

2 There are claims that the obesity risk epidemic has disproportionally targeted boys/young men. One claim is that ubiquitous mainstream media images of ‘lazy gluttonous children’ – the so called “couch potato generation” – are almost always of boys transfixed in front of a television or computer screen consuming high caloric foodstuffs (Gard, 2010, p. 8). In another example, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario: Annual Report 2008, depicted a series of computer modified images of a boy “getting slimmer and slimmer until the last photo where he is his normal weight [sic]” (p. 3). In the initial images, the boy is labelled as fat and the captions accuse/associate him with “too much screen time”, a short life-span, heart disease, and high blood pressure. In the latter images, the boy’s weight/size visibly decrease and the captions associate him with physical activity, eating well, and living longer. To my knowledge, beyond anecdotal examples there is no empirical research showing that boys/young men are disproportionally targeted over young girls/women. There is research to support the opposite viewpoint, particularly for women who are otherwise marginalized (Rice, 2014). My greater point is that I hope to show how health and body discourses that affect boys are lived and embodied by boys.

5 embodied identities. Body and health discourses include the biomedical, popular culture, and other identity constituting discourses, including race, class, and gender (e.g, dominant masculinity) that converge on the male body in the construction of male embodiment. Embodiment involves the processes of lived physical experiences and psychic sense of self, and was explored in relation to the physical education school environment3 and physical activity in general. My focus on boys does not diminish the fact that other groups have equally important but different needs and experiences. It is my hope that this study has produced knowledge that will be of value to physical education and health policy makers, school administrators, curriculum writers, teachers, parents, and students in conceptualizing health, fatness, and physical education in ways that do not discriminate based on size, shape, gender, and ability. My intent with this inquiry was to go some way in mapping how dominant discourses both construct and marginalize bigger bodies. I hope to have opened up different ways of thinking about bodies, physical activity and movement, and to make embodied experiences more accessible, equitable, and inclusive. Theoretical Underpinnings Orientation to knowledge and reality. In agreement with others, I believe it is important to identify one’s perspective at the outset of an inquiry since it affects the research questions, analysis, and the choice and interpretation of empirical materials (Anfara, 2008; A. Gebhart, personal communication, 2013). Therefore, because it informs all aspects of this thesis, I have stated my theoretical assumptions and personal background as part of my introduction. All attempts to seek knowledge, or to do research require a particular orientation to knowledge and reality – a process of engagement with the world and with what it is we want to study. There is much inconsistency in what to call this process of engagement. Some have called it a theoretical framework (Anfara, 2008), while others have termed “the theory of knowledge and the interpretive framework that guides a particular research project … [a] methodology” (Harding, 1987, as cited in Lather, 1992, p. 87, italics mine). More generally, methodology can be described as the strategies, principles, and processes of how researchers seek knowledge (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011). Still others prefer to use the term, paradigm – a term first developed by physical science historian Thomas Kuhn. A paradigm is “a world

3 In Ontario schools (and in other provinces of Canada), physical education is one component of health and physical education courses. In the health component students typically study topics including growth and development, sexuality, and healthy eating. In this thesis, I focused on the physical education component because I wished to emphasize moving, bigger bodies. Also, there is great variability in how schools implement the health curriculum. Indeed, one participant claimed that his class did not spend any time in the health classroom (Ronny, INT#1; June 15, 2015; Q#20), and another said that health was taught by the regular teacher and not by the health and physical education teacher (Jason, INT#1; June 15, 2015; Q#20).

6 view, a general perspective, a way of breaking down the complexity of the real world” (Patton as cited in Sparkes, 1992, p. 12). In reference to how paradigms work, Sparks (1992) provided the following illustration which also applies to theoretical frameworks and methodologies: they make available “different sets of lenses for seeing the world and making sense of it in different ways; they act to shape how we think and act” (p. 12). These lenses are helpful in that they allow us to act quickly with an acceptable level of certainty of what is before us; in so doing they may also hinder our development because they make it difficult to question underlying assumptions in the sense that we are often unaware of our own biases. It is only when we are aware of our particular lens that we can critically interrogate our ways of seeing, being, and acting. In my own case, during my youth and into adulthood, including much of the early part of my academic and teaching career, I lived a positivist approach. My Master’s degree in exercise physiology very much adhered to a biomedical positivist perspective. I believed reality was directly accessible, truth was foundational, society could be explained using scientific laws, and individual actions could be predicted due to coherent, stable, unitary identities. Unsettlingly, there were times when I found my approach incommensurable with the lived realities of my students; for example, when I told my students that if they studied hard they would be successful, I often heard some variation of the reply, “Sir, you just don’t know what it’s like”. I clearly remember those occasions because I found them very perplexing. It seemed my students did not understand my point of view, and I certainly did not understand theirs. Similar instances and reflection led me to question the positivist approach. Unfortunately, at the time, I lacked the analytical tools to deal with the impasse created by my privileged position as a white teacher (and product/agent of a particular system) teaching racialized and differently classed youth. It was only during my PhD studies that I became aware of different possibilities for seeing the world – that I realized the complexities of human lives could not be explained using causal relationships described by fixed sets of variables. The underpinnings of any research orientation involve questions regarding the nature of knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemology), views of reality (i.e., ontology) and, based on the writings of Jurgen Habermas, the role of purpose in human understanding (Donmoyer, 2008; Lather, 1992). Throughout a lengthy PhD journey, determined as much by good fortune as purpose, I came to the slow realization that my position on each of these questions was best served by a qualitative approach to research. Although qualitative4 research means different things in different historical contexts, Denzin and Lincoln (2005) offer a tentative definition:

4 Patti Lather (1992) argues that postpositivist – not qualitative – is the preferred term. She states: “Qualitative is ‘the other’ to quantitative and hence, is a discourse at the level of method, not methodology or paradigm. My Term of choice for the opening up of paradigmatic alternatives for the doing of social science is ‘postpositivist’ ” (p. 90, italics in original).

Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It

consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These

practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations …

attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people

bring to them. (p. 3)

In agreement with this quote, I have positioned my work squarely in the realm of qualitative research in that my own experiences and studies have led me to believe that knowledge “is constructed, not discovered… [and] because people live and work in different places and consequently construct reality in very different ways, the world consists of multiple realities rather than a single, unitary reality” (Donmoyer, 2008, p. 592). Within qualitative research there are many approaches. In addressing the purpose of this study, the emancipatory motivation for my inquiry (i.e., the politicized desire to make physical education experiences less oppressive) could place my work in the critical studies field. However, there are two main reasons I find the poststructuralist orientation within qualitative research a more appropriate orientation. First, critical studies is foundational in that it assumes reason can yield ‘truth’ and that “ideology shapes the relation between people and between groups” (Budd, 2008, p. 179). This goes against my own experiences, and the type of relationships I wished to develop with my students. Second, and related to the idea that there is not one true/correct position, I wanted to produce a more multilayered and “‘suspicious’ reading … by foregrounding the students’ own production of meaning” (Lather, 1992, p. 95). However, at times, the reader may find that I have wandered quite deeply into studies written in the positivist tradition. These are meanderings and do not reflect my ideological stance toward knowledge and reality. However, I used these meanderings in an attempt to demonstrate the limits of positivist research when it comes to a holistic understanding of the body, and to exhaust the usefulness of this type of research in its ability to describe the social world. At times, I attempted to turn these positivist approaches against themselves by pointing out contradictions and limitations. Equally important, I have done this work for my own benefit: that is, to understand and develop my own approach to knowledge and reality, and to leave a trace where I have been (and because of the work I have done, I am no longer). My focus was on the limits to meanings that the boys made, and the discursive systems that hail subjects for what is lived as an embodied identity; that is, how knowledge and power, working through the dynamics of discourse, produce subject positions. Having de-emphasized the liberatory nature of this inquiry – at one point I also strongly considered action research due to its focus on group empowerment – this study nonetheless had the potential to be transformative. Emancipation in poststructuralism is not found in one ‘Truth’ but in many

‘truths’; a “social scientist’s task is not to discover what is true … but to describe… how different people in different contexts have constructed reality and what these people take to be true” (Donmoyer, 2008, p. 592). Thus, poststructuralism is not concerned with finding ‘the answer’, but rather in the process whereby being is informed and transformed by discourse. In my task, I hoped to contribute to the growing body of literature that explores how body and health discourses and practices work to discriminate against particular students. I want to clearly state that I believe physical education and health discourses and practices are not deliberately oppressive but rather, in their commonplace, ‘invisible’, and unremarkable nature they nonetheless produce oppressive results. The great majority of educators do the best they can with the resources they have available. Thus, the intent of this inquiry was not to prove that bigger boys were discriminated against by physical education teachers; instead, through a poststructuralist approach, I attempted to show how the fixation on the removal of fat already endemic to social discourse works through the “operation of language, the production of meaning, and the ways in which knowledge and power combine to create accepted or taken-for- granted forms of knowledge and social practice” (Fawcett, 2008, p. 667). The researcher and positionality. Qualitative researchers recognize that their own background shapes their inquiry, and they position themselves in the research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Creswell, 2009). I came to this study with my own lived experiences and understandings, and these have shaped all aspects of the research process including the final research text. Poststructuralist theory calls into question the authority of the author who ‘knows’ and tells the story and those individuals who are written about. It is appropriate therefore to tell my own story, not to reveal my own life as different or exceptional, but rather, to assert “a communicational bond between the teller and the told within a context” (Hutcheon, as cited in Davies, 1993, p. xi). This process allows the researcher to become the subject and to “move away from the stance of disinterested spectator toward assuming the posture of a feeling, embodied, and vulnerable observer” (Bochner, as cited in Markula & Denison, 2005). Further, I anticipated that some of the experiences and understandings of my participants would be difficult for them to articulate through their self-conscious telling of stories. Toward this end, my own story as a big boy helped build trust over a series of meetings and shared experiences with my participants. I have always had a love-hate relationship with food, and in this regard I am probably like many people. In the early 1970’s, we were a new immigrant family in Canada, and coming from a Portuguese tradition, food was at the core of family and social life. As a young boy and youth, I enjoyed the taste of food and found it comforting (and continue to do so as a self- proclaimed foodie and cook). My mother cooked huge, multi-course meals, and family and

9 friends regularly gathered at our home. Both my parents worked but it was my mother who always had a home cooked meal ready. My mother held down a few part-time jobs and one of them, fortunately for us, was working for a restauranteur/wedding caterer. When she was at work, our home-cooked meals only needed warming up. Sunday mornings were my favourite because we often woke up to trays of food from the Saturday midnight buffet at Portuguese weddings: lavish brunches of lobster, shrimp, chicken, roast beef, fish fillets and cakes. It was fantastic, and the leftovers sometimes lasted until mid-week! Food was our way of dealing with the uncertainty of the immigrant experience; it grounded us and represented security. As an eight-year old in a new country who did not speak the language, food was a connection to familiar routines and practices, and to family and friends. I also found food confusing. In a new social and cultural environment, social acceptance was critically important to my developing sense of identity, and the food we ate did not help. The lunch I brought to school, often heavily perfumed by onions, garlic, and fishy aromas, immediately identified me as an outsider in a world full of wonder bread, peanut butter (in the days without allergy concerns) and jam. I remember, once in secondary school, leaving my lunch on the kitchen counter, and my mother delivered it to the school. I was personally called down over the public announcement system to pick up my lunch from the main office, in a school of almost two thousand students! It was extremely embarrassing to have that done in front of the whole school. I decided that I could either suffer the strange looks or go hungry – and since my name had already been announced, I went to the main office and picked up my lunch. I learned English quickly and did well in school but that was not perceived as desirable in my immigrant neighbourhood. With parents often at work, the activity most available to children involved playing on the street. Whenever possible, we played whatever sport was in season. On occasions when there were enough of us, we might walk fifteen minutes to the park or school yard to play a hockey, soccer, football, or baseball game without the interruption of vehicles driving through the middle of our game. Sometimes we challenged the kids from down the street. In that environment, the fat, non-athletic, smart kid gathered little social capital. For me, a sense of identity in my new country was very much tied to participation in sports, and to my body. As the fattest kid in middle school, and a new immigrant trying to fit in, I got the message loud and clear: fat was bad, and food’s visible manifestation, being overweight or obese, was bad. Food went from being something that was comforting and desirable to an obstacle that stood in the way of social acceptance. Food became linked to the physical appearance of my body, and participation in sports and physical fitness become a way to develop social acceptance and an emerging sense of identity. From middle-school forward, I dedicated my life to acquiring a desirable level of social acceptance (and personal self-worth) by disciplining my body and eradicating fat through

10 participation in sports and to a lesser extent, dieting. As I disciplined by body through exercise, food took on a less important role. That is, because I was exercising so much, I could eat almost whatever I wanted. I was still in Middle School when I bought my first set of weights and started a running program. Later in high school, I joined the wrestling, football, and track and field teams. During the summer school holidays, I sometimes would do three workouts in a day: I would lift weights in the morning, swim in the afternoon, and run in the evening. I noticed that as I spent more time in the weight room and sports fields, my body became noticeably more muscular and leaner… and my school grades suffered. As far as I was concerned, lower grades were a small price to pay for an emerging sense of self that was connected to my body, to participation in sport, and to social acceptance. In order to continue to play on school teams, I took an extra year to complete high school and somehow made it to university. In university the pattern remained consistent. I was a member of the football and wrestling teams. Academic pursuits continued to take a secondary role to athletics. I maintained acceptable grades because academically eligibility was necessary to play on varsity sports teams. I did not see much beyond the world of football and believed future options to be limited. Education and football were temporary reprieves from the world of real work, which for someone from my cultural background meant physical labour of one sort or another. I saw school (and sports) as the best option by far, and the pressure to get a job was kept at bay via part time employment. I identified with many immigrant, inner city youth who felt they were outsiders, and that being a professional athlete was their best career option. As a teenager and young man, I could not imagine future possibilities outside of professional sport. Thus, I measured success by how well I did on the football field and the wrestling mat. Success was connected to my body: its strength, speed, power, and the shape and size that could produce those performances. Possibilities in the education field or white-collar professional ranks simply did not exist in my imaginary. We were strictly working class, blue collar folks, and so was everyone we knew. The secondary school I went to was a technical/vocational school even though there were academic schools that I could easily have attended much closer to home. I spent an extra year in high school primarily so I could play football and wrestle for another year. When I finished high school, I was very fortunate that the minor league for a sport like football was the university intercollegiate athletic system. It was there that an athlete could get the best coaching, training, and competition before attempting the professional ranks. While largely dedicating myself to football – I played five years and coached for another five at the university level – I nonetheless managed to complete a degree in Physical and Health Education, followed by a Master’s degree in Exercise Science. Although I did not fulfill my dream of playing professional football, I did compete as a bobsledder in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Later, my career as a Physical and Health Education teacher seemed like a natural progression of my athletics career and, with my strong commitment to coaching

11 extracurricular sports, it allowed me to continue to work in sport environments. Today, as a doctoral candidate, university instructor, and high school teacher, I have continued to study and reflect upon the issues that shaped my identity growing up: how bodies and physical activity practices can shape identities and lives. Looking at my history from a poststructuralist perspective, in my quest for a livable identity, the discourses that were available to me designated particular subject positions – acceptable and non-acceptable ways of acting, thinking, and experiencing. Poststructuralist subjects take up subject positions through the negotiation, assimilation, or subversion of discourses. These subject positions were largely defined by discourses originating from my Portuguese working class history and new immigrant status in Canada – both of which limited the personal and professional options that I could envision, and thus negotiate. Since the poststructural term for individual is subject, the term subjectivity helps us to conceive of human identity “as a construction, as a product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious” (Sarup, as cited in Davies, 1993, p. 8). Poststructural subjectivity “rejects the idea of an essential or core self that remains the same in all situations … and subjects are regarded as having a shifting core that continually changes in relation to context” (Fawcett, 2008, p. 668). In this sense, I have noticed that as my exposure to social, cultural, body, and professional discourses have changed, it has greatly influenced the trajectories of my subjectivities – that is, the trajectory of who (or more specifically, which people) I am (becoming). This is an important move away from humanist conceptions of a coherent, freely chosen identity. Thus, subjectivities make modernist Western notions of autonomy and agency less visible while foregrounding the “discursively constituted nature of the range of choices” (Davies, 1993, p. 9) in the formation of the self. Ultimately, this thesis is about the formation of the self in the context of culturally circulating discourses around bodies and physical activity, and about the relation of the self to other selves. Conclusion and Thesis Organization For the organization of my doctoral dissertation, I adapted the structure of a qualitative research study as proposed by Creswell (2009). In the introductory chapter, I have outlined the research problem, stated the research questions, and described the epistemological and ontological assumptions that undergird this study. I have also addressed my role in the research, and produced a starting point for an understanding of poststructuralist theory. Continuing to follow Creswell’s outline, I next situated the study in the literature. Chapter two includes a poststructuralist understanding of representation, and social constructions of fatness and identity. Also, in Chapter two, I have discussed the biomedical construction of health, and the physical education discourses of fatness, masculinity, and health. In Chapter three I have provided a methodology that addresses: the participant recruitment process and research setting;

12 the data construction methods including interviews, participant observation, and focus groups; and a process for representing the data centered around discourse analysis, plugging in, and a philosophy of the limit. For the analysis, I have offered individual chapters on: the absent presence of the fat body; constructions of health, sport discourses in physical education; the parergonal logic of movement discourses; and the ethic of alterity. Lastly, in Chapter nine, I have provided a conclusion.

Chapter 2. Situating the Study in the Literature This chapter has three sections. I began by highlighting the process of representation, which is key to the poststructuralist understandings of language, reality, and the construction of meaning that underlie this inquiry. In the second section titled Embodiment and Boundaries, I explored how the body is used as a mechanism for social control and how it represents aspects of society in gendered and medicalized contexts. Lastly, I problematized representations of the body and movement in physical education by exploring how limits are set on the body’s possibilities for movement through concepts like physical literacy. Representation and Poststructuralism Representation is the process by which language is used “to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people” (Hall, 1997, p. 15). More specifically, “representation is the production of meaning through language” (Hall, 1997, p. 16, emphasis mine). In this sense, representation, through the use of language, stands in the place of what we perceive to be reality, and at the same time it stands for or symbolizes particular understandings, concepts and ideas (Hall, 1997). Thus, language does not simply reflect meanings and realities that already exist in the world of objects, people and events; moreover, language does not express only what the speaker, writer, or artist wants to say. There are actually two related systems of representation at work when people communicate. The first system involves the process by which things are associated with a set of concepts or mental representations that individuals carry around in their heads. It is important to recognize that people think and communicate with the idea of something and not with the actual thing. Although it may seem obvious, the actual external physical reality and the idea of it in someone’s head are not the same thing. The second system of representation, which I will focus on, involves the exchange of the meanings and concepts that can only be done through access to a shared language. Here, the word language is used in a broad and inclusive way to refer to sounds, words, images, gestures, and things that represent, or stand for, something (else). Meaning “depends on the relationship between things in the world – people, objects and events, real or fictional – and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representations of them” (Hall, 1997, p. 18, italics in original). The conceptual system, or system of ideas, involves different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations among them that help individuals make sense of the world. These relationships rely on constructs involving similarity and difference, sequence, causality and other principles of organization. We are able to communicate because we share similar general conceptual maps and, as a result, interpret the world in roughly similar ways. However, for communication to take place, conceptual maps or ideas must be exchanged.

Language is required as the second system of representation in the overall process of constructing meaning. During each stage in the construction of meaning, a certain amount of incongruity is introduced; that is, conceptual maps may not exactly reflect external reality, and language has different interpretations for each speaker. Thus, “meaning is the result, not of something fixed out there, in nature, but of our social, cultural and linguistic conventions, [and] meaning can never be finally fixed” (Hall, 1997, p. 23, italics in original). Of course, there must be some temporary, general fixing of meaning in language or we would never be able to communicate at all. Ferdinand de Saussure, known as the father of modern linguistics, developed a semiotic model of language that addressed the problem of representation. According to Saussure, “language is a system of signs [that produce meaning]” (Culler as cited in Hall, 1997, p. 31). The system of signs include the form – the actual written word, sound, image, or object which Saussure termed the signifier – and the corresponding concept which he termed, the signified. One of Saussure’s key contributions is that language possesses cultural and linguistic codes which allow for the translation of the concepts in people’s heads into something meaningful. Both the signifier and the signified “are required to produce meaning but it is the relation between them, fixed by our cultural and linguistic codes, which sustains representation” (Hall, 1997, p. 31). Further, the code linking the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. The correspondence between the signifier and the signified is not pre-determined by nature and signs do not inherently possess fixed meanings. In the arbitrary relation between signifier and signifier, a gap – or uncertainty in meaning – is first suggested. Interestingly, it is the difference between signifiers that carries meaning. Each signifier is only defined in relation to other signifiers, and each signified is also defined in relation to other signifieds. Defining meaning not positively but as a gap between different terms creates the sense of slippage or play previously mentioned. According to Saussure, all signifiers reside in a continuum of signifiers and all signifieds in a separate continuum of signifieds, and the link between them is arbitrary; how the individual may choose to connect them adds to the uncertainty of language. For example, “fat” as a signifier has to be distinguished from similar signifiers like “bat” and “cat”, and as a signified it is difficult to differentiate “fat” except in relation things like “muscle” and “bone”. Furthermore, meanings are also largely dependent on historical, social and cultural contexts. Context “brings with it alternative visions of what constitutes fatness, as well as the desirability of fat on bodies” (Gross, 2005, p. 67). Hence, meanings associated with fatness may also conjure up notions of desirability, ability, agency, and a host of other constructions. This is known as the chain of signification (Bolton, 2012) wherein language does not point simply or reliably to a stable meaning, or fixed external reality, but only defers meaning by pointing to other language further down the chain of signification.

According to the constructivist approach to language, “neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning … Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs” (Hall, 1997, p. 25, italics in original). To use constructivist language, meaning is relational. Making meaning involves an active process of interpretation; it must be actively read or interpreted thus making the reader as important as the writer in the production of meaning. Building on the constructivist approach and at the same time diverging from it, an understanding of how language works in representation underpins the poststructural orientation to epistemology and ontology. Poststructuralism encourages reading in a way that is aware of the gaps in meaning that inevitably exist in language. It is a way of reading that does not try to get outside language to fix meaning or close those gaps; rather, poststructuralism revels in the play of language and plays at constructing new meanings in the spaces these gaps open up (Bolton, 2012). The meanings people make depends on how events are represented; it follows that the process of representation is not an after-event activity but rather enters the event itself. Media theories now state that the media do not portray real events but events now mimic the media or are staged for it (Bolton, 2012): for example, reality shows, “fake news”, and the staging of political events. The process of representation is constitutive of the event itself. Seen in this manner, the world does not exist meaningfully until it has been represented through language. In other words, the world may well exist but is ambiguous as to its meaning until it is represented using language. Thus, as it pertains to experience, there is no such thing as “raw” experience (Maynard as cited in Fawcett, 2008, p. 669). Experience, as understood in a poststructuralist manner, does not provide for the opportunity for an individual to access the truth of a situation. It is these understandings that provided a basis for the linguistic turn in the social sciences that has included the crisis of representation, legitimation, and praxis. These understandings form a platform from which one could challenge Enlightenment perspectives on knowing, reason, progress, and objectivity. Returning to the concept of the sign, Saussure believed that the whole domain of meaning could be systematically mapped and this is where poststructuralism parted ways with Saussure. Saussure paid particular attention to the formal or structural aspects of language that could be studied with the law-like precision of a science due to its closed, limited nature. This aspect of language he termed langue. It was Saussure’s focus on studying language at a formal and structural level that placed him in the structuralist camp. Scholars have since come to realize that the quest for a science of meaning is untenable because meaning and representation necessarily belong to the interpretive side of society, culture, and the human subject. Interpretation can never produce a final absolute truth. Alternatively, Saussure paid very little attention to language as it is actually used between speakers, as it functions in actual, interactive situations – what he himself termed, parole. Thus, it is not surprising that issues of power in

16 language did not arise for Saussure. Many scholars who built upon Saussure’s model, have focused on this latter aspect of language and applied his model in a much more loose, open- ended, and poststructuralist approach to language and representation. Poststructuralist scholars argue that, in a culture, meaning depends not only on how words function as signs within language but on larger units of analysis: narratives, groups of supporting statements, and whole discourses that operate across a variety of texts and may acquire widespread authority during specific historical and social moments. They have become more concerned with representation as a source for the production of social knowledge (not only meaning) and discourse (not only language) – a more open system connected intimately with social practice and questions of power. Discourse, in this sense, is used to refer to language and practice – or as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, language games embedded in forms of life (as cited in Gergen, 1999, p. 35) – which are necessarily invested in relations of power. Within specific contexts – historical, social, and cultural – some discourses have gained more prominence than others in influencing individuals’ lives, and are productive of objects and subjects. Here, “language… [and discourse] is not a mirror of life, it is the doing of life itself” (Gergen, 1999, p. 35). In brief, the creation of meaning involves one system for creating a set of correspondences between the world and ideas or concepts in our heads, and a second system for sharing those ideas and concepts. The second system, language, is the tool used by people to communicate shared conceptual maps and culture. Saussure took language from being a transparent window to the world to a greater understanding of how language actually works in the production of meaning. All models of meaning that generally subscribe to this theory are described as belonging to the linguistic turn where language is any “sound, word, image or object which functions as a sign, and is organized with to other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning” (Hall, 1997, p. 19). There is no meaning or referent that cannot be interpreted to mean something else and thus, within the play of the text, meaning can be endlessly deferred along chains of signification. In this view, semiotics displaced the human subject from the centre of language and poststructuralism returned to that empty space, without putting the author back as the source of meaning (Hall, 1997). This is not a naïve attempt to erase the subject or to deny the importance of an external, physical reality; rather, it is about recognizing the power of language to shape and re-shape our own individual realities. The very act of speaking about experience is to culturally and discursively constitute it (Fawcett, 2008, p. 669). Hence, groups of interrelated supporting statements, embedded in relations of power, can acquire authority. These discourses result in ways of thinking and practices of acting through which objects and subjects are produced. Discourses define the conditions of who can speak and with what authority; they function by establishing a framework for the possibilities of what can emerge.

Embodiment and Boundaries Reductionist understandings of the individual have a long history in the Modernist tradition which can be traced to Cartesian mind-world dualism and the notion of two worlds: the inner psychological world of the self which perceives, deliberates, and decides; and the outer material world (including the body) that exists outside our thoughts. In the techno-scientific orientation of Western culture, we “find ourselves comfortably committed to a dualist ontology – the reality of mind and of world” (Gergen, 1999, p. 8). The mind-world dualism suggests a hierarchy where the more important mind houses the self and human consciousness, and the body is relegated to an object to be controlled by the mind. Also subordinated or made invisible in Cartesian dualism are unconscious processes. In this dissertation, I argue against this atomized view of the individual and the traditional Western notion that we can separate the superior mind from the subordinate body. Further, I argue that when we separate the individual self from the community of selves that is humanity, we do so to our own great detriment. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) commented that “the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment” (p. 4). Here, embodiment describes a broad concept involving biological, social, and psychic processes (Weiss, 1999). Embodiment is a dynamic matrix of body-mind-world – a web that integrates thinking, being, doing, and interacting within different cultural and social contexts (Hocking, Haskell, & Linds (2001). Bodily experiences exist in a reciprocal relationship with conscious and unconscious processes, and the discourses one has to negotiate. The fact that identity cannot exist without a body is self-evident but, in a constitutive manner, one’s bodily realities – one’s differentiated experiences of their own and of other bodies – make certain understandings more likely. Indeed, there is a call to take more seriously the materiality of the body as it enters into the construction of identities and social inequalities (Shilling, 1991). Hence, the notion of embodiment allows for an analysis of the ways in which social, psychic, and biological processes are inextricably linked to constitute the lived body. Embodiment highlights the importance of the body-mind-world constellation in relation to identity, and implies a variety of possibilities for literally being-in-body and for the embodiment of fat. James Messerschmidt (2005) wrote that “bodies in their materiality have both limits and capacities which are always in play in social process” (p. 208). In the social construction of the body, bodies are viewed in gendered, moral, economic, and aesthetic terms that may, or may not, mirror real lives (Bordo, 2003, p. 191; Gilman, 2004, p. 226). The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1973) ascertained, The human body is always treated as an image of society and… there can be no natural

way of conceiving the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension.

Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances,

escape routes and invasions. If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I

would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries. (as cited in Gilman, 2004; p.

238-239)

In support, Moss Norman (2009) had this to say about the intersections between fatness and other social markers: Ways of understanding, evaluating, and experiencing bodies cannot be isolated from

one’s socio-culturally constructed position as a raced, gendered, sexed, sized subject.

Therefore, fatness is not an objectively interpreted phenomenon, but rather is always

viewed through one’s framework of tacit bodily knowledges. (p. 165-166)

Conversely, the reductionist understanding of the mind as separate from the body ultimately reduces the body to a material object; in a dualist ontology, the body is effectively a robot. It presents us with the unsurmountable philosophical problem of how the self (a non-entity) affects the body (a material entity) (Gergen, 1999). A reductionist view would also sever any possibility for conceptualizations of agency and subjectivity. Instead, I argue that the body, subjectivities (both conscious and unconscious processes), and society are all inextricably entangled in embodiment processes. In this thesis, I argue for an understanding of the body, subjectivities, and movement as discourses, which I begin to explore next. Social Constructions, Subjectivities, and Fat Throughout history, fatness has been understood in a multitude of ways, continuously shifting and changing. Constructions of fatness have been historically, culturally, and situationally defined (Ambwani, Warren, Gleaves, Cepeda-Benito & Fernandez, 2008; Bell & McNaughton, 2007; Chernin, 1981; Sykes & McPhail, 2008), and its meanings understood within the intersections of other aspects of identity including class, race, and gender (Braziel & LeBesco, 2001; Gilman, 2004; see also dedicated issue on gender and fatness in the Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 25, 2008). Among its many complex and often oppositional constructions, fatness has been made to be attractive (Gross, 2005), or ugly (Klein, 2001; Snider, 2009); a disease (WHO, 2006) or sign of health and fertility (Frisch, 1994); a man’s problem (Pope, Phillips & Olivardia, 2002) or woman’s problem (Orbach, 1978); a source of pride (Chernin, 1981, p. 124) or failure of the will (Gilman, 2004, p. 234); a genetic maladaptation to the modern environment (Lee, 2009) or a global concern (Kuraanyika, Jeffery, Morabia, Ritenbaugh, & Antipatis, 2002; McKensey Global Report, 2014); a sign of power and control in hip-hop culture (Gross, 2005) or a disability (Wright & Burrows, 2006), and unlivable subjectivity in physical education (Sykes, 2011b). Thus, fatness is not simply an empirical fact; the maintenance of social boundaries around the human body as well as

19 politicized intrusions to regulate and discipline bodies have served to define and essentialize fat subjects in different yet specific ways. In each context, there are those who have been marginalized and oppressed because they do not fit normative cultural ideals. The classification of things, including fatness, is a strong cultural impulse. It is how meaning is generated to begin with. What is of interest, is how certain classifications affect individuals or groups of individuals, or as Stuart Hall (1997b) put it, “when the systems of classifications become the objects of the disposition of power” (p. 2). Classification is a very generative process as it seeks to both describe and predict a whole range of behaviours, aspirations, and possibilities. Classification is also a way of maintaining order within a system as it constrains and, in many cases, determines opportunities and possibilities (Hall, 1997b). Classifications are part of social processes that inscribe their reality upon our bodies and identities. For example, in describing identity formation, a young person talked about positive feelings towards their body until it was pointed out otherwise: ‘I didn’t realize I was fat until I was in situations where it was pointed out to me’

[quoting Judith Moore’s Fat Girl]. And so often when I was growing up, I really did

like myself, I was pretty proud, I had a pretty good level of self-confidence. (Sykes,

2011b, p. 52)

This young person has described a discursive intrusion shaping the formation of an identity as fat. Fat subjectivity “refers to the incorporation of fat subject position(s) into a person’s overall embodied subjectivity” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 51). This passage introduced the notion of fatness as a somewhat fluid identity category within an individual’s multi-faceted embodied subjectivity, negotiated under shifting social contexts. This concept has replaced the idea of fatness as a stable identity category in which “fat kids were hyper-aware of their fat, and that they are always and ubiquitous fat” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 52). In this section, I explore specific examples of social constructions of fat and outline how individuals have navigated – sometimes assimilated, challenged, subverted, or outright rejected – these constructions in their quest to make fat subjectivities livable. The notion of fat as undesirable has been explored by researchers who have addressed fatness as a lived experience. The more notable examples involve researchers who have written extensively employing a critical feminist perspective, and described fatness as a woman’s burden (Bordo, 1993/2003; Chernin, 1981; Orbach, 1978). Describing fatness primarily employing a feminist perspective may have contributed to the assumption that boys and men do not worry about their bodies (Gilman, 2004; Bell & McNaughton, 2007). Moss Norman (2009) described how young men have been reluctant to state explicitly that the appearance of their bodies mattered to them, and was worth worrying about, because these practices are culturally

20 associated with women. Indeed, some scholars have commented that boys’ relation to their bodies must be examined as thoroughly as girls’ perceptions (McVey, Tweed, & Blackmore, 2007; Paxton, 2002). Susan Bordo (2003), in the 10th anniversary edition of her book, Unbearable Weight, commented, “And now, young guys are looking in their mirrors, finding themselves soft and ill defined, no matter how muscular they are. Now they are developing the eating and body image disorders that we once thought only girls had” (p. xxiii). The gap in the research involving the relation men and boys have with their bodies has just recently begun to be addressed (see Atkinson, 2011; Bell & McNaughton, 2007; Gilman, 2004; Kehler & Atkinson, 2010; Monaghan, 2008; Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia, 2002). As Gilman (2004) stated “Masculinity is not simply a parallel construct to femininity but has its own complex (and often contradictory history), as do the meanings attached to the fat boy’s body” (p. 7). At this point, it needs to be made clear that men’s fatness is no more or less important than women’s fatness. Like others, I only suggest that gendered constructions of fatness have different meanings for men and women, and as such, each is worthy of being explored in its own context. Physical capital. Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the body as possessing different forms of capital helped us understand the body’s materiality as a social construction in ways that are accorded social value. For Bourdieu, physical capital referred to the embodied state – comprised of the body’s physical attributes, appearance and abilities – within the broader category of cultural capital. That is, physical capital is embodied through particular body and social practices in ways that express a social or cultural location, and can be converted into other forms of capital (e.g., money, fame, status, and membership in specific networks). Adapting Bourdieu’s schema, some researchers have described how the physical attributes of bodies can be productive in their own right (see, for example, Evans & Davies, 2004a; Shilling, 1991; Wright & Burrows, 2006). In the analysis of how the body is represented, Ewen (as cited in Gergen, 1999) has described a sweeping shift in Western culture from persons defined by substance to the centrality of style. In Ewen’s view, the tradition of conceptualizing ourselves in terms of what we actually do – what we accomplish in the world – is being replaced by a concept of self-as- appearance. Our sense of self is increasingly dependent on the image we give off to others. This shift, as Ewen saw it, has been the result of the rise of commercial truth brought about by the combination of a massive growth in media (television, radio, magazines, etc.), advertising agencies, and big business. In emphasizing the importance of physical capital, Shilling (1991) called for a recognition of the body as its own form of capital, and claimed that the management of the body “can be seen as the fundamental constituent in an individual’s ability to intervene in social

21 affairs” (p. 654, italics in original). Indeed, the power of cultural processes is such that successful social integration has become increasingly dependent on successful body management (Garrett, 2004b). Further, through an examination of the cultural history of fatness, Bell and McNaughton (2007) showed that men, like women, have been caught up in the desire to reshape the male body to fit prevailing ideals; and the male body, similar to the female body, has entered an era of physical transformation – a shift from productive to decorative (Alexander, 2003). As the possessor of physical capital, the appearance of the male body is socially coded for heterosexual masculinity, health, and ability and “has considerable value beyond that associated with the ability to do physical work” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 278). The appearance of the body – the body as evidence of particular work done on the body – has, in terms of cultural value, surpassed its ability to do work (Wright & Burrows, 2006). Ironically, this has occurred at a time when individuals have less opportunity to be physically productive due to the changing nature of labour. In this sense, the materiality of the body has become a form of social capital – that is, valued in significant social relations – for those who have the time and resources to work on it. Hence, the value of the body in many current social contexts has “less to do with what the body can do than with what the body looks like it can do” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 279). The underlying notion is that the body is a malleable and unfinished manifestation of social and self-identity representing particular lifestyle choices ( Kirk, 2004). As with the other forms of capital, however, the opportunities to accumulate and exchange physical capital are unequal, as they are largely dependent upon the social positions available to different groups.

Fat and masculinity. When addressing normative constructions of the body, the discourses of masculine heterosexual embodiment remain largely hidden underneath prominent discourses of fitness, health, and sport (Norman, 2009). Masculine embodiment is culturally coded as an “invisibility” (Norman, 2009, p. 134) or “secret crisis” (Pope et al. as cited in Ryan, Morrison & Ó Beaglaoich, 2010, p. 24). In other words, the proper performance of a normative masculinity involves the “suppression and silencing of anxieties about body image” (Kehler & Atkinson, 2010, p. viii) as well as the disguising of ‘feminine’ practices like caring about the body within normative masculine practices like sport and fitness (Norman, 2009, p. 17). Here, the psychoanalytic theory of identification can help us understand the apparent contradiction in caring for, and pretending not to care, about the body, and the role that identification processes play in the development of subjectivity. Identification refers to conscious and unconscious attachments and anxieties, in “how we make ourselves through and against others” (Luhmann as cited in Sykes, 2011b, p. 6). We “use” others, both deliberately and psychically, through both “love and loathing” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 75) in creating our identities and embodiment. This offers a more complex and queered understanding of identity formation than that offered by role modeling research that focuses only on conscious processes (Davies, 2003; Sykes, 2011b). Continuing with the idea that we define ourselves through our body, with and against others (Connell, 1995; Sykes, 2011), we see that the quest for a body shape and size that is symbolic of masculine identity necessarily downplays body image concerns associated with feminine identity and fatness. To the extent that men are fat, they are feminized because fatness has been historically associated with women (Murray, 2008; Sykes & McPhail, 2008). “Fat women are positioned as ‘hyper-women’ in patriarchy whereas fat men are emasculated – they are ‘failed men’” (Mosher, 2001 as cited in Sykes & McPhail, 2008, p.73). Fat men have breasts or ‘man boobs’, their bellies can give them the appearance of being pregnant, and the penis is reduced in proportion to body size, or is rendered invisible by the stomach (Mosher, 2001, as cited in Gross, 2005). Furthermore, traditional understandings of men position them in control of their environment and themselves. When they are not, it is a sign of weakness. For example, Gilman (2004) commented on Al Roker, a television weatherman, and his unsuccessful public attempts to lose weight, “Failure of the will is a sign of the absence of the real man in control of his body!” (p. 234). But not all men experience fatness in the same way. Norman (2009) stated that differently classed and racialized individuals take up health and body discourses in different ways; these individuals may draw on different cultural and social resources to understand and articulate body weight in more divergent ways than white middle-class individuals (p. 163). He explains that different groups do not comprise homogenous, polarized interpretive communities but simply that there are broad interpretive patterns that mark differences between groups.

Norman further noted that some of the embodiments of fatness present in the racialized community of boys he studied made clear distinctions between “good fat” and “bad fat”. “Good fat” was described as “healthy fat”, “muscle fat”, “thick-skin fat” and “sporty fat” due to its ability to be productive in sporting environments, while “bad fat” was “lazy”, “sedentary and unmotivated to lose weight” (2009, p. 168). Fatness in this context had its own set of associated performatives and characterized a particular subjectivity. Within these categorizations there were moral assumptions that constructed good and bad subjects, and the criteria for assessment tended to be functional as opposed to based on the decorative attainment of an idealized shaped body. Norman (2009) provided the insightful example of a racialized youth whose understanding of fat bodies was intimately shaped by his positive relationship with his mother. Although the boy’s mother was fat, as measured on a weight scale, the young man did not experience her as such. In fact, his tacit bodily knowledge – the lived bodily reality of his relationship with his mother – overrode the reading on the weight scale, and he was surprised to learn she weighed as much as she did. In other words, he experienced a disconnect between her measured weight and his social experience of her healthy, physically active body. The proximity of the body under evaluation and one’s narrative with that body (in this instance, the relationship between mother and son), shape the understanding of fatness where tacit body knowledges, intercorporeal ways of creating meanings from bodily being in-the-world experiences, can override primarily cognitive knowings (Murray, 2007), including prevailing understandings of the association between fatness and poor health. To further explore examples of different embodiments of fat, I drew on the sport and entertainment world where there have been large individuals who did not fit normative body ideals. They have included baseball players like the legendary Babe Ruth who simultaneously elicited equal measures of awe, respect and disgust for his prowess on the field and voracious appetite(s) off it (Gilman, 2004, pp.196-197). The poet, Mariaane Moore said of Babe Ruth rounding the bases, “his pigeon-toed stubbed little trot lacked beauty” (quoted in Gilman, 2004, p.195). When the fat boy is athletic, it is surprising. Babe Ruth’s ability and bodily appearance seemed to defy the visual logic of athleticism and begged the question whether a fat man could be a ‘real’ baseball player (Gilman, 2004, p. 196). It seems the answer is a definitive yes as we continue to see many large bodied elite baseball players who do not fit the mold of the physically conditioned, disciplined body. In professional football and sumo wrestling, where mass and strength are an advantage, athletes weighing in excess of three hundred, and sometimes four hundred pounds, are considered heroes. Fatness can be a socially dominant performance and a positive embodiment of normative masculinity through the taking up of space in sporting events and its capacity to win fights (Norman, 2009, p. 16). Klein (1996) asserted that fat men can feel bigger, stronger,

24 more serious and impressive; and it appears that fatness gets understood differently and somewhat forgiven in publicly productive sport bodies (Jamieson, Stringer & Blair, 2008). The sins against visual logic committed by fat athletes are forgiven by their athletic accomplishments on the field of play. In this manner, sport can become a way of redeeming the gendered obese male, albeit defined only by a very small number of exceptionalities. I have noted the relation between larger male athletes and masculinity, and Joan Gross (2005) writes that in black rap culture there have been, and continue to be, numerous fat black rappers – including Christopher Ríos, Heavy D and Biggie Smalls – who, in their performance of male masculinity, have redefined fatness. In providing a socio-cultural context, Gross notes that fat people have had increasingly difficult lives as obesity has come to be seen as a sign of overconsumption and lack of self control. Interestingly, those who can most afford to overconsume food are careful not to because eating can lead to a body that is generally marginalized. Just as richness and thinness are associated, so are poverty and obesity: “if obesity is more prevalent among Americans of colour [Blacks and Latinos], it is also more prevalent among poor people of all shades” (Gross, 2005, p. 69), and many rap artists have had an upbringing among the people with the highest poverty rates – those who have experienced food insecurity. In a society that encourages and celebrates most forms of overconsumption, yet severely punishes bodily evidence of overconsumption, male hip-hop artists have subverted these discourses and allowed their physical bodies to express their masculinity via their appetite(s) to consume. These artists often wear baggy pants and shirts that, instead of containing the body, expand bodily contours so as to take up the maximum amount of space. In male hip-hop culture, fatness unapologetically symbolizes the desire to consume, take up space, and be recognized. It is associated with brute force, being in control of other men and women, and access to wealth. While some male hip-hop artists have re-fashioned fatness in their performance of (hyper)masculinity, other subcultures labelled at-risk have reacted differently. Straightedge is a novel case of asceticism that started in the punk music scene and is now a global social movement (Atkinson, 2011). Most adherents are male youth reacting to lack of economic opportunity and social mobility through intense and constant purification of the body by rejecting promiscuity, drugs, alcohol and other vices that place the body at risk. Through these practices, sometimes described as a spiritual calling, they hope to achieve personal growth and control that then serve as a model for other youth. In studying a group of Straightedgers in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Michael Atkinson (2011) wrote, different from other male-dominated youth subcultures like Hip-hoppers (Martinez,

1997) who use symbols of conspicuous consumption as a means of alleviating status

frustrations as economically underprivileged or disenfranchised men, Straightedgers

deny any social merit in consuming more that you need in the search for masculine

distinction in times of crisis. (p. 97)

These youth who come mostly from a cultural history of independence, hard work, and resiliency, now see themselves without access to hegemonic masculinity5 through economic fulfilment. Straightedge is their response to middle class mainstream, a group that they perceive as hegemonic, consumption oriented, hedonistic, and unrestrained. More important than material acquisitions for Straightedgers is the physical shape and performance of their bodies: many prefer slim, fit, and fat-free bodies as a sign of control, self-care and discipline. Aspects of being morally superior and culturally different by returning to more traditional and conservative practices are also present. Atkinson (2011) reminded us that not all youth subcultures turn to excess or “slacker” lifestyles as a collective response to perceived crisis, and asked us to “remain attentive to how the gendered meaning of Straightedge is framed by practitioners as a civilized vocation that emerges from a perceived calling during crisis” (p. 99). In summary, male fatness, as well as its absence, has generated multiple, sometimes oppositional meanings: from modern notions of male beauty to the ugly fat man both lazy and slothful; from chiseled, hard bodied athletes to fat athletes; and from embodiments of femininity as well as masculinity. In terms of modern consumer culture, the male body has increasingly become an object to be looked at, worked on, and desired (Alexander, 2003). Bodies’ shapes and sizes have come to tell us something about their owners; they tell us something about the gendered, racialized, and classed person inside (Bordo, 2003; Seitler, 2004). These varied understandings for the embodiment of fat allow for an exploration of the power of discourses, and also how certain individuals and groups resist, subvert or take up those same discourses in complex and interactive ways, including hip-hop and Straightedge. Bodily practices also tell us something about self-care discourses, and commitment to exercise and health. Next, I have explored how biomedical health discourses have contributed to naturalized and “common- sense” constructions of bodies and fatness.

5 I defer here to how Michael Atkinson (2011) and Antonio Gramsci (1971) use the term hegemony. It needs to be noted that hegemonic masculinity infers a whole set of assumptions that do not align with poststructural perspectives. The process of hegemony allows the interests of the ruling elite to be generalized as the interests of society through a form of coercive consent. Although remotely similar to the workings of discourse, the hegemonic processes of universalizing and naturalizing are unique. According to Gramsci (1971), hegemony is accomplished on behalf of the power elite by organic intellectuals who are distinguished by their ability to manufacture societal consent through apparatuses of the state and the public sphere. This process shapes and controls the moral and intellectual life of society. As I have begun to outline, poststructural epistemological and ontological conceptualizations, including conceptualizations of the individual and the circulation of power, are very different. However, I draw on hegemonic masculinity and associated researchers because of its contributions to understanding dominant forms of masculinity. I will have more to say on this process in the Data Construction and Analysis chapter under the “plugging in” section.

Biomedical constructions of the body. The biomedical construction of health (and non-health) has relied on a mechanistic, “body-as-machine” understanding of human beings (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 39). In a mechanistic model, the body responds predictably to laws that are consistent across time and space. Some analogies, like the one comparing the heart to a hydraulic pump, have been very useful in our understanding of the human body but these analogies are not helpful, and are often quite harmful, when extended to human behaviours. Simply put, people are not machines. For example, body weight understood in terms of “energy-in and energy-out” (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 38), and explained by the balance between calories eaten and energy expended, misrepresents people’s relationship to food. The body-as-machine model attempts to apply the law of conservation of energy to real lives. It implies an overly simplistic scenario in which an overabundance of fatty and sugary foods combined with a sedentary lifestyle results in fat and unhealthy people. As we will see, there are many problems associated with a mechanistic way of thinking about the human body. A key tool enlisted in the war on obesity is Body Mass Index (BMI). Body Mass Index is a weight-to-height ratio, grouped into health risk categories, associated with presumed levels of fatness. Body Mass Index is calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by the square of one’s height in meters. Overweight and obese are increasingly higher categories or classes in BMI values above what is considered healthy or desirable. Using the World Health Organization BMI categories, underweight is defined as BMI<18.5kg/ m2, normal is BMI: 18.50 – 24.99 kg/ m2, overweight is BMI ≥ 25kg/ m2, and obese is BMI ≥ 30 kg/ m2. In support of the general panic over the obesity epidemic, BMI has been used not only as a determinant of health risk but also increasingly as a general indicator of fatness. Body Mass Index appears everywhere including doctors’ offices, health clubs, mass media, school textbooks (Temertzoglou & Challen, 2003)6, and even student report cards7 (Vander Schee, 2009). The usefulness and validity of BMI has faced severe challenges both at the population and individual levels. As a blunt instrument useful in describing population levels of fatness there has been a growing debate on the need to develop different BMI cut-off points for different ethnic groups due to increased evidence that the association between BMI, percent of body fat, and body fat distribution differ across populations (WHO expert consultation, 2004). Specifically, from a biomedical science perspective, what is considered too fat and supposedly unhealthy may not be the same for different groups of people. When applied to the individual,

6 In Ontario, this widely used Grade 12 Exercise Science textbook and workbook, students are asked to calculate their own BMI (see page 151 in the textbook and accompanying section in the workbook). 7 In the United States, as of 2009, 16 states had legislation that mandated annual BMI testing (Vander Schee, 2009). In some areas this was followed by a “BMI report card” sent home with each child.

BMI is inappropriate because it does not take into account differences in sex, age, body types and the distribution of body weight (Gard & Wright, 2005; Scott-Dixon, 2008). Body Mass Index can tell us if the members of a particular population are getting heavier (not necessarily fatter) but this tells us very little about individual health. For example, there is no clear evidence that children with BMI categories of “overweight or obese will suffer worse health consequences than other children” (Flegal, Tabak & Ogden, 2006, as cited in Gard, 2010, p. 6). Moreover, muscular males or females will be classified at the higher end of BMI because they are, in relative terms, heavy for their heights; another example is that stocky or large boned individuals (endomorphs) are almost always in the overweight or obese categories regardless of how much fat they carry or their health status. It is worth noting that BMI was first used to develop normative models of human body shapes (Scott-Dixon, 2008)8, and it largely continues to function in the same manner by referencing an ideal body type, whereas it is evident that the ‘ideal body’ does not exist in any health context. Another problem with the body-as-machine model is that outside of short term, controlled laboratory studies, there is a lack of relationship between food intake and the body weight of adults, adolescents and infants, even when controlling for physical activity (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 41). Simply put, calories in and calories out cannot predictably explain body weight across individuals. In the real world, body weight is governed by many factors including genetic predisposition, socioeconomic state, environmental influences, educational attainment, hormonal responses, timing and types of food, types of physical activities, responses to stress, and a myriad of other biological and environmental factors (Agras, Hammer, McNicholas, & Kraemer, 2004; Eriksson, Forsen, Osmond & Barker, 2003; Hawkins, Cole, & Law, 2009; Lee, 2009). The scientific and medical communities have begun to tease apart the biological factors around body weight starting with investigations into the nature of fat itself. Findings that are not widely circulated in the mainstream media show that fat is not the inert substance it was once thought to be (see Halaas & Friedman, 1997; Farooqi et al, 2002; Tara, 2016). The layer of fat that surrounds our bodies is, on average, only three-quarters fat. It also contains collagen to hold it in place, veins and nerves, as well as blood, muscle, and stem, and immune cells (Tara, 2016).

8 What we have come to know as BMI was first develop by a mathematician in 1832 as a way to define the ‘normal man’ and largely forgotten until 1972, when physiology professor and obesity researcher Ancel Keys published Indices of Relative Weight and Obesity. By 1985, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began defining obesity according to BMI. At first, the thresholds were established at 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women. Then in 1998, the NIH consolidated the threshold for men and women — even though the relationship between BMI and body fat is different by sex — and added the category of overweight. The new, drastically lowered thresholds were now 25 for overweight and 30 for obesity. http://the-f-word.org/blog/index.php/2009/07/22/the-history-of-bmi-and-why-we-still-use-it/

Thus, when we ‘pinch an inch’, we are not really pinching an inch of fat. Fat is crucial in managing our energy stores, it enables puberty, allows reproductive organs to function, strengthens bones, enhances the immune system, and boosts brain size since parts of brain cells are sheathed in a substance called myelin which is 80% fat (Farooqi et al, 2002; Tara, 2016). Without fat, certain fat soluble vitamins (A,D,E, K) could not enter cell walls. Because fat secretes essential hormones and enables many bodily functions, fat is an organ – fat is part of the endocrine system (Friedman & Halaas, 1998; Halaas & Friedman 1997; Tara, 2016). The discovery that fat belongs to the endocrine system was made by Jeffrey Friedman in 1994 (Tara, 2016). Friedman found that, under normal conditions, leptin is a protein that acts as a messenger that reflects the total number of calories that are stored (Friedman & Halaas, 1998; Tara, 2016). The amount of leptin released varies depending on the amount of fat tissue. Leptin travels from fat to the bloodstream and binds to the hypothalamus region of the brain that is involved in regulating appetite via appetite suppression. It is “as if our brains ensure that fat is being fed and cared for before allowing us to stop eating” (Tara, 2016, p. 42). It is the fat that we have that actually suppresses appetite. More specifically, stored fat (adipocytes) releases a protein (produced by the ob gene in adipocytes) called leptin that travels in the bloodstream to the hypothalamus where receptors recognize it and suppress appetite. Thus, for our hunger/ satiety system to work properly, we need fat: we need fat to be able to produce functional leptin, and we need working receptors in the brain. We have also learned that leptin is involved in fat metabolism, which allows the body to use fat as an energy source (Tara, 2016, p. 44). Failures in this part of the endocrine system – either in the production of functional leptin or in leptin receptors in the hypothalamus – can lead to lipodystrophy or morbid obesity. Interestingly, lipodystrophy is a condition “in which fat cells simply atrophy and disappear. Because these people don’t have fat, they produce no leptin, and so eat ceaselessly” (Taras, 2016, p. 42) but gain no weight. Yet, their blood is full of fat, cholesterol, and sugar. This condition was incurable and often led to early death before the discovery of leptin. On the other hand, morbid obesity is associated with mutations in the ob gene. It is characterized by increasing weight gain (even under controlled conditions in a hospital) and many children with mutations in the ob gene have died in the first or second decade of life. These conditions are the product of “a gene driving a behaviour” (Farooqi et al., 1999, as cited in Taras, 2016, p. 45). However, many people, including doctors, have a hard time accepting a genetic influence present in hands in cookie jars, perhaps because they dislike the notion that we’re not fully in control of our health (Taras, 2016). There is also important, mounting medical research led, in part, by Paul McAuley and Steven Blair (2011) into what has become known as the obesity paradox. The obesity paradox describes a situation where, “[although] ‘overweight’ implies increased risk, it is in fact associated with decreased mortality risk” (McAuley & Blair, 2011, p. 773). In citing very large,

29 longitudinal studies, those authors made the point that in certain populations (including cardiovascular disease and dialysis patients), overweight to mildly obese patients have better chances of survival compared to their normal weight counterparts. The apparent paradox, given the taken-for-granted association of fatness and poor health, is that in certain groups, obesity confers a survival advantage. Moreover, in the general population, obesity can no longer be considered the mortality risk factor it was once believed to be. Research employing the Canadian National Population Health Survey over a 12-year span involving over 11,000 adults reported that, when compared to BMI in the acceptable range, a higher risk of mortality was observed for underweight individuals while overweight was associated with a decreased risk of death, and moderately obese individuals (BMI 30 to 35) were not associated with an increased risk of mortality (Orpana, Berthelot, Kaplan, Feeny, McFarland, & Ross, 2009). These results are consistent with similar research on overweight and moderate levels of obesity (Flegal, Graubard, Williamson, & Gail, 2005, 2007), including a recent large systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies (Flegal, Kit, Orpana, & Graubard, 2013). Evidence now suggests that many studies have incorrectly extrapolated the health risks associated with extreme obesity to those who are moderately obese or overweight as well. McAuley and Blair (2011) also provided strong evidence that low cardiovascular fitness and inactivity are a greater health threat than obesity. They concluded that, in terms of public health policy, improving the fitness of obese persons (brisk walking), independent of weight loss, should be stressed, and recommended increasing leisure time physical activity and cardiovascular activity for overweight and obese adults as the main focus. The corollary was also made that focusing on weight loss is often associated with poorer health outcomes (McAuley & Blair, 2011; Puhl & Heuer, 2010), and this finding was echoed by others who supported the need for research to determine if decreasing weight-related social pressures and personal weight concerns could actually contribute to reductions in obesity in children and adolescents (Neumark-Sztainer, Wall, Haines, Story, Sherwood, & van den Berg, 2007; Puhl & Heuer, 2010). The primary method for weight reduction for most people is calorie reduction through dieting. Long-term follow-up studies have shown that the success rate of diets, over time, is poor with a maximum net treatment effect of approximately 6% of body weight lost at 1-year follow-up (Dansinger, Tatsioni, Wong, Chung, & Balk, 2007). This places patients well below their target goals for ‘ideal body weights’ and still at risk for body weight stigma and discrimination. Perhaps even more concerning, given the dangers of yo-yo dieting, is that patients typically regain 30-35% of their lost weight during the year following treatment, and regain most or all of their lost weight within five years (Puhl & Heuer, 2010). It is clear that dieting involves continual deprivation – amidst relentless messages to consume – which is

30 almost impossible to sustain over the long term. Experts in the obesity field have now concluded that weight regain occurs in practically all dietary and behavioural interventions, and obesity is a life-long condition for most obese people (Puhl & Heuer, 2010). Further, dieting may be a precursor to eating disorders and also increase the risk for binge eating and weight gain over time (Neumark-Sztainer, Wall et al., 2007). In spite of these findings, cultural discourses continue to be largely obsessed with thinness and the methods used to achieve it. The faulty logic linking body weight to health has continued to result in reactive health care policies that are not financially sustainable. In this approach, all attention and resources have been shifted to fixing the “problem” (i.e., big people). The approach overlooks the fact that “good health is not simply a matter of diet and exercise… [and] research shows that other factors such as our income, employment, home and work environment, and social relationships have a stronger impact on our health and well-being” (Health Council of Canada, 2010). In agreement, the World Health Organization (2008) asserted that socio-economic status, education, and the conditions of work and leisure have the greatest impact on health. The reasonable recommendation is for governments to expand their approach to health promotion in order to deal with systemic factors that lead to poor health, and in doing so alleviate the pressure on health care budgets (Health Council of Canada, 2010). As a response to soaring health care costs, the McKensey Global Report (2014) recommended the need for interventions “that rely more on changes to the environment and less on conscious choices by individuals” (McKensey Global Institute, 2014). Multiple social and economic changes have significantly altered our living environment creating a “biology – environment mismatch” (Lee, 2009, p. 45) that promotes greater food consumption and less physical activity (Puhl & Heuer, 2010). These changes include: shifts in the work environment with advanced workplace technology and reductions in physical work; a built environment that has decreased opportunities for movement through urban design, land use, and automobile use; the food environment that has increased accessibility to heavily processed and relatively inexpensive foods when compared to fresh foods, and increased portion sizes in restaurants; and in the media environment, including the marketing and advertising of energy-dense foods by the food industry that has skyrocketed, especially targeting children (Puhl & Heuer, 2010). Unfortunately, current policies and conditions disproportionally affect the needs of the poor and socially disadvantaged who suffer the worst health outcomes. Thus, defining obesity as a disease is not only a medical issue but also a political decision that defines obese people as financial burdens on the health care system. This stigmatization of bigger bodies is part of the neoliberalist discourse whereby all responsibility rests with the individual without any consideration of systemic barriers. It leaves little room for the consideration of human differences in cultural values, socio-economic class, race, gender, geographic location or age

(Gard & Wright, 2005; Zanker & Gard, 2008). This discourse obscures the fact that people live their lives in a social context, and within a spectrum of competing responsibilities and priorities. Defining fat people as economic burdens, in turn opens the door for the moralizing argument equating fat with irresponsible behaviour (LeBesco, 2004, as cited in Beausoleil & Ward, 2010, p. 9). If we are to believe that body weight is simply a matter of managing calories, then it becomes possible to claim that fat people become fat because of their own laziness, gluttony, slothfulness and moral inferiority (in support see Critser, 2003, pp. 53-57, 176; for a critique see Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 6). This view has promoted an institutionalized intolerance for difference and perpetuated fat hatred. The pervasiveness of the personal responsibility message plays a key role in the stigmatization of obesity, whereby stigma is perceived as an appropriate social motivator for behaviour modification (Critser, 2003) despite decades of science documenting the detrimental social justice and public health effects of weight stigma (Puhl & Heuer 2010). Stigmatization of obese individuals continues to pose serious risk to their psychological and physical health, creates health disparities, and interferes with effective efforts to improve health (Puhl & Heuer, 2010). Although “there is significant consensus that stigma undermines public health, this principle has not been applied to the obesity epidemic” (Puhl & Heuer, 2010, p.1020). Indeed, in describing the counterproductive nature of stigma on health, Burris (2008) asks, “Where is the evidence that inculcating a sense of spoiled identity is a good way to get people to adopt healthier behaviours?”9 (p. 475). This question, when applied to public health campaigns targeting obesity, points to the detrimental role of stigma which positions overweight and obese people as disgusting while demanding these individuals adopt ‘healthier behaviours’ (Lupton, 2014). In particular, Deborah Lupton documented the threat to human dignity when public health campaigns reinforced stigmatization and discrimination by using “the pedagogy of disgust” (2014, p. 2) to persuade individuals to change their behaviour in the interests of health. The combined effects of the war on obesity create a “régime of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 132) that perpetuated a type of deficit theory (Gorski, 2008) that has been used to police, normalize, and regulate all body types toward the imagined ideal body. This pretext has been used by some in the health promotion field, effectively using fat discrimination and shaming as a socially sanctioned prejudice. In thin obsessed societies, individuals become “lipoliterates”

9 Here, I want to be careful not to misrepresent Burris’ position. He is writing specifically in relation to the stigma related to smoking. The point I am trying to make is that the question reflects the neoliberalist position prevalent in medicine regarding human agency (i.e., the notion that we are in full control of our health outcomes).

(Graham as cited in Murray, 2008, p.8) who read fat bodies for what they supposedly divulge about their owner’s moral character and health. Body discourses and biopower as forms of control. The previous sections have highlighted some of the continuously repeated groups of statements and positions regarding the body, fatness, and health. These ideas and positions have come to be organized into discourses and accepted as common sense. It is precisely because these discourses make such good and rational sense that they have become Discourse “not only reflects thinking, it is part of thinking itself … Discourses are aspects of the processes by which ideologies are not only articulated but also developed (Green, 2009, p. 185, italics in original). These processes position discourses as powerful epistemological and ontological processes that shape and promote specific ways of thinking and behaving. It is not that discourse determines behaviour in a direct or causal manner but rather, discourse provides a constraining framework for understanding the world and our actions within it. The development of other possibilities is therefore curtailed if not altogether eliminated. When the same discursive networks of power (for example, institutional, socio- economic, knowledge, and technological) continuously press upon the individual, it becomes difficult to imagine possibilities that are on the boundaries or run counter to the prevailing arguments. On this point, Foucault (1979) has been instrumental in elucidating how forms of power are exercised at the level of the individual. Foucault argues that power is situated and exercised at the level of life (1979), and operates in a “low profile manner in daily social relations or micropractices” (Fawcett, 2008, p. 667, italics in original). In every society, the body has been “in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations” (Foucault, 1979, p. 136). However, there developed in the eighteenth century new techniques of “infinitesimal power [and control] over the active body” (p. 137), in terms of increases in utility. There was its immense scale of control with a decreasing focus on the signifying elements of behaviour or the language of the body in favour of an increasing focus on the economy, efficiency of movements, their internal organization, and the “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result” (Foucault, 1979, p. 137). Although these disciplinary methods “involved obedience to others, [they] had as their principal aim an increase of the mastery of each individual over his own body” (Foucault, 1979, p. 137). According to Foucault (1979): The historical moment [the eighteenth century] of the disciplines [relations of docility-

utility] was the moment when the art of the human body was born, which was directed

not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the

formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it

becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of

coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures,

its behaviour…. A ‘political economy’ which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was

being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that

they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the

techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus, discipline produces

subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. (pp. 137-138)

This is a type of power over the individual and by the individual. The proposed relationships between obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, and ill health, all described in moral and economic terms are conceptualized in this manner. Foucault’s notion of biopower is helpful in exploring this conceptualization. As an alternative to conventional understanding of power (i.e., the capacity to deny, remove, exclude or incarcerate) biopower is conceived as “strategies for the governing of life” in the name of the existence of everyone and risk management (Rabinow & Rose, 2006, p.195). Borrowing on the concept of biopower, biopedagogies emerged as a new set of normalizing practices to control and discipline bodies in order to reduce levels of obesity and protect society from ‘at-risk’ individuals (Rail, Holmes & Murray, 2010). The prophylactic measures used to discipline fat bodies and protect society were accomplished through a variety of regulatory and surveillance techniques working concurrently from both without and within (Norman, 2009, p. 21; Rail, Holmes & Murray, 2010). Working from without, regulatory power was directed at society, and for the sake of the health of all; it operated through the collection of knowledge in the form of general measures, statistics and expert forecasts (Norman, 2009). Such regulatory power created a surveillance actualized through cultural practices, stigmatization, as well as institutions like the popular media (see Bordo, 2003), health organizations (National Prevention Council, 2011; Statistics Canada, 2011a, 2011b; WHO, 2006) and schools (Lee & Macdonald, 2010; Sykes, 2011b; Sykes & McPhail, 2008; Beltran-Carillo, Devis-Devis, Peiro-Velert, & Brown, 2010). Understood as a tool for state control, “[bio]medicine can be used to regulate behaviour, define deviance, and manage populations, generally with the ostensible aim of increasing well-being” (Garner & Hancock, 2014, p. 366), and managing risk (Evans & Davies, 2004a). Functioning within a network of biopedagogies, physical and health education has worked to “constitute a visibly ‘healthy’, gendered, engaged, normalized body” (Petherick, 2011), partly through the construction of fat bodies as at-risk, expensive, lazy, lacking will and in need of discipline. In this paradigm it has been the incessant monitoring, surveillance, and testing of the body in physical education that has kept the fat body at bay and functioned to maintain it.

One of the effects of regulatory power is to potentiate disciplinary power working from within, at the level of the individual. Disciplinary power is conceptualized to work when individuals, in effect, voluntarily become their own overseers through surveillance of self and others. Foucault theorized discipline to describe techniques within systems of power that singularize the individual – to isolate, identify/name and ultimately dominate. The official version of truth – or state science to apply Foucault’s term – empowers an all-encompassing regime of truth that has labelled those with contradictory views as ideologically guided, scientifically unsound, “domestic terrorists” (Rail, Holmes & Murray, 2010, p. 259) and has created a type of fascist structure (Homes, Murray, Perron & Rail, 2006; Pronger, 2002). Health and the body have become organizing concepts in society and the objects of new problematizations. As with all problematizations, they have brought into existence new discourses and practices that have shaped the reality to which they refer. Any model “is a construction of the world and not an indisputable, objective truth about it” (Escobar, 2012, p. 24). The essential trait of the fat body has been its ill health and the prescribed universal solution has been diet and exercise. This discursive formation, consisting of multiple systems of knowledge that have claimed to understand the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, accounts for the prevalence of the ‘war on obesity’ and its progressive insertion into a regime of thought and practice in which certain interventions for the eradication of fat have become central to living a healthy life. That discourse continues to be a way of bringing about a political order “that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through ordering differences” (Haraway, 1989, as cited in Escobar, 2012, p. 24). In short, the biomedical community has mostly dismissed the importance of systemic and environmental factors regarding health. I am not claiming that, at certain levels, obesity is not an issue requiring medical attention; I only claim that how people get to these levels is extremely complex, and what has been commonly accepted as overweight or obese has more to do with “moral and ideological beliefs than scientific evidence” (Gard & Wright, 2005, p.3). In fact, I have cited recent research showing that overweight and moderate obesity may confer health advantages when compared to the underweight category. Western science understandings of the body have served to name, compartmentalize, and decontextualize the individual, thereby disciplining the individual and limiting freedoms. In effect, the individual has been divorced from a holistic sense self (i.e., the body as separate from the mind, the psyche, and the spirit), as well as from the environment (i.e., the individual as separate from historical, political, social, and environmental context). Specifically, biomedical health discourses that model human beings on machines, ultimately limit possibilities for living and allow for moralizing arguments that have construed fat people as economic burdens. These neoliberal discourses work, from within and from without, in the creation of regimes of truth that are oppressive, harmful, and foreclose other more helpful ways of conceptualizing health and fatness. In particular,

Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower has effectively been used to explore coercive forms of social control over the active body, in the name of that same body. In the following section, I explored further some of the discourses around physical education and how they are implicated in a regime of truth that disciplines bodies through pedagogical practices. Problematizing Physical Education In this section I sought to problematize physical education by exploring how physical education (re)produces the body and sets limits on its potential for movement. In this task, I have explored issues related to the understandings and practices surrounding curriculum, physical literacy, ability and social class, gender, and health. Curriculum. Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and Taubman (2002) described their major work on curriculum as “an unruly book, a cacophony of voices” (p. 3), and Longstreet and Shane (1993) asserted that “curriculum is an historical accident – it has not been deliberately developed to accomplish a clear set of purposes” (p. 7). Curriculum, in both its conceptualization and practice, does not reflect a consistent, coherent body of work. Rather, it has evolved as a reactionary, rather than visionary, response to the increasing complexity of educational decision-making. Throughout its different manifestations, all curriculum has been related to shifting power relations; its texts and practices have represented the knowledge, values, and ideas of dominant groups while simultaneously marginalizing the values and knowledge of other groups (Apple, 2001). Deng and Luke (2008) asserted that the most basic curriculum question is what should count as knowledge. Implicit in this query are other questions: Whose knowledge counts? In what contexts? Writing in the Australian context, Wright and Burrows (2006) noted that physical education has maintained its place in the education curriculum “through the work that it claims to do in producing particular kinds of citizens/subjects; citizens often differentiated on the basis of gender, class, race and their intersections” (p. 275). Physical education possesses characteristics that make it a particularly potent site within the educational curricula for discourses regarding the human body (Wright, 1996). It addresses what is valued in the psychomotor realm – an integration of the cognitive, affective, social, and spiritual domains of human functioning with a foregrounding on the physical (Hellison & Schubert, 2010). While the language of the Ontario physical education curriculum10 articulates a

10 In this section, I place an emphasis on the Ontario physical education curriculum – the province where this study takes place. It should be noted that Canadian school curriculum policies fall under the authority of each provincial government’s Ministry of Education. While there is a national association, PHE Canada, it does not have a role in either curriculum design or implementation. The approaches to curriculum across provinces are vastly different and there is very little coherence within many of the provincial documents between their initial overall philosophy and their stated objectives and expectations (Robertson & Barber, 2011). This supports the stated notion of curriculum being a cacophony of voices without a clear set of purposes that nonetheless marginalize particular embodiments.

36 holistic vision of the student (The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: Health and Physical Education, 2015), it is clear that current educational reforms in Ontario, and elsewhere, prioritize the teaching and standardized testing of ‘foundational’ subjects like literacy and numeracy. Furthermore, while recent physical education curricula promote holistic practices, the enacted curricula typify older, sport and fitness focused, performative models of physical education (Petherick, 2011; Robertson & Barber, 2011; Sykes, 2011b). Teachers, perhaps the strongest curricular force in the classroom, contribute to the latter practice with their own biographical, embodied history with physical activity and sport (Ferry & McCaughtry, 2013). The key point is that what has happened in physical education, far from being thoughtful coherent practice, has been the reflection and product of a discourse of texts, what Julia Kristeva (1980) calls an “intertextual ensemble” (as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. xv), that (re)produce the body within the socio-historical contexts in which they operate. In this section, we look more closely at some of these texts. Considering what is deemed valuable, or counted as knowledge, The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (2015) features two key concepts: physical literacy and health. A critical examination of these concepts will help locate the social mechanisms, technologies, and cultural practices active in the construction of students’ bodies. These concepts are borne of historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, in all their tensions, conflicts, and conversions. The institutions involved in their creation are not limited specifically to education – they include social, cultural, and financial organizations as well. Therefore, while exploring notions of physical literacy and health, I have also looked at other discourses that have become such a part of our social and cultural practice that they seem the proper order of things, invisible and unchallenged in their naturalness: • traditional discourses around gender that make a boys’ and a girls’ Phys Ed department seem perfectly normal; • discourses around what constitutes ‘ability’ that make it difficult to question why boys’ physical education units are organized around sports, while the girls get activities like dance and yoga; • discourses around social class (and race) that make character education and physical education seem like a desirable partnership in inner city schools; • discourses around citizenship that support the quantitative measurement of bodies through fitness performance tests; and • discourses around health that equate it with fitness and lack of fat. These discourses sometimes run parallel to each other, but not always; they function in both complementary and contradictory ways, and interpenetrate each other, making sharp boundaries impossible to distinguish. Next, I have investigated the concept of physical literacy, and then

37 considered in the wider socio-cultural discourses around social class and ability, gender, and health to help explore how physical education gets made up. Physical literacy or sports literacy? Margaret Whitehead (2001) conceptualized physical literacy and it has been largely picked up by Western systems of physical education. The Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum document states, Individuals who are physically literate move with competence in a wide variety of

physical activities that benefit the development of the whole person… They are able to

demonstrate a variety of movements confidently, competently, creatively, and

strategically across a wide range of health-related physical activities. (The Ontario

Curriculum Grades 1-8: Health and Physical Education, 2015, p. 7).

Here there was no mention of sport or the instrumental use of physical activity to develop physical fitness, to burn calories, or to shape bodies. Physical literacy, as described above, is a move away from competitive sport (i.e., based on notions of fitness, aggression, and toughness) toward a more holistic and inclusive understanding of the body. It provides an alternative to sport and the unending quest for fitness or the perfect body shape. At first glance, it appears to reflect an ideal to work towards. However, we see in the concept of physical literacy traces of the Enlightenment, Modernist, Humanist, as well as more current Neoliberalist positions in that it posits individuals as capable of exerting complete control over nature and their bodies. In these perspectives, the individual is seen as the agent of change who, through reason, acts upon objects and a non- changing, “out there” reality (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2002, p. 473). Moreover, as Wright and Burrows (2006) astutely point out, what the concept of physical literacy does not include is any reference to the social and cultural contexts in which we use movement; it does not acknowledge how particular ways of movement and particular physical skills are socially constructed in relation to gender, class, and race, and how particular physical literacies have relevance for specific social and cultural contexts. Put differently, what counts as physical literacy, and the ‘abilities’ it promotes, was envisioned differently for different individuals, in different places. Based on the ideas in this guideline, it has been valuable to explore the impact of the physical literacy that it introduced. Physical literacy developed sufficient symbolic capital in the lives of parents and children (it sounds rather impressive to be “physically literate”!) that it has come to be manipulated for economic advantage in contemporary society. Providing physical literacy opportunities for children has been presented to parents as a duty – even a necessity if they want to keep up in a competitive world – making parents feel the need to enroll their children in all sorts of lessons and organized sport opportunities. Take for example, how the concept,

38 originally conceived in relation to holistic development, has been appropriated within organized sport contexts: Hockey Manitoba (2017) has endorsed the principles of physical literacy in its player training programs, and used it as a recruitment tool for its long-term athlete development program (see http://activeforlife.com/physical-literacy-and-long-term-athlete-development-for-hockey- players/ downloaded Feb 9, 2017). Interestingly, some organizations have also taken significant liberties with its original definition to suit their interests. The Ontario Soccer Association (2017) claimed, “physical literacy is the combination of mastering fundamental movement skills and fundamental sport skills” (italics mine; see http://www.ontariosoccer.net/player/player-news/1056- incorporating-physical-literacy-in-our-practices downloaded Feb 9, 2017). The examples are many but insofar as these newly expanded notions of physical literacy remained at the level of independent sports bodies, they might not be so problematic. However, a relevant development is that the newly expanded conceptualization has found its way into the education field. Consider a glossy teaching resource presented at the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association (OPHEA) 2015 teachers’ conference, titled Developing Physical Literacy: A Guide for Parents of Children ages 0-12 (Canadian Sport Centres, n.d.). It began with the following alarmist quote: Childhood obesity and rising inactivity among children threatens the future health of

Canada, and the problem needs to be addressed NOW if we are to prevent a generation

of children from growing up with chronic health problems. (p. 4, capitals in original)

In the world of physical education, fatness is seen as the enemy (Beausoleil & Ward, 2010; Murray, 2008). The resulting instrumental evaluation of bodies, their shape and size, and their physical performance has left many students feeling objectified by teachers and peers and disconnected from their bodies (Petherick, 2011). In their critical examination of fat-phobic discourses in physical education, Sykes and McPhail (2008) compared the job of the physical educator to policing the border between fatness and thinness, between pathology and health. A predictable outcome is that adults who self-identified as fat children, reported that it was nearly impossible to feel good about their bodies in physical education classes (Sykes & McPhail, 2008). The same curriculum guideline support document addressed how the problem of childhood obesity and chronic ill-health were to be addressed. Developing Physical Literacy goes on to explain: Physical literacy gives children the tools they need to take part in physical activity and

sport, both for healthy life-long enjoyment and for sporting success; and is a key

component of Canada’s Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) program. (p. 5)

The document further described activities appropriate to the developmental stages of children, and connected these to athlete development with chapters titled “Learning to Compete” and “Training to Win”. The document also contained a “Parent Lobbying Kit” with a list of questions to ask administrators of Pre-School and School Programs in order to ensure children are getting the best physical literacy programs. Although the document contained an impressive list of research articles at the end, the body of the document does not include any references on the relationships between obesity, health, and sport for any population, much less for children under 12 years of age. Nonetheless, in the document, obesity was casually constructed in opposition to good health and the wellbeing of the nation, as well as the antithesis to sport participation, and being an athlete. These common sense yet spurious associations, purportedly supported by experts and social institutions, created specific and damaging ways to think about obesity that continue to harm young children of all shapes and sizes. The connection between physical literacy, sport, and education was made even more evident in the Province of Alberta’s Ministry of Education website (2010), where the concept of physical literacy was used explicitly for the purpose of student recruitment for athlete development programs in a document titled, Fundamental Movement Skills: The Building Blocks for the Development of Physical Literacy; Learning to Train Stage. The title of the document was very clear as to its content, linking fundamental movement skills and physical literacy, which are supposed to apply to all students, with athlete development. What a document of this type was doing on a Ministry of Education website is extremely puzzling and troubling, to say the least. A similar example of this troubling relationship was seen in the province of Ontario where the International Physical Literacy Conference (2017), held in the city of Toronto. was sponsored by the Sport for Life organization as well as the Ontario Physical and Health Educators’ Association (OPHEA) (see http://www.is4ls.org/). Although physical literacy in physical education apparently facilitates personal understandings of bodily ways of moving within holistic understandings of the individual, it has now been annexed into larger discourses around health, obesity, and the value of sport in contemporary society. This is not unique in the history of physical education in schools. In the Australian context, Kirk (2004) reported that the curricular “Grey Book” (1946) recognized the importance of play, enjoyment, and enthusiasm for all children in physical education (similar concept to physical literacy) but then the same document went on to equate play with playing competitive games and positioned competitive sport as pivotal to the educational legitimation of physical education. In the uncertainty of today’s society, sport and fitness focused, performative models of physical education continue to exist and offer a level of familiarity, comfort, and security for many teachers. As reported by Ferry & McCaughtry (2013), many physical education teachers have a long personal history of deeply embodied, and emotional connections with sports and

40 this has played an important role in how they have selected course content. In Canadian public schools, the coaches for extracurricular sports teams are unpaid volunteers, and overwhelmingly they are school teachers. In fact, it has been a tacit expectation that physical education teachers take on coaching duties in addition to their teaching workload. Thus, it should not be unexpected for organized sport practices to leech into classroom practice. As stated by one teacher who has also helped plan extracurricular programming for grades 7 to 12, “For my first 10 years of teaching, I was a coach first and a teacher second” (Active for Life, 2017) Downloaded on Feb 9, 2017 from http://activeforlife.com/high-schools-new-sports-model/. In addition, the economic value that a comprehensive extracurricular sports program brings to a school should not be underestimated in an environment where schools must actively compete for student enrolment or face a loss of teaching jobs or, in the worst cases, closure. Students in seats ultimately mean teaching jobs. Moreover, extracurricular activities keep students actively engaged in some form of physical activity, under adult supervision, usually after school at a time when many parents and guardians are not at home. A school with these types of programs could be an important consideration in many households. To appreciate the importance of extracurricular sports to schools – and more specifically, their value to physical education departments – one need only look at the “Athlete of the Year” awards lining the hallways of every Secondary School in Ontario. These awards command more prestige and hallway space – the large student-athlete photographs hanging in conspicuous locations – than any other student accomplishment. Traditionally, no other scholastic achievement, whether related to academic standing, community service or student leadership, has been celebrated as enthusiastically or has provided as much status as the “Athlete of the Year Award”. This has been revealing of the hidden curriculum of educational institutions where the development of thinking skills, knowledge, and positive contributions to society are ostensibly valued above all else. It has been argued that one of the ways in which physical education sought to validate its legitimacy as a curricular subject was to align itself with mainstream educational discourses (Robertson & Barber, 2011), particularly those around the notions of literacy. Physical literacy originally emphasized holistic development. However, older, more dominant and entrenched discourses were able to align it with their interests and adopt it into their own perspectives on the individual, health, and the value of sport. Currently, we find the travelled discourse of physical literacy back in physical education and extracurricular school programs, albeit significantly modified. I will say more on how dominant discourses have been able to adapt to new developments at a later point. For now, I suggest a more appropriate term than physical literacy would be “sports literacy”. As a term, sports literacy more accurately reflects the described approaches to physical education (i.e., the focus on athlete development, sport contexts, physical fitness, performance, and the eradication of fat). In many physical education

41 programs, the reductive emphasis on the individual as athlete and physical activity as sport has largely superseded the idea of being physically literate in one’s own body within a holistic sense of the self. Ability and social class. The Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility through physical activity model (TPSR) proposed by Don Hellison (2011) was an effort to address the negative experiences that children and youth, specifically inner city students, brought to physical education class. The goal was to offer children and young people at risk of social exclusion the opportunity to develop their personal and social skills and their responsibility, both inside the gym and outside of the school, in their daily lives. The core assertion of the model was that students, in order to thrive in their social environments, had to learn to be responsible for themselves and others – a learning opportunity lacking in their lives outside school marred by poverty, racism, violence, drugs, unsupervised free time, and exposure to electronic media. The model defined responsibility as a moral obligation toward oneself and others, and students moved through hierarchical stages emphasizing respect, effort and cooperation, self direction, helping others and leadership, and transferring their learned skills outside of the gym. The basic premise of TPSR was that responsible behaviours and attitudes could be taught through different strategies, (aimed at inner city, working-class students) to help them adapt to changes in life and develop as healthy and competent adults. In the TPSR approach, as in other deficit system perspectives, there was an implicit something lacking in the student, their family, their culture, or their community (Gorski, 2008). As argued in an Australian context, when children are perceived as “culturally deprived” – they don’t eat the right foods, do the right amount and type of exercise, have the right supports – then teachers develop low expectations of them which are invariably fulfilled (Evans, 2004). The notion of ability was key: what abilities were students presumed to lack and what abilities were they presumed to require after graduating from school, given their ‘expected’ career and life trajectories? I have used the term ability – like I have used all terms related to fatness – as an acknowledgement of its socially constructed nature, one that requires further unpacking. Wright and Burrows (2006) explored how ability was constructed differently in Australian elite (private) schools and government (public) schools. In the elite schools, the importance of ability as embodied capital was explicitly recognized, and linked to sport. Both boys’ and girls’ programs employed professional coaches. For the boys, activities tended to be team sports and rowing, with a hierarchy of social value allocated to different sports and the boys who played them; for the girls, although they also participated in school sponsored activities and school teams, their activities were much more varied and included dance and martial arts. These activities were asserted and valued as part of the school’s mandate to prepare well rounded graduates – graduates capable of taking leading roles in civic life with the kinds of

42 capital valued in professional and academic careers, and in competitive social circles. In the environment of striving for excellence, ability was seen as something to be developed and maximized. By contrast, in the schools drawing students from lower socio-economic areas, “physical education and sport ‘ability’ was taken to be a fixed attribute, unevenly distributed amongst students, which simply complicates teaching” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 285). The athletic students were already assumed to be participating in extracurricular sports teams; and the teacher’s job was to provide those without a high level of ability “with the opportunities to develop sufficient skills to experience the pleasure in movement now, which would motivate them to continue to participate beyond school” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 285). Teachers talked about physical education and sport “as remedial, as conveying abilities that would provide their students with the capacity to function as ‘good’ citizens and workers” (Wright & Burrows, 206, p. 284). For non-white bodies, competitive sport was often depicted as a “way out” – a tool for upward social and economic mobility. Young people of colour were targeted by sports academies, and school and community sports teams to use the physical capital they are presumed to have inherited by virtue of race as the only way for them to achieve (Bishop & Glynn (1999), & Hokowhitu (2004), as cited in Wright & Burrows, 2006). This singularity of focus often came at the cost of their academic needs, and supported a racialized construction of dark bodies as physical and natural athletes (Wright & Burrows, 2006). This construction was done in opposition to the assumed superior intellectual ability of whites and foreclosed academic opportunities for these youth. In each context, ability was not a neutral concept. It was not simply the execution of specific movement or sport skills but the “embodied capacities to perform movements that are located and valued because of their relationships with particular cultures and societies” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 289). In private schools, sporting ability reproduced constructions of an upper class striving for excellence and preparing for a life of civic and economic leadership. In the TPSR model and for some students in public and inner city schools, ability was approached from the perspective of lack where physical education as “compensatory education” (Evans, 2004, p. 5) enforced particular perfection codes; that is, in order to make up for students’ ‘deficiencies’ in their character and lives, they required correction and treatment through participation in physical education. It is interesting that it has been in the private schools that sport, as a vehicle to develop the embodied capacities needed to participate meaningfully in social, economic, and political life, was valued; whereas, in public schools sport was utilized more for its restorative properties – a tonic for the masses. Discourses of ability have important consequences for what has happened in physical education and has contributed to different experiences and outcomes for young people. Ability

“as a form of physical capital is profoundly classed, particularly in its value beyond the school” (Wright & Burrows, 2006, p. 283), and the concern has been that it reflects and perpetuates normative forms of white, classed practices. Discourses are not simply the result of the combination of specific elements, nor the effect of the works of particular institutions. They are, rather, the result of the establishment of a set of relations among elements, institutions, and practices and of the systemizations of these elements to form a whole (Escobar, 2012)11. For example, ability discourses were constituted not by the arrangement of objects under its domain but by the way in which a set of relations was able to form systematically the objects of which it spoke (athletic, fat, fit, disciplined bodies, and others), to group them, and arrange them in ways so as to give them a coherence of their own. Thus, to understand ability discourses we need to look at the system of relations established among the elements (for example, physical education, science, organized sport, neoliberalism; and athletic training and nutrition programs) and not merely at the elements themselves. It is the system of relations – established among institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, and technological interventions – that establish what could be thought, and the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies could be incorporated into the discourse. In other words, the system of relations establishes the discursive practices and sets the terms of engagement: who can speak, and with what authority; the rules of the game that must be followed for a particular problem, theory, or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, transformed into a policy or plan, and implemented (for example, physical literacy). The end result was the creation of a space of thought and action, the adult stage of which was outlined in advance by the same rules introduced during its formative stages. The discourses around gender, race, and social class defined a perceptual field structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry and registration of problems, and forms of intervention; in short, it brought into existence a space defined not by the combination of objects with which it dealt, but by a set of relations and discursive practice that systematically produced interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and practices. The discursive formation allowed the discourse to adapt to new conditions (the introduction of the concept of physical literacy, new technologies), always within the constraints of the same discursive space (outlined by the dominant discourses).

11 I owe the following explanation on how discourses work to Arturo Escobar (2012). He bases his analysis on discourses of development (see pages 40-41) and here I have adapted it to obesity discourses.

Gender. Young people are able to “express gender identities in and through physical activity and sport”, and at the same time face “pressures and expectations to express particular gender identities” (Penney, 2007, as cited in Kehler & Atkinson, 2010, p. xi, italics in original). Many physical education classes are gender segregated, particularly during the transition years from elementary to secondary school, and “the content of these classes cultivates social and cultural patterns for men and women’s physicality” (Petherick, 2011, p. 12). Previously, I noted that in different social and cultural environments, the expectations of ability in physical education have produced particular kinds of engagements with the world. Now, I have turned my attention more specifically to gender. At a secondary school in Ontario with students aged 13 to 15 years, Petherick (2011) reported a narrow definition of healthy living within the context of physical education which placed an emphasis on sport and fitness practices culminating in a timed one-mile run. The boys understood the allocation of marks to be based on their time while the girls emphasized the completion of the run and participation. For the boys, physical education experiences were defined by the strict criteria of performance standards; for the girls, it was the idea of participation as a means to encourage lifelong physical activity that was accentuated. Petherick (2011) asserts: Gendering the performance expectations of the mile continues to reproduce notions of

competence that mark the female body as participatory and soft, whereas the times and

measured association of the male run discursively construct normative masculinity as

concrete and linear, a construction that evokes dominant masculine practices. (p. 16)

Focusing on boys, research has “established schools as a site of masculinizing practices through which boys learn particular codes of masculinity” (Kehler & Atkinson, 2010, p. viii). In the Western tradition, masculinity “is associated with rationality, mental control, order, and leadership while women are typically said to be emotional, bodily oriented, disorganized followers” (Gergen, 1999, p. 28). In this view, demonstrations of male dominance within sport have been claimed to serve a useful purpose, not only as an opportunity to develop positive characteristics but also as an outlet for aggressive behaviour where ‘boys will be boys’. For boys who participated in sport, masculinity was marked by the ability to embody force and skill. Force is the irresistible occupation of space and competence and skill is the ability to operate in space or the objects in it (including other bodies). The combination of force and competence is power, “the capacity to achieve ends even if opposed by others” (Connell, 1983, as cited in Wright & Burrows, 2006). Context is important but not separate from other contexts, and boys may feel they have to enact this type of masculinity both within and outside sport. When boys are not living up to the expectations of being a ‘real man’ they are

45 admonished to ‘be a man’ or the currently ubiquitous, ‘man up’. Within sport this may provide a relatively non-destructive outlet with a set of rules and supervision. However, this enactment of masculinity is potentially much more dangerous outside of sport as in the realms of delinquency and crime (see Messerschmidt, 2005), and society in general. Along this line of thought, a robust argument can be made that male aggressive sport perpetuates the very notions of violence and misogyny it claims to alleviate. Connell (1995) stated that hegemonic12 masculinity defined itself partly in opposition to what it is not, and in the process actively subordinated other forms of masculinities and genders. She (2001) further argued that the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity requires correspondence between cultural ideals, institutional power, and individuals in a specific historical and social setting. Put differently, hegemonic masculinity practices reflect and reproduce power relationships that are “culturally honored, glorified, and extolled situationally” (Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 198). These situational expressions and reproductions of power are part of longstanding discursive formations of the abled, rational, heterosexual male body. In physical education, discourses and practices of masculinity have actively and symbolically dominated less athletic bodies, and subordinated masculinities (i.e., homosexuality), and other genders. The current physical culture of masculinity and climate of homophobia in many schools has had a damaging effect on many students (Kehler & Atkinson, 2010, p. viii). Fat phobia, within the context of sport but also physical education in general, in reinforcing normative constructions of race, gender, and sex, has compounded the challenges for bigger bodies as well as sexual and gender minority students (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2016; Sykes & McPhail, 2008; Wright & Burrows, 2006). When sports and competition dominate the physical education curriculum, “the valuing of individual achievement through aggressive competition, within a context of male dominance, becomes the normative standard” (Wright, 1996, p. 331).

12 The concept of hegemony referenced here is not the same as how poststructuralists might conceptualize dominant masculinity. Please see footnote #5 on page 25.

Building healthy bodies. The work of physical education teachers has become a challenging balance between competing ideologies and conditions. Constructions of ability and gender, and the value of sport in contemporary society, have played important roles as teachers manage expectations regarding the promotion of physical activity and health; at the same time, teachers need to legitimize and validate physical education “as a functional and core component of public school curricula” (Petherick, 2011, p. 4). Incessant reports on the poor health of the population and rising inactivity levels, and concerns over health care costs have clearly impacted how physical education has been taught in schools. Within the context of the moral panic resulting from the ‘obesity epidemic’, teachers have been asked to help students develop “the skills needed to get, understand and use information to make good decisions for health” (The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: Health and Physical Education, 2015, p. 7). Health objectives in curriculum documents have focused on developing, in students, “the comprehension, capacity, and commitment they will need to lead healthy, active lives and promote healthy, active living” (The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: Health and Physical Education, 2015, p. 6). An oversimplification of people’s lives – one that does not take into account systemic and social factors – is the idea that physical education in schools leads to increased levels of physical activity, and that early engagement in physical activity positively influences adult health. Unfortunately, this key pillar of physical education has not been borne out in the research. The relationship between physical education, levels of physical activity, and adult health are anything but conclusive. From the limited number of studies available, some researchers have suggested that a sufficient quantity of quality physical education can contribute significantly to the overall amount of physical activity of the school-age child (Dale, Corbin, & Dale, 2000; Shephard, Jequier, Lavallee, LaBarre, & Rajic, 1980), while others claim that the amount of time spent on physical education has no effect on the physical activity levels of children outside of school because children naturally compensate for levels of activity (Mallam, Metcalf, Kirby, Voss, & Wilken, 2003; Wilken, Mallam, Metcalf, Jeffery, & Voss, 2006). In studies that have specifically investigated physical education as an intervention strategy for obesity prevention, the results have been equally mixed. In a review of nineteen studies, Katz (2009) reported that in-school based interventions that included physical education resulted in a significant effect on body weight. In contrast, in her review of exercise-based school obesity prevention programs, Yetter (2009) found that, out of seven initiatives, only three reported decreases in students who were overweight. In a longitudinal study, Wardle, Brodersen and Boniface (2007) reported that higher levels of school physical education were associated with decreased adiposity in boys but not in girls. From a strictly biomedical science perspective of the human body, one that separates the human body from the rest of human

47 enterprise, any relationship between physical education programs and obesity prevention as a means to maintain health remains unsubstantiated (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 121). When we expand our view of the individual to a more holistic interpretation, a more harmful picture of the war on obesity has emerged. There is evidence to suggest that participation in physical education classes can have the opposite effect on intended outcomes. Overweight students may avoid physical activity due to teasing and weight criticism (Bauer, Yang, & Austin, 2004, as cited in Puhl, Luedicke, & Heuer, 2011). The stigma associated with being overweight may function as a type of license for a whole range of victimizing behaviours in schools. In a study by Puhl, Luedicke, and Heuer (2011), at least 84% of students observed weight-based victimization where peers were being called names, getting teased in a mean way, and teased during physical activities. Other forms of bullying associated with the overweight stigma, that were identified in this study, included being ignored, avoided, excluded from social activities, having negative rumours spread about them, and being teased in the cafeteria. Young children may initially have positive perceptions of physical education but these become more negative as they become adolescents (Trudeau & Shephard, 2005). As they grow older, children reported that they were confused, disappointed, and even angered by the structure of physical education (Graham, 2008). The negative experiences of boys and girls in physical education classes could preclude further participation that could extend beyond the physical education context (Beltran-Carillo, Devis-Devis, Peiro-Velert & Brown, 2010) and, in general, young people’s negative experiences in physical education and sport could have undesirable consequences in their identity construction and future (non)participation (Allender, Cowburn, & Foster, 2006; Brooks & Magnusson, 2006; Garrett, 200;a,b; Sykes, 2011a; VanDallen, 2005), and particularly for non-conforming student bodies (Sykes, 2011b). The ‘common-sense’ discourses associating physical education with increased physical activity and better health are not supported by the research.

Healthism. The expansion of health knowledge to living healthy, active lives aligns with what Crawford (1980) termed “healthism”; that is, the preoccupation with personal health as primary to the “achievement of well-being, a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles” (p. 386). Today, health cannot be forcibly controlled by the state via traditional mechanisms of physically threatening forms of power. Nonetheless, constraint and regulation are present in all regimes of “power/knowledge, as [Foucault] termed the processes of cultural disciplining (Gergen, 1999, p. 40; italics in original). For Foucault, modern structures of normative regulation are the new forms of control (Garner & Hancock, 2014); it is “the insinuation of power into the ordinary” (Gergen, 1999, p. 38). As part of an apparatus of governmentality, healthism has worked through normalizing practices in social institutions like medicine (Crawford, 1980), and education (Petherick, 2011) to protect society from at-risk individuals, and for the wellbeing of all. Healthism links the state’s objectives for the good health and order of the population with the desire of individuals for health and wellbeing. Healthy bodies and low health care costs are still the objectives of the state but it cannot overtly threaten and punish its citizens into compliance. Instead, individuals are addressed on the assumption they want to be healthy and free to seek out the ways of living that best promote their own health. In this manner, and in line with neoliberalist ideologies, healthism “situates the problem of health and disease at the level of the individual. Solutions are formulated at that level as well” (Crawford, 1980, p. 365). This is consistent with Evans and Davies’ (2004a) contention that we live in a risk management society, where the rise in manufactured risk (for example, the ‘obesity crisis’) is simultaneously constructed as individual responsibility (personal control of body size and shape). Physical Education is one cultural site of practice where the work of healthism is done. Healthism draws on the concepts of biocitizenship (see Petherick, 2011) and technologies of the self “where caring for the self and the state involves a conscious contribution by the citizenry to improving the life and wellbeing of a community by actively demonstrating the moral virtues of the citizen” (Halse, 2009, as cited in Petherick, 2011, p. 4). The health of the individual reflects upon the health of the nation. The good biocitizen, through individual effort and discipline, visibly demonstrates health and fitness, in part by exercising and regulating the size and shape of the body. The idea of being healthy, the benefits of good health, and the ways to achieve it are communicated to individuals much the same ways as commodities and services are marketed, and brought into alignment with personal goals. Individuals are thus rendered governable. Moreover, the unruly, out-of-shape, unfit body must be tamed. What is, in effect, being produced is a self-governing subject (Petherick, 2011). Thus, health promotion in schools has become a mechanism for social control and has led to greater surveillance and control through the promotion of (obesity) prevention (Evans & Davies, 2004b).

As was the case with physical literacy, sport again plays a role; this time in promoting health in schools and in building healthy bodies. Following dominant health discourses on obesity that prioritize measurable fitness goals, Canadian physical education has largely reacted to contemporary health challenges by promoting sport-centered motor skills linked to competition, and a forced, steady state exercise prescription developed to maximize fitness (Petherick, 2011; Prusak, Pennington, Wilkinson, Graser, Zanandrea & Hager, 2011; Robertson & Barber, 2011). This is evidenced in many physical education classes: a preoccupation with exercise as a tool to burn calories (Gard & Wright, 2005, p.122); the structuring of classes around the guiding principle of exercise intensity (Trudeau & Shephard, 2005); the preoccupation with the measurement of fitness evaluated through tests like the one-mile run (Petherick, 2011) and the measurement of fatness via the weighting of students and the calculations of Body Mass Index (Temertzoglou & Challen, 2003). Discourses construct health, obesity, and fitness in specific ways and in relation to each other. Hegemonic discourses now strive to incorporate rather than negate or dissolve other discourses; when it serves a purpose, the powerful adapt and adopt (Atkinson, 2011). However, the discursive practices that have been laid down, both within and between discourses, ensure that the adaptation to new conditions are within the confines of the same discursive space (Escobar, 2012). The discursive space is maintained by the system of relations between elements (for example science, education, and the economy) that define the chorus of ‘experts’ who can speak and with what authority (Escobar, 2012). An important feature of this arrangement has been the power relations and subjugation by various groups who claim privilege in knowing or having ‘the truth’ about who individuals are as human beings. A key role has been assigned to experts who have declared as truth particular discourses. This truth has been disseminated through research institutions, the medical community, education, public policy, and various forms of media. Individuals then come to know themselves in the same terms outlined by the discourse (for example, overweight or obese) and have sought advice or help from the professionals who created the condition in the first instance. Individuals thereby expand the reach of the discursive formation, and have, in fact, demonstrated their subjugation to power. For Foucault (1980), “power is … an open, more or less coordinated … cluster of relations” (as cited in Gergen, 1999, p. 38), and his concept of the “clinical gaze – a panoptic kind of ‘expert seeing’ that determines in advance what will appear … a discursive power that shapes the realm of the possible” (Rail, Holmes, & Murray, 2010, p. 261) is relevant here. Brian Pronger (2002) has contended that the construction of health, its promotion and surveillance technologies, primarily through the practices of physical fitness, represent a form of “body fascism” and imprisonment. He observed that modern physical education for children, adults, and the elderly “casts wisdom primarily as the technology of physical fitness, which

50 understands the body as a biophysical object whose functions can be maximized by instrumental programs of training and diet” (Pronger, 2002, p. xiii). Reflecting this stance, and the position of science as the ultimate voice in the legitimization of human activity, most Canadian university departments formerly known as physical education have changed their names to departments of kinesiology as they embrace the scientific techniques of physical fitness as their intellectual and applied foundation (Pronger, 2002). While the system of relations between elements can be very difficult to tease out, the discursive formation, as a whole, operates in a space of linear rationality, where health = fitness = not fat. Normalizing practices within discursive formations have worked to create binaries (for example, health = not fat), and reduce complexity. Concepts of health, fitness, and activity are used interchangeably by fitness and testing professionals (Cale & Harris, 2009, as cited in Petherick, 2011), and it is not surprising that students reflect this confusion. In a Canadian study, Rail, Holmes, and Murray (2010) reported that students’ “constructions of health involved a crucial link to body shape. For all of them, health meant having a particular body shape and weight and, more specifically, being not too fat, overweight or obese, and being thin or skinny” (p. 268). Debate within this delineated space has been encouraged – adding to an appearance of legitimacy – while those who challenge it are marginalized and labelled as “rebels … their work [rejected] as ideologically laden and scientifically unsound” (Rail, Homes, & Murray, 2010, p. 261). Here, it has not been claimed that healthism is strictly a calculated strategy on the part of the state. Rather, it has been part of a discursive formation involving a set of relations between elements which include the state institutions as noted; and social sciences like exercise physiology, nutrition, and human movement; market forces that promote wellbeing through diet, nutritional supplements, training aids and regiments; as well as the popular media (see Pronger, 2002). Together they create the discursive formation, or systems of knowledge, which claim to understand the nature of human beings and the world in which we live (Garner & Hancock, 2014). While not in full agreement, they maintain a dominant perspective on the human body; one limited by the rationalist, instrumental, and empirical gaze of science. In particular, Pronger (2002) has been critical of the technological approach to the body that renders the body prisoner to the normalizing and disciplinary techniques of physical fitness, and overshadows the more personal pleasures and insights one may garner from physical activity. According to Pronger, the technology of physical fitness disciplines the body as it transforms its functions and contours; it sets boundaries on bodily desires, on the joys and insights of movement, thereby diminishing the body’s transcendent power and imagination. In addressing these concerns, amongst others, a critique of current practices in physical education has recommended that “lifelong patterns of physical activity in Canadians will be more influenced by experiencing positive body messages in the school physical education

51 setting, regardless of skill level, fitness measurement and competence/ability levels” (Robertson & Barber, 2011, p. 4). Rather than indoctrinate students in normative constructions of the body, physical education has been called upon to support the development of fat positive fitness and activity spaces in schools (Sykes, 2011a), and empower students to feel competent (experience success), be autonomous (have choice), feel socially connected (Brooks & Magnusson, 2006; Cox, Smith & Williams, 2008), and enjoy physical activity for its own sake as an expression of one’s physicality (Kentel & Dobson, 2007). For these to occur, physical education must be receptive to more innate ways of knowing the body (Pronger, 2002). In agreement with the preceding critique, this dissertation supports the main goal of physical education as an embodied practice where students can experience their own “being in the world” (Kentel & Dobson, 2007, p. 147) through movement. For this to happen, the physical education community has to reject narrow constructions of ability, athlete development models, hegemonic masculinity and other gendered constructions of the individual, and the instrumental use of physical activity to discipline and control bodies. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of researchers challenging the oppressive and discriminatory practices associated with the social productions of the body, gender, and health, and many have defied the notion of one bodily ideal and instead have provided “a defiant affirmation of multiplicity, a field of differences, or other kinds of bodies and subjectivities” (Grosz, 1994, as cited in Gard and Wright 2005, p.165). Conclusion In this chapter I began by exploring the process of representation in poststructuralist theory. I expanded upon the notion that language is not a mirror to reality. Rather, it is the process of representation through language that is constitutive of reality itself – in the sense that meaning depends on how the world is represented, which creates the world. I then explored the embodiment of fatness, identity construction (subjectivities), and social boundaries. In this, I focused primarily on the biomedical construction of the fat and the (non) healthy body. Here, the embodiment of fat had to do with social boundaries, and therefore, power relations. Lastly, I attempted to problematize the production of the body in physical education by first conceptualizing curriculum and then by exploring the discourses surrounding physical literacy, social class and ability, gender, and health. Throughout this chapter, I weaved in, and at times directly addressed, how the body is both an instrument and a product of power relations; and it is also productive of power relations. In this, the body plays into an intertextual ensemble that, through the establishment of a set of complex relations, elevates particular discourses of the body while suppressing others. In attempting to highlight this, I drew upon both positivist and poststructural research as both are part of the intertextual ensemble’s “circles of texts…[that] produce a discourse on the body through which it can be read and by which its future can be

52 charted” (Pronger, 2002, p. 193). In the following chapter, I outlined the methodology for the proposed study with the aim that it will contribute to the continuing research on positive embodiments in physical education spaces.

Chapter 3. Data Construction and Analysis In the first half of this chapter, I have presented an overview where I outlined the interrelated theoretical and practical approaches to data construction and analysis employed in this poststructuralist study. I have taken into consideration the theoretical constructs, and described the recruitment of participants, choice of setting, interviews, and participation observation and focus group organization. In the second half of the chapter, I have outlined how I analysed discourses within the framework of deconstruction, also referred to as the philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992). In this task, I pragmatically used theory and theorists in the process of “plugging in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 5), which centred the constitutiveness of data/theory/researcher. Overview and Terminology How researchers decide on a methodology or theory is determined not only by the research questions, but also by epistemological and ontological assumptions (Corbin & Strauss, 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 2003), as well as the purpose of the research (Lather, 1992). Methodology, defined by big picture/paradigm/theoretical frameworks, and methods, the “techniques for gathering empirical evidence” (Harding, 1987, as cited in Lather, 1992, p. 87), and the researcher, are inextricably linked. Theory guides the type of methods employed in a particular study, and methods are the doing, or the performance, of the theory (Madison, 2012). In this chapter, I have been primarily concerned with what are traditionally known as methods while asserting the connections between methodology, methods, and researcher. The assumptions underpinning notions of data collection or gathering empirical evidence require clarification. Implicit in modernist notions of data collection is the assumption that a ‘real’ or ‘true’ experience can be found and accurately depicted. All investigations of human interaction necessarily deal with language and interpretation, and are therefore, not a clear window to an objective reality; within qualitative research, there exists no independent reality or data that is untainted by interpretation. Instead, poststructural researchers have called attention to the discursive forces that have gone into the production of data, and thus, talked about data construction “as a means of drawing attention to the way in which data is not found but constructed” (Norman, 2009, p.128, italics in original). Within the process of data construction undertaken in this dissertation, I worked “both within and against interpretivism” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. vii, italics in original). This process gets out of the representational trap of trying to accurately depict what participants mean, or letting the data speak for itself, in a desire to create a neatly coherent narrative bound by themes and patterns (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Data construction therefore avoided the

54 deception that better meaning was to be found in bigger data sets or higher numbers of participants, and that ‘truth’ was protected by strict adherence to rigorous method. Conventional methods, and how they might be applied and understood, do offer an orderly construction of knowledge – a knowledge that would provide reassurance and security from scrutiny knowing that an established process had been followed. Often these methods are depicted within a linear, step-like process with compartmentalized and sequential elements. For example, in some interpretivist research, the sequence is to go from data, to coding, to theory, to meaning, and lastly, representation of data; the order and isolation of each step helping to ensure validity and reliability. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) argued that such a closed system for fixed meaning (reductive patterns and themes generated from coding data) is likely to produce “sameness” and that “a more fertile practice… is to seek the voice that escapes easy classification, and does not make easy sense. It is not a voice that is normative, but one that is transgressive” (p. 4). Yet, this does not mean that I have rejected the use of specific methods; instead, researchers working from the data construction perspective “work the limits (and limitations) of such practices” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. ix). Poststructural thinking is fluid, relational, and contextual. The process I have followed in constructing data can be described as an assemblage: a process of making and unmaking, a jump-cut “from one conceptual flow to another… unpredictable… [and] non-static” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. vii), but not un-related. According to Jackson and Mazzei (2012), an assemblage, as way of dealing with data, was first conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari13. An assemblage requires the discarding of the divisions, while making connections, among i) a field of reality (data, theory, method); ii) a field of representation (producing different knowledge, resisting stable meaning); and iii) a field of subjectivity (becoming-researcher) (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). An assemblage is a process of arrangements and relations (not the arrangement itself) between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these fields. It pays attention to the situatedness, particularities, and constitutiveness of each multiplicity. How different multiplicities enter an assemblage via a process described as “plugging in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 5) is explained later in this chapter. In this context, the assumption in conventional qualitative research that scientific objectivity is upheld by the careful cross-checking of reports, and an agreement between researcher and participants as to what is really happening, is no longer acceptable. Poststructural thought rejects conventional notions of objectivity which effectively silence the power relations inherent in all research. The god-trick of seeing everywhere from nowhere or the unlocatable and thus irresponsible, knowledge claims of objective research are replaced by situated

13 Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei credit Deleuze and Guattari, (1987), and their text, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, with this orientation toward conducting research.

55 knowledges (Haraway, 1991) wherein researchers embed themselves in the research through a conscious self-reflexive positioning (Norman, 2009). Contemporary researchers are increasingly inclined to expect differences in perspective based on gender, class, race, and other factors such that “truth has come to be seen as a thing of many parts, and no one perspective can claim exclusive privilege in the representation thereof” (Angrosino, 2005, p. 731). We have moved from an interest in ‘the truth’ of texts to the ways in which texts are constructed by communities for specific purposes, and to the possible dialogue between communities (Gergen, 1999). Indeed, the term subject, with its implicit colonialist connotations, is sometimes replaced with the notion of a dialogue between researchers and those being described; in this view, dialogue is not a literal conversation between researcher and participants but rather the constituency of multiple, and possibly contradictory voices (Angrosino, 2005, p. 731). I return to the important concept of truth later. In previous chapters, I detailed the orientation of this inquiry to knowledge and reality, and stated the poststructural assumptions used to conceptualize how obesity discourses function in the (re)production of embodied subjectivities. Next, I have outlined the recruitment criteria and setting for the participation of young boys in the physical activity program developed specifically for this dissertation. As part of the study each boy participated in interviews, participant observation and focus group sessions, which I have described and situated within a poststructuralist framework. Later in the chapter, I have elaborated how researchers can analyze discourses as systems that delimit possibilities and realities, and show how the process of plugging in and a philosophy of the limit is compatible with research as data construction and as an assemblage that unsettles the boundaries between fields of reality/ theory/ and subjectivities. Research “is always already relational, political, and ethical work” (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 902) and it is in this vein that I have proceeded. Recruitment of Participants: It’s a Matter of Fat In planning this study, considerable thought was given to participant selection and the setting that had the greatest potential to provide insights into the research questions. The initial criteria for participation, approved by the University of Toronto Office of Research Ethics, called for male participants, ages 12 to 14 years, to identify as ‘overweight’. The final criteria, amended and accepted, was inclusive of boys of all body types. All participants were enrolled in the Near North District School Board, in North Bay, Ontario, and attended physical education classes. The physical activity program for the study, titled Boys in Motion was developed, and conducted by myself at a local community centre, the YMCA of North Bay. The participant recruitment process began in August 2014 and continued until June 2, 2015, when the Boys in Motion Program began. As part of the study, each participant took part in two interviews: an initial interview before the start of the Boys in Motion Program followed by a final interview at

56 the end. The program itself involved 12 participant observation sessions, each immediately followed by a focus group session throughout a period of six weeks. The program ran every Tuesday and Thursday, from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. It started on June 2, 2015 and ended on July 10, 2015. I decided to name the participant observation and focus group components of this study, the Boys in Motion Program, to highlight the capacity of all bodies to move, in one form or another. The aim was to be open to different forms of movement without being tied to any specific form. As a physical education teacher, I knew this was not always an easy task because participants will have their own understandings of physical movement and instructors themselves (myself included) value specific forms of movement over others. I also went into the program with the assumption that all bodies need to move, and that the physical activity needs of some students were not being met in conventional physical education classes (Petherick, 2011; Robertson & Barber, 2011). As one of the participant’s parents told me before the start of the Program, “I'm so glad that someone is looking into addressing the phys. ed. needs of boys like my son” (John’s mother; email communication; May 30, 2015). In this sense, the name of the program was notable for what it did not include. It was not a sports camp, or a fitness camp, or a weight loss boot camp. I knew that it would be challenging to find participants for a project such as this. As reported in a major newspaper, the obese can be counted among the persecuted, discriminated, humiliated, and bullied (The Star, 2012). In the current social environment, “where fighting fat has even become a spectator sport” (Tara, 2016, p. 6), participants and their parents/guardians, might not want to take part in any possible spectacle associated with fatness, including, potentially, research studies. The “combination of dread and fascination” (Tara, 2016, p. 6) with which fatness is viewed has spawned shows like The Biggest Loser. The reality show has attracted an average of 6 million viewers, has run for 17 seasons, and has itself spawned a dozen or more other shows (Tara, 2016), all exploiting a very personal and social fear. I was prepared for the challenge of participant recruitment but did not anticipate the length of time it would take or that it would require a change in participation criteria. I had hoped to recruit approximately ten to twelve boys as this number would allow for the implementation of a wide variety of group activities, and anticipate potential drop-outs. Recruitment proved to be extremely challenging and I was able to recruit only six participants – four of whom self-identified as “overweight” or “above average weight”, and two as “normal”. All of the participants presented as White; The participants ranged from low to upper middle class as judged by where they lived – from cooperative housing to large detached homes in affluent neighbourhoods. All participants completed the study; there were no withdrawals. Below, I describe how the final participant selection criteria and program location were arrived at, and in particular, how concerns over participants’ self-identification as overweight were

57 resolved. The age range of participants, 12 to 14 years, was chosen because it is considered developmentally important. For the boys in this study, middle or junior high school is the transition period from elementary to secondary school. It is a critical time in their development, and issues relating to body image and identity construction are extremely important to their holistic wellbeing and developing sense of identity. Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2007) highlighted the importance of accessing the perspective and experience of the young person claiming or being labeled with a particular identity, and various studies point to this general age group as a critical make-or-break time for students, predictive of later school performance (Rubin, 2007). The majority of available literature treats fatness as a homogenous identity category without much regard to issues of race, gender, class and ethnicity. In response to this, and keeping in mind the example of other critical scholars (see Davies, 1993; Norman, 2009; Sykes, 2011b), I contacted a variety of organizations across different social and cultural locations in order to recruit diversely positioned subjects. As I anticipated that it would be difficult to recruit these participants, my original recruitment posters made no direct mention of overweight or fat but included the caption, “Ever been teased or excluded because of your weight?” (see Appendix A). This was not an attempt to mislead participants as the purpose of the study would be fully explained during the initial communication with the boys and their parents/guardians. Rather, the wording on the poster reflected an awareness of fatness as an unintelligible subjectivity and for participants to accept that subject position was to in some way accept the pathology that has been heaped onto bigger bodies as weak, irresponsible, and unmotivated (Gard & Wright, 2005). However, at the start of the recruitment process, when I approached the local Public Health Unit asking to use their notice boards, they insisted that the posters (and effectively the study) be inclusive of all body types. They refused to distribute the study advertisement poster except on the condition that the Boys in Motion Program accept all body types. Specifically, they objected to the line, “Ever been teased or excluded because of your weight?” (see Appendix A). Having worked with individuals who had been marginalized because of body size, the Health Unit was aware of the tremendous power of obesity discourses to stigmatize overweight bodies, and were rightfully concerned that the recruitment process (and study) could potentially do further harm. They were concerned that a program that would only accept fat boys would essentially identify fat boys as in need of correction. It was possible to simply omit the Health Unit in the recruiting efforts given that there were a host of other options. I could advertise in all the public schools and many other organizations. After full consideration, it became increasingly apparent that the recruitment of strictly overweight boys could potentially cause harm to participants. Rather than protect these boys, a segregated program would further entrench the notion that society treated them differently. In view of this development, the original ethical commitments of the study had

58 to be reconsidered. My thesis supervisor and I agreed that the inclusion of all body types best protected the wellbeing of participants. Therefore, I changed the wording on the recruitment posters to reflect a program “inclusive of all body types and especially geared for boys with bigger bodies” (see Appendix B). This change in participant recruitment required an Ethics Review Board amendment that was sought and granted. All participants were recruited with the latter wording. As part of the recruitment process, I led talks and workshops with over 500 students in the Near North District School Board. I also posted advertisements and recruitment posters at numerous community locations and organizations where students and their parents/guardians were known to frequent. These included: schools; local health units; Nipissing University; youth community centres and youth organizations including Big Brothers Big Sisters; the YMCA; the North Bay Nugget newspaper; City of North Bay Events website, the Indian Friendship Centre, the North Bay Public Library, Kijiji North Bay community events; and local grocery stores and shops. The Boys in Motion Program was also the focus of an interview on CBC Radio North (aired June 3, 2015; interviewer Jason Turnbull); and another on CTV Television Northern Ontario (aired June 5, 2015; interviewer Cindy Males). The main recruitment strategy was to be invited by school administrators and teachers to do workshops and presentations on the topic of body image, and in doing so gain access to potential participants. The workshops included segregated single sex classes and mixed (co-ed) classes. One larger presentation included a group of approximately 100 students in the school auditorium. The activities for my workshops/presentations drew from the teaching resource Embodying Equity: Body Image as an Equity Issue authored by Carla Rice and Vanessa Russell (2002). In particular, activities dealing with the changing notions of the ideal body served to structure my presentation (see Appendix C). My aim in interactions with students was twofold. First, a purpose was to show how ideals of attractive bodies have changed and continue to change – they are social constructions – and for that reason, we might not want to get too caught up in such representations of beauty. Secondly, the teacher in me wanted participants to leave feeling good about their own bodies. I started these presentations with images of what were considered ideals of beauty during different time periods, and in different cultures. I showed a picture of the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, and then we considered a modern version of the same woman with make-up, hair colour, skin whitening, and cosmetic surgery. Throughout different historical periods, there were oscillations in body shapes and sizes with a general trend toward more slender women in the new millennium, and more muscular, yet leaner, and more defined men. I explained to students that it had been difficult to find pictures of males without their shirts on before the 1980s. Those that I found tended to appear in-role as in the examples of bodybuilders, strongmen, or in swimsuits like actors Burt Lancaster (and Deborah Kerr), in the classic movie From Here to Eternity. Even the actor,

Sylvester Stallone in the first Rocky movie usually appeared in full workout gear with a long- sleeved shirt or hoodie. It was only in the later Rocky movies that his shirtless, and increasingly lean and muscled body began to appear in tabloids and billboards. We discussed why this might be so. One of my observations was that students were very hesitant to describe bodies, particularly bodies judged to be overweight. I explained that they were right to be careful how they used words because words could be used to hurt people, and to discriminate. I asked what words they had heard being used to describe bodies. Usually, I helped to start the conversation by presenting a list that included: thin, skinny, fat, phat, overweight, big, obese, and large. There was a very strong reluctance to use the word, fat. For this young group of students, fat was a very disrespectful and derogatory term. They clearly rejected its use and appeared surprised that I included it in the list. They appeared undecided about the appropriateness of using the word overweight, and I quickly learned that the preferred term was “big” or “bigger”. Each presentation concluded with an opportunity for participants to think, write, or draw positively about their body, to feel good about themselves. At the end of my talk I would also describe the Boys in Motion Program and ask interested students to pick up a poster. Very few students picked one up to take home to show to parents, and the ones who did usually preferred to wait until the rest of the group was exiting the classroom. Even with focused recruitment efforts, the stigma attached to fatness proved to be hard to overcome. Very few boys were saying, “Pick me”. The Boys in Motion Program appeared appealing and inclusive and I am not sure what more could have been done to help with recruitment, either to reduce the length of time it took to find participants or to increase their number. The posters and other recruitment efforts were widely distributed and the program itself was free, and took place at a well-known and respected organization (the YMCA) at a convenient time (immediately after school and before dinner). After ten months of recruitment, there were only six participants signed up. This was short of the intended number, but I decided to proceed because of facility availability, and a decision to delay would also mean extending the program too far into the summer school break when students would be busy with other activities. Reflecting on the recruitment process, I believe that the change in wording to an emphasis on bigger boys and not fat or overweight boys is what actually allowed me to recruit any participants at all. I have addressed this claim and theorized the difference between discourses of fatness and bigness in Chapter four. Also, the change in participation criteria improved the study. Most notably the study was not exclusive of any body type; two participants who self-identified as being of normal weight were able to participate. This was no longer a study just for fat boys. Moreover, I was able to observe the interactions between differently self-identified participants and gain perspectives from their standpoints.

Setting In the search for a location in which to conduct the activity program for the study, I considered working directly with institutions or organizations that had, as part of their membership, boys in the 12 to 14 years age group. Organizations such as community centres, youth organizations, health centres, and sports organizations would already have the space, equipment, and perhaps experience with health or physical activity based programs. After consulting with a few such groups, I concluded that conducting research within existing organizations/programs was not desirable for a variety of reasons. First, it pre-selected and limited participants to available members. For example, Norman (2009), working in two pre- established community programs was able to explore issues of fatness with youth members all of whom identified as normal bodied. Second, piggy-backing on organizations that had identified at-risk populations raised concerns that participants may not participate of their own volition. Third, there was the risk of having to follow established policies, procedures, and expectations which greatly increased the possibility of reproducing existing discourses in already established settings and programs. Fourth and last, some organizations might have seen my program as similar to some of their offerings and consider it unwanted competition. Studies that have provided some of the most valuable insights regarding the embodied perspectives of children reported considerable time working with participants in co-created spaces (see for example Davies, 1993; Rice & Russell, 2002); that is, they may have used existing organizations for their facilities and membership but created new spaces and programs within which to conduct the research. Wolcott (1994) also counselled beginning researchers against going back to the site they know best. which, for me, would be to observe physical education classes. In returning to familiar settings few things stand out, and the tendency is to go straight to evaluation without much observation. For this study, I also felt it was important to provide participants with a different environment and opportunity than they would normally receive in traditional physical education classes. In the search for a physical space to conduct the study, I applied for and received a gymnasium permit from the Near North District School Board. Unfortunately, I was later informed that there were no time slots available that would be convenient for my participants. I then contacted the YMCA, and after providing a Police Services Criminal Record Check and receiving YMCA Ethics approval, they generously donated the facilities to conduct the study (racquetball court, gymnasium, and meeting area) and allowed us to use their sports equipment. In addition, since none of the participants were members of the YMCA, each received a free-of- charge day pass throughout the duration of the program. Interviews and Voice The traditional understanding of the interview as a tool for gathering objective data to

61 be used neutrally for scientific purposes has been replaced, in qualitative research, by an acceptance of the interview as “inextricably and unavoidably historically, politically, and contextually bound” (Fontana & Frey, 2005, p. 695). Interviews in poststructuralism are not expected to provide “consistent non-contradictory accounts of the world” (Davies, 1993, p. xv). The very concept of ‘truth’ is problematic in that it produces one right way of looking at the world, often aligned with dominant systems of power. Rather, poststructuralism is concerned with systems of knowledge that produce truth effects. If interviews do not represent truth, it follows, in poststructural terms, that they are not a view into an accurate representation of the self but rather allow access to an understanding of how and with what cultural resources participants narratively construct culturally meaningful or “intelligible” identities (Norman, 2009, p. 142). Data construction methods informed by poststructural thought necessarily challenge the modernist assumptions of the agentic, unitary subject. Language is central in the construction of the subject in that the subject is constituted in, and through, their positioning in discourse; as they make themselves a culturally intelligible subject, the subject is already within “a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and maintained” (Butler, 1990, p. 33). Poststructuralist subjects do not stand outside, nor do they exist prior to the discourses they take up and employ. Rather, discourse sets the very possibilities and boundaries for the existence of the agentic subject. Thus, the current research is concerned with how participants take up and employ dominant and marginal discourses in the creation of embodied subjectivities. Questions in this regard include: What are the truth effects of specific health, gender, and body discourses as they constitute the fat subject? And, what is the system of relations that allow those particular discourses to be acceptable, and indeed accepted, in particular contexts? To remove the subject from the constraints of language and discourse is to accept a subject who willfully speaks themselves into being; that is, to privilege voice. As Jackson & Mazzei (2012) describe: The privileging of voice in traditional qualitative research assumes that voice makes

present the truth and reflects the meaning of an experience that has already happened.

This is the voice that, in traditional qualitative research, is heard and then recorded,

coded, and categorized as normative containable data. (p. 3, italics in original)

The counterstance to the privileging of voice is that “all narratives tell one story in place of another story” (Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, as cited in Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. ix). When participants share their experiences, it is “something that has been filtered, processed, and already interpreted” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 3) such that data and analysis are always “partial and incomplete” and in place of other “re-tellings and re-memberings” (Jackson &

Mazzei, 2012, p. ix). The fact that something is represented and not something else refers to not only the data but, as a consequence, also the analysis. Therefore, in this dissertation, you will not find generalized narratives that speak to the essence of the embodied subjectivities of the participants. You will find individual data segments viewed across different perspectives in a manner that “opens up and diffracts, rather than crystalizes, representation” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. ix). The methodological implications of decentering voice are that researchers question what we ask of data as told by participants, question what we hear and how we hear (our own privilege and authority in listening and telling), and deconstruct why one story is told and not another (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Important questions to consider in this context include: What are the limits of voice in the production of embodied subjects? How can the working of voice in a poststructuralist framework be productive of meaning, both comfortable and uncomfortable, as opposed to re-productive of normativities that have already been articulated? The pre- and post-study interviews in this inquiry took the form of semi-structured interviews. Many of the questions were open-ended. I chose this approach because it guided the interaction by focusing on a limited number of issues yet allowed participants the freedom to frame and structure their responses, as they saw fit. Participants were encouraged to take the time they needed in order to explore their own ideas during responses. In this manner, semi- structured interviews seek to understand rather than explain, are respectful of the participants’ contributions to the research, and help address power imbalances between researcher and participant (Fontana & Frey, 2005, pp. 705-706, 717). Also, from my researcher’s perspective, semi-structured interviews allow the researcher to explore, probe, and follow-up on emerging themes. Each semi-structured interview was between 30 minutes and one hour in length, and explored each participant’s embodied physical education experiences, as well as ideas on health and the body. The timing of the initial (pre-study) interview – before the participant observation and focus groups sessions – was important. Also, parents/guardians were always present which allowed them to vet me, and ask questions about the Boys in Motion Program. These interviews also provided the boys with an opportunity to get to know me before meeting the other participants. The initial interview also allowed me to get to know the participants, and helped in the initial structuring of the participant observation and focus group sessions. The final (post- study) interview provided the boys with the opportunity to express thoughts individually and helped to identity any changes they experienced as a result of participation in the research. The lists of interview questions (Appendix E: Pre-study Interview and Appendix F: Post-study Interview) are based on similar questions employed by critical researchers exploring issues of embodiment in physical education (see Larkin & Rice, 2005; Sykes, 2011b).

All interviews were audio taped using the “Garage Band” software program on my lap top computer and a portable audio recorder as backup. I transcribed the audio files to Microsoft Word documents shortly after each interview. Handwritten notes were taken during the interviews as a reminder for further probes or as personal notes. The interviews were conducted in a location agreeable to both parties and all interviews took place in the presence of a parent/guardian. The complete procedure was outlined verbally before the interviews, as well as in written form on consent forms. Participant Observation and Looking The materiality of bodies is central to the construction of identity (Grogan & Richards, 2002; Kirk, 2004; Shilling, 1991). Yet, in the construction of male masculinity, males rarely talk about their bodies as biological entities because such talk is considered “feminine practice” (Norman, 2009, p. 17). Men “are ubiquitous in positions of power everywhere… [but] woman alone seems to have gender since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on difference between the sexes in which the standard has always been man” (Kimmel, 2005, p. 5). Paradoxically men are the “invisible” gender – at least to themselves (Kimmel, 2005). The inability to talk about concerns and insecurities regarding our materiality renders bodily matters a difficult topic to address. This presented a challenge for a study whose purpose was to identify the workings of the salient cultural, social, and corporeal resources boys used in constructing embodied identities. Part of my solution was to observe the body in action, using participant observation. These sessions allowed me to pay close attention to how participants moved in physical activity settings, how they used their bodies, and how they reacted to other bodies and objects. I was sensitive to the shift in observation based research in which new roles for the qualitative researcher are emerging in response to a greater consciousness of situational identities, and issues of relative power (Angrosino & Pérez, 2000). Who is doing the “looking” has important implications for this study, and I took care to position myself in the research. I do not claim to have observed participants in a ‘natural’ setting, as research settings are the “products of inherently ‘unnatural’ colonial relationships” (Angrosino, 2005, p. 729). Rather, I observed participants in settings that were the result of historical, social, and power-laden processes. This position recognizes that ‘pure’ observation is impossible to achieve in practice, and ethically questionable. Functioning in the context of collaborative research because depictions can hardly exist without the researcher being part of the account, and my desire to further a more progressive and equitable social agenda, I accepted the role of “active member researcher” (Angrosino, 2005, p. 733), as one who becomes involved with the central activities of the group, and takes an active interest in necessary social reform (Angrosino, 2005). Next, I describe what a researcher actually looks for in participant observation.

Observation is an esoteric process in that what to look for, how to look, and why we look, are all inextricably connected (Wolcott, 1994). On the myth of unbiased observation, Angrosino (2005) noted that what is described is influenced by previous experiences and includes interpretation as well as sensory reporting. From a poststructuralist perspective, it is impossible to observe an event without simultaneously constructing that event. In response to the critiques against poststructuralism that inevitably come from such a position, researchers must be transparent in their political, social, and intellectual affiliations. Mindful of the active role of the researcher and the assumptions inherent in the process of observation, I developed the participant observations sessions for the Boys in Motion Program (Appendix G). During these sessions, I met with the boys twice weekly over a period of six weeks. These were movement-based sessions where they had the opportunity to participate in a variety of physical activities. Each session lasted approximately one hour and the sessions were conducted either inside the YMCA (racquetball court or gymnasium) or outside in the playing field, weather permitting; and, once we met at a golf practice facility. As the study went on, I encouraged the boys to take leadership of the Boys in Motion Program, and to develop and implement their own activities with me in the role of facilitator (i.e., provide equipment, book facilities, etc.). As they had greater input regarding the type of activities, there was the stipulation that everyone had to agree on the activity. The participant observation sessions served to provide discussion topics and key themes for the focus group discussions that immediately followed. These sessions also helped to identify differences between participants’ actions and the narratives that arose during discussions. I was particularly interested in observing whether participants would re-enact the activities and discourses learned in physical education classes, or whether they would resist and challenge those same discourses by developing their own narratives and embodied practices. That is, if participants might “exert a counterforce within the system through the interruptions they devise” (Wolcott, 1994, p. 162). All observations were recorded as field notes immediately after each session. They were hand-written and transferred to a Microsoft Word document as soon as possible. Focus Groups Focus groups are considered a form of group interview that can be effectively used to complement participant observation (Fontana & Frey, 2005). In their exploration of the function of focus groups, Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) noted that focus groups allow researchers to "explore the nature and effects of ongoing social discourse in ways that are not possible through individual interviews or observations” (p. 902). More specifically, focus groups serve to highlight important interactional and synergistic dynamics that constitute much of social practice that, by its very nature, is inaccessible during individual interviews.

What may seem unimportant individually may take on greater relevance in a group setting. Participants in focus groups may feel more comfortable in talking about and exploring their experiences with peers compared to one-on-one interviews. In this sense, they can be used to elicit, explore, and validate “collective testimonies and group resistance narratives" (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 897). Related to this, focus groups can allow participants to “own” the interview space, and can be used strategically by the researcher to limit his or her authority (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). On the other hand, focus groups are not without their challenges (Fontana & Frey, 2005). Emerging relationships within the group may interfere with individual expression. Some participants may feel the need to act a certain way or establish power hierarchies. Another possible outcome is “group think” where particular health, gender, and body discourses may be continuously reproduced. Part of my role was to manage discussions so that every participant felt comfortable enough to freely state their thoughts without feeling they were being judged. I encouraged responses from each group member, and managed the role of group interviewer (attention to general themes) with that of moderator (sensitivity to evolving patterns of group interaction) (Fontana & Frey, 2005). At times, group discussions gravitated toward topics that did not appear to be of interest to the study; this was expected, and a necessary part of respecting the knowledge and experiences that participants brought to the group. With the goal of establishing a respectful group environment, we first co-created ground rules for group interaction, and determined group objectives with the help of all participants. This provided an early opportunity for cooperative activity and trust building. Focus groups in the present study (Appendix G) helped to share narratives, challenged specific lived contradictions, and built trust among members allowing for a more collaborative, synergistic, and complex research text about group and personal experiences (see Fontana & Frey, 2005). Our focus groups also provided the time together to: produce small group and individual works; write journal entries; debrief and reflect on the previous participant observation session; introduce and discuss various topics; deal with concerns; and plan future sessions. Each focus group meeting took place immediately after the participant observation session. Each lasted approximately 30 minutes, and was audio taped using the “Garage Band” software program on my lap top computer and a portable audio recorder as back-up. Handwritten notes were also taken as a reminder for further probes or as personal notes. I transcribed the audio files and handwritten notes to Microsoft Word documents shortly after each focus group session.

Prior to participation in any portion of the study, participants and their parents/guardians were given, and signed, an information letter containing parental consent and participant assent forms (see Appendix D). The letter contained information outlining the study, purpose, and

66 relevant information required before signing the consent forms. It contained my contact information as well as that of my supervisor. Participants were informed that their participation was completely voluntary, and they could choose to withdraw from the study at any time. They could also choose not to answer any of the interview questions or participate in any of the activities at any point without judgment, coercion, or harm. There was no direct financial cost associated with participation except for, perhaps, transportation costs. Participants were offered, but none required, student public transport tickets. Participants were informed that all personal information pertaining to the study was confidential and would be kept in a secure location; also, their personal identity would be protected by the use of pseudonyms throughout the study, and in any future publications or presentations linked to the study. Approval for this study, including both versions of the recruitment poster, was granted from the Office of Research Ethics at OISE/UT. All data collected was with the explicit permission of the participants and their parents/guardians, and in full compliance with the University of Toronto Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education Research Ethics Board. The data that was collected included: i) interview audio recordings and written notes; ii) participant observation session field notes; iii) focus group audio recordings and field notes; and iv) participant diaries and notes. Participants’ raw data (e.g., journals, audio recordings) were stored in a locked cabinet in the researcher’s home or university office. All transcribed data, field notes, analysis, and write-up were only identified by pseudonyms and kept in a password- protected personal computer. The codes for the pseudonyms were kept in a separate, secure location in the researcher’s home. Ethical approval by other institutions affiliated with the research was also sought and received. Approval for all body image workshops/presentations for students and the posting of recruitment advertisements was granted by the Near North District School Board. As I was also a faculty member of Nipissing University at the time of the research, institutional approval was sought and granted by the Office of Research Ethics at Nipissing University. Lastly, approval for use the YMCA facilities in which to conduct the Boys in Motion Program was granted by the YMCA of North Bay. Discourse Analysis and Deconstruction The analysis of discourse is contested terrain with a range of forms emerging from different disciplinary environments such as linguistics and sociolinguistics, sociology and social psychology, education and others (Potter, 2008). This leads to considerable terminological confusion. Be that as it may, the general goal of discourse analysis is to explore how meanings are produced within narrative accounts (e.g., in conversations, interviews, movement repertoires, or any other text) (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008). From a poststructuralist perspective, there is no definitive set of methods for the analysis of texts; however, a primary

67 concern is how a set of statements comes to constitute objects and subjects (Perakyla & Ruusuvuori, 2011, p. 530). In the analysis of data, I was concerned with how "issues are defined as problems in the texts and how the styles of reasoning are reformed or stabilized in time and across different types of data" (Perakyla & Ruusuvuori, 2011, p. 532). In more comprehensive terms, discourse analysis is used to describe the process of capturing regularities of meaning (patterns in language use) as these are “constitutive of discourses and to show how discourses in turn constitute aspects of society and the people within it” (Taylor, 2001, as cited in Wright, 2003, p. 22) with emphasis on context and power relations (Potter, 2008). Discourse analysis is indebted to Derrida’s work on deconstruction and Foucault’s work on the normalizing, regulatory, and prescriptive tendencies within contemporary biological and social science disciplines (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008). Deconstruction is widely “used to refer to critiques that show the artificial or arbitrary nature of categories that seem natural… [but] in a narrow sense, deconstruction refers to an intellectual project initiated by Jacques Derrida that involves philosophical claims and a specific methodology” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 196). Deconstruction means to make explicit the implicit assumptions in texts by demonstrating how rhetorical devices function to position individuals within dominant regimes of truth (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008). In other words, the task is to reveal the ways in which power secrets itself discursively in seemingly apolitical texts (Pronger, 2002). Paradox is typical in deconstruction and “by showing how concepts that seem to refer to one thing are also referring to their opposites, deconstruction rattles conventional views and forces a reconfiguration of how the world is viewed” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 2). The analysis is deconstructive in that the researcher simultaneously demonstrates what ‘truths’ or discourses are being produced and what alternative perspectives or positions are dismissed or marginalized (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008). My greater point here is not to accurately set the parameters for discourse analysis and deconstruction, if it were possible from a poststructural perspective; instead it is that deconstruction, as a process suitable for adaptation, has seeped into discourse analysis in general. Discourse analysis rests on the workings of language in the construction of meaning, and thus objects. Because meaning does not exist prior to and apart from representational systems, its mediated production occurs in complex and intricate ways, and any account of experience will inevitably be located within a complex network of power relations (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008). Within the boundaries of language, the individual “is a subject and is subjected to dominant discourses that often impose predetermined meaning” (Miller, 2010, p. 680). One of the key assumptions in an analysis of language is that as people talk, write, and create meanings in social contexts, they are making choices that are limited by the availability of meaning-making tools. Not all individuals have access to the same cultural and institutional resources and therefore not everyone is equally free to make choices. Some possibilities are

68 more available than others, and indeed not all ways of acting and meaning making are equally valued in all social contexts (Wright, 2003). In this manner, discourse analysis (and poststructuralism in general) “targets the very idea of [unitary] identity, offering an alternative view of the world that focuses on difference instead of identity” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 2). This makes it a particularly powerful tool for studying how the participants in this study constructed embodied subjectivities from the socio-cultural resources they had available. At this point I would like to return to the concept of truth in relation to discourses. In keeping with the conceptualization of knowledge as socially constructed, poststructural researchers are concerned with how individuals, groups, cultures and institutions construct realities and with what effects (Wright, 2003). That is, to analyze a discourse is not to say what it means or to secure “the last and only word” (Gergen, 1999, p. 58). Rather, it is to investigate how it works, what conditions make it possible, what is gained and what is lost, and how it intersects with other discourses as well as cultural and institutional practices. In doing so, the information that is collected can be only partial, situated in terms of time and place and viewed in the context of the specific situation and community. Since a key aspect of this project was to map how embodied identities are constituted in and through discourse, it was important for me to describe how discourses are identified in the data, and analyzed. When one works from the poststructuralism perspective of data construction where multiple interpretations are embraced and “we insert ourselves as researchers into the data” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012, p. 11), then it is important to explicitly describe the processes involved. I began by noting that some discourses may emerge from unanticipated directions, while others may be previously identified in the literature. As such, there are at least two directions from which to approach discourse analysis. The first more grounded approach, as it relates most directly to language (used in the broadest sense to include interviews, ways of moving, educational curricula and others), is to look for patterns in meaning-making through an analysis of specific data episodes. Since a fundamental belief of poststructuralism is that individuals, in constituting narratives, draw on both dominant and marginal discourses already circulating in their social and cultural contexts, “the task when working from this direction is to determine where these are found, who else is articulating them, with what power do they speak (or write) and with what effects” (Wright, 2003, p. 24). In this approach, starting with the study of the specific data texts, the work was to connect data to the explicit cultural resources or discourses that a participant used in formulating a narrative. Here, “discourse analysis moves outward toward the broad social picture to examine how language use reproduces or challenges power relations” (Larkin & Rice, 2005, p. 221) that sustain their presence. The second strategy is to approach from the side of existing discourses and the texts that may be used by participants (including objects like school books or sport and health

69 magazines) in accessing those discourses. Here, the empirical task was to start by identifying the “institutional and cultural texts which are likely to serve as important sources for the discourses which constitute the field of inquiry” (Wright, 2003, p. 24). Texts from relevant sources “will provide indication of how discourses are constituted and how these become invested with personal and cultural desires, needs, and so on” (Wright, 2003, p. 24). For example, texts on fitness will include examples of how to perform different exercises, but a fit body only becomes a desirable goal when connected to cultural ideals of attractiveness or athletic prowess14. So, a connection has to be made between the text and cultural practices/desires as constituted through discourse. In a research protocol this can be done via interviews or focus groups, as in the present study. Currently, there is a growing body of literature identifying the circulating discourses, dominant and otherwise (for example, see Evans, Davies, & Wright, 2004; Gard & Wright, 2005; Robinson & Randall, 2016; Sykes, 2011b; Sykes & McPhail, 2008) Lastly, discourses needed to be documented to show how they worked, and with what effects. From my perspective, both approaches are similar but working in different directions: starting with texts internal to the study (participant data) and working ‘outward’ toward circulating discourses or starting with pre-existing texts and circulating discourses and moving ‘inward’ about participants’ experiences of them (participant data). Both approaches involve identifying relations between circulating socio-cultural discourses and specific texts. These connections must be described in terms of the local context including “details such as location of the exchange, characteristics associated with that space, other participants engaged in the discussion, and embodied characteristics that might help in making sense of the narrative, including body size and race, for instance” (Norman, 2009, p. 123). The set of relations among elements (for example, institutions, forms of knowledge, and socio-political processes) that make the discourse viable must also be identified: that is, the systems of ideas, concepts and categories that support the discourse; the modes of inquiry; the conditions that determine who can speak with authority; the registration of problems; and the forms of intervention (Escobar, 2012)15. In this step, connecting local themes to the broader social contexts, “is where the interpretative analysis and real political work begins” (Norman, 2009, p. 125). Of interest, is the disclosing of how the “implicit and explicit narratives together inter-lock with the dynamics of the localized context in the production of relevant subject positions… [how a participant] literally “talks” himself into partial, situated, and embodied subject position” (Norman, 2009, p. 125).

14 In adapting this example, I am indebted to Jan Wright’s (2003) illustration on thinness. 15 Arturo Escobar was specifically addressing development discourses in Third World countries but the workings of discourse apply generally.

Lastly, there are realities rendered invisible or only hinted at by dominant discourses. An ethical stance for a researcher committed to political and inclusionary work requires an openness to what lies outside of discourse and language. This approach will be expanded upon later in the section on the “philosophy of the limit” (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002). Criticisms and strengths of discourse analysis. Critiques aimed at discourse analysis in general, and deconstruction specifically, claim that they are simply interested in the elitist, intellectual activity of taking apart the vagaries of language, leaving the ethical work of concrete political action to other approaches better able to grasp the material reality of lived lives (Pronger, 2002). The criticism alleges that poststructuralism does not address in any effective way the fact that “oppression is a brute reality” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 198) resulting from systems that perpetuate privilege in the contexts of class, race, gender, sexuality, body size and others, and does not sufficiently attend to corporeal or embodied aspects of subjectivity16. These criticisms fail to take into account the nuanced ways and political commitments that come with an understanding of how discourse works. In defense of poststructuralism, postructuralist approaches do not attempt to identify a foundational truth or ahistorical explanation; rather, these approaches pay close attention to context. In this respect, discourse analysis is explicitly political in that it delves into “whose interests are served, and whose interests are marginalized, by discourses that gain hegemony and authority” (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008, p. 78). Any approach that has served to question the ways in which social, economic, cultural, and bodily systems impose limits on human possibilities is inherently political (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002). Their power lies not in an accurate reading of reality but in the usefulness that the mapping of oppressive discourses may have in bringing about change. By attending closely to “the socio-political context of discourse and attempting to show how people are positioned by (or resist) dominant discourses… [discourse analysis] is better able to identify structural rather than individual change strategies” (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008, p. 78; italics in original). In moving away from truth finding and toward a diffracted reading of the function and effects of discourse, the researcher can address how useful the analysis may be for participants. This fosters a participatory approach (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2008), particularly for members of marginalized groups who are often the targets of truth finding initiatives. For instance, instead of assuming that obesity is an acontextual disease and focusing on causal questions (i.e., etiology of the disease), the discourse analysis might conceptualize how contemporary biomedical discourses about obesity converge on boys’ experiences of obesity. This is not to say that there is no role for contemporary medicine in the study of obesity; it is to challenge

16 For more detailed responses to these critiques than I have provided here see Cornell (1992), Pronger (2002), and Sykes (2011b).

71 rather, that contemporary medicine has discovered the one and final truth about fat and the body (including in a medical sense). It is to say that contemporary medicine is not the only way to look at obesity, or perhaps, even the most helpful. It is to accept that obesity is a medical, biologically-based concern in some instances, and also to appeal to the contextual socio-cultural realities in understanding obesity. In this way, while studying obesity, the researcher could challenge positivist notions of obesity while exploring participants’ experience of obesity without blaming them for ‘having obesity’. Specifically, one could look at participants’ lived experiences, and contemporary health and physical education discourses that affect their interpretation of their experience17. Therefore, to reply to the charges of elitism and apoliticism, discourse analysis works by exposing seemingly common-sense, harmless, and well-intentioned systems that nonetheless do violence, both psychic and physical, to our potential for living full lives (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002; Sykes, 2011b). As I have noted, in mapping discourses, one has to explore the conditions under which certain discourses (for example, discourses of health, fatness, and hegemonic masculinity) come to create the taken-for-granted figures they produce (constructions of toned bodies, the fat boy, and the muscular, athletic, heterosexual male, respectively). In other words, one has to map how certain oppositional discourses reify and essentialize their own version of what it is they have created. However, if one of the main objectives of a poststructural analysis is to “critically interrogate social relationships and social practices” (Fawcett, 2008, p. 669, italics mine), the difficulty lies in the fact that in mapping these discourses the same discursive grid is used. This paradoxically serves to maintain the outlines of the original discourse – in effect, reproducing it. As a solution, Taubman (1982) suggested a strategic essentialism whereby the necessity of temporarily anchoring re-articulated figures was recognized. To put a signifier (such as data, truth, obesity) “under erasure is to expose the uncertainty of what that signifier might be or could become … under erasure is to engage in the process of using them [signifiers] and troubling them simultaneously; rendering them inaccurate yet necessary” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 18). This was one approach I considered. Another, that I found more appropriate to the analysis of bodily difference, and which was addressed below, was the philosophy of the limit. But first, I have described a different approach for dealing with data, one that disrupts the traditional fields of reality, representation, and subjectivity. This approach has been termed “plugging in” by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, as cited in Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 1), and operationalized in Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei’s text, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (2012).

17 In this instance, I want to acknowledge Cosgrove and McHugh’s (2008) explanation of using discourse analysis to study women’s experiences of depression, whose example I mirrored.

Plugging in. In this dissertation, I have made use of many concepts and authors. This approach stemmed from a commitment to deconstruct practices that limit the appearance of the body in order that there may be a “compassionate openness” to body shape and size with the “profound potential for freedom” (Pronger, 2002, p. 21). This is a pragmatic approach that makes selective use of theory and theorists without being bound to a “unified and comprehensive system of thought that remains in some way true to traditional interpretations” (Pronger, 2002, p. 21). This is a move from a single truth, microscopic approach to a multitude of telescopic opportunities; not a signifying of reality but an openness and permeability to rhizomatic possibilities (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). It is a form of writing about which Deleuze and Guatari (1987) commented, “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 19). Pronger (2002) adds, “truth may occur … not in the precision of the correspondence between words on the page and some external reality, but in the event of unconcealment in the reader or in other deconstructive, contemplative practices that [the] text may facilitate” (p. 19). As introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the process of thinking with data and theory at the same time involves the dismantling of conventional barriers between reality, representation, and ourselves. Adapting the process described as “plugging in” by Jackson and Mazzei (2012, p.5), involved three moves: 1. disrupting the theory/data/researcher triangle by decentering each and showing how the elements constituted or made one another; 2. allowing analytical questions to think with and emerge in the middle of plugging in. Put differently, specific questions were made possible by specific theories; 3. showing suppleness of theory and data when plugged in; interrogating how they constituted each other. Plugging in made use of the metaphor of the threshold as a non-linear passage for both entries and exits that only have meaning when connected to other things. It was in the process of putting data and theory into the threshold that new analytical questions were created and new insights formed. As Jackson and Mazzei (2012) described their process, “the data were not centered or stabilized, but used as brief stopping points and continuously transformed ... as we used theory to turn the data into something different, and we used data to push theory to its limit” (p. 6). The threshold was engaged “as a site of transformation”, yet, the thinking with theory exercise “can be considered determined and dated, [as] arrested in the threshold… to signify temporary meaning that can escape and transform at any moment” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 6, italics in original). The idea that meaning can be briefly “arrested”, before escaping and

73 moving on, suggests a temporality, and presents an invitation to the reader; the assemblage is not a coherent and fully developed system of thought that the reader enters or not, but instead a “toolbox” that “pack[s] a potential in the way a crowbar or willing hand evokes an energy of prying (Massumi, 1992, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 20). The reader “is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book and incarnate it” in their own medium (Massumi, 1992, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 20, italics in original). Thus, to plug in was to “work with unstable subjects and concepts-on-the-move that would intervene in a process to diffract, rather than foreclose, thought… [it was] to help extend a thinking at the limit” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 5). Next, in my selective use of theorist and theories, I enlisted Drucilla Cornell (1992) and Brian Pronger (2002) to describe how to engage deconstruction and a thinking at the limit of systems in the “Philosophy of the Limit”. Philosophy of the limit. One of the attacks against deconstruction is that almost by the negativity of the term itself, the approach is accused of a type of nihilistic reductionism resulting in “unreconstructible litter… [that] renders political action impossible” (Pronger, 2002, p 12). That is, if you dismantle all categories and constructs then you are left with nothing with which to work. To counter such a misunderstanding, Cornell (1992) has suggested renaming the deconstruction project, “the philosophy of the limit”. Pronger (2002) embraced this approach in his analysis of the technology of physical fitness, and in the philosophy of the limit we see traces of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) pragmatics philosophy, and Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) plugging in. I have mentioned these authors, not to imply that they all employed a coordinated approach, or that my methods are the same, but in the spirit of acknowledgement and appreciation of what has come before, to alert the reader to similarities in dealing with data – an intertextual and dialogic relation in both orientation and process. Every system, in its functioning as a system, imposes limits on reality, thus producing specific realities. Such limits “preclude our engaging in fully and genuinely ethical relationships with material reality, which in turn undermines our political power to formulate alternative constructions of reality” (Pronger, 2002, p. 12). Systems are defined by sets of relations that establish what is valued, permissible, and even imaginable. These sets of relations produce specific realities – the same realities the system espouses – trapping those who would wish to go beyond them, and those for whom the realities simply do not apply or have no attraction. These limits are real in a very literal sense. For example, Pronger (2002) argues that the legitimacy and power of science (and the physical education and biomedical communities in relation to this study) goes beyond status or prestige. Discourses are powerful not because of their reputation but because they are so effective at changing the world. They are powerful at inscribing themselves, and their limits, on the materiality of bodies; they produce the world they describe. As Arthurs and Grimshaw (1999) noted “the body is itself the subject of constant social

74 inscription; it is discursively constructed and ‘written’ on by innumerable forms of social discipline” (as cited in Garrett, 2004a, p. 140). But “the very establishment of the system as a system implies a beyond to it, precisely by virtue of what it excludes” (Cornell, 1992, p. 1, italics in original). In the elements and relations of a system, one can begin to see what is beyond it. That beyond consists of what the system excludes, by virtue of either “what it cannot comprehend or of what it prohibits in order to accomplish its systematic objectives” (Pronger, 2002, p. 13). Pronger (2002) argued that the philosophy of the limit is particularly well suited to reveal “the hidden and oppressive operations of power in everyday discourses” (p.11). All discourses or systems of thought impose structural limits on the potential for being which in turn erode possibilities for ethical relationships with ourselves, others, and the material world. The philosophy of the limit seeks to expose what dominant discourses make Other, and how such exclusions foreclose ethical relationships. In the quest for a more just society, one also has to realize that oppressive discourses are not a stable target on a bullseye, at which one can take aim. Discourses are in flux and adaptive to changing conditions. Escobar (2012) argued that the architecture of the discursive formation – not as a set of objects or institutions, but as a set of relations and discursive practices that systematically produce interrelated objects, concepts, theories, and strategies – allows the structure of the discourse to adapt to new conditions. Thus, boundaries and limits of systems are themselves shifting and evolving which, at least, partially explain the longevity of many discourses while maintaining legitimacy and power “within the confines of the same discursive space” (Escobar, 2012, p. 42). Hence, attention to context in terms of these shifts is extremely important in any analysis. Also, as a subject, one is never wholly positioned within discourse. Individuals can never fully inhabit the margins or the centre of discourse. The subject positions available to individuals in relation to race, class, gender, and other categories, and the subjectivities they construct, are never fixed in “pure, universal space” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 40). To inhabit the centre or the margins is not irreducible and we are not exclusively one or the other, but always in-between. In poststructuralism, the awareness of the constitutiveness, as well as the difference and contradiction, and of being both inside and outside is ever present (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Pronger; 2002). For instance, big bodies may claim access to the centre and to the culture and benefits of particular sporting environments, while simultaneously inhabiting the margins of the wider society. Delving further into the Philosophy of the Limit involves the examination of three ways to interrogate the limits of systems: the logics of parergonality, secondness, and alterity.

Parergonality. Parergon is a word of Greek origin meaning something that is supplementary to or is a byproduct of a larger work. Para means alongside or subsidiary, and ergon means work. Derrida first used the expression “the logics of parergonality” (Cornell, 1992, p. 1) to interrogate the limits of a system and what may exist outside those boundaries. What a system includes and what it excludes together describe the workings of that system as a system. A parergon “is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside” (Derrida & Owens, 1979, p. 20). The system does not dispute the possibility or the reality of the objects of these ideas; it simply cannot adopt them into its maxims of thought and action. There is something in the realm of the transcendent here; something more than the system is willing explain to itself. The parergon “inscribes something extra, exterior to the specific field … but whose transcendent exteriority touches, plays with, brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit and intervenes internally only insofar as the inside is missing. Missing something and is itself missing” (Derrida & Owens, 1979, p.21). This “missing” is manifest in a yearning for transcendence. It requires a supplementary “by-work” which represents a threat, but also, seen differently, a critical function. Researchers are reminded to ask important questions, not only about what is included and excluded, but also how the exclusion, by virtue of its exclusion, produces the particular reality of what is included (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002). The problem of parergonality may be not only the problem of exclusion but also that of subtraction. How does the exclusion also diminish what the system includes? How is what is included diminished or transformed, alienated from what it could potentially be? It should be noted that both inclusions and exclusions, centres and the margins, exist within the same systems of domination. I have used the concept of parergonality to theorize the processes of marginalization and normalization as inseparable processes of exclusion and inclusion across different subject positions. Secondness. Through the philosophy of the limit we can explore what parergonal logic renders other or second. To distinguish it from conventional understandings of what second might point to, the concept of secondness is used. Secondness rests not in the accuracy of its fit with accepted, socially constructed experiences of reality, but in its capacity to open a space for alternative encounters with, and productions of, reality (Pronger, 2002). Secondness “indicates the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Secondness, in other words, is what resists” (Cornell, 1999, p. 1, italics in original). Traditional conceptual frameworks and practices cannot access a truth residing at the “very border of strangeness” (Pronger, 2002, p. 19). As a result, secondness cannot be apprehended through language and discourse and even less through understandings of the body

76 as an instrument for science and technology. Derrida provided an insightful analogy regarding secondness. For Derrida, the limit of any system of meaning is represented to us in death. Like secondness, we may know it “only indirectly, for example in the death of a friend or lover, but the indirectness of this knowledge does not diminish the force of its impact” (Cornell, 1992, p. 1). Secondness, as the concealment of what the system makes other, looks simultaneously backward at the parergonal logic, by recognizing what it leaves out, and forward from the parergonal logic, by openness to the potential for departure. These are embodiments so secondary to dominant modes of existence that they are almost incomprehensible or non- existent. Secondness remains free of the system in the sense that it involves an emotional dimension, a “sense of longing for that which is lost but not entirely forgotten” (Pronger, 2002, p. 16). Dominant conceptual reproductions of the body are so effective in shaping the modern visual and physic imaginary that other dimensions disappear almost without trace. Secondness appears as suggestions or hints that tell us as much about escape routes as they do about systems of oppression. As such, secondness cannot be apprehended directly, but rather through negative dialectics in an attempt to reveal negatively what a system omits “not by including it within the very system that effects its erasure, but by knowing it indirectly precisely as that which the system omits” (Pronger, 2002, p. 15). Traditional understandings of inclusion that theorize difference in relation to normative discourses do not work here. The process is not to “attempt positively to describe the limit as an oppositional cut, or merely as the system’s own self- limitation so that the system can perpetuate itself as a whole” (Cornell, 1999, p. 2). To describe the limits positively would be to reinstate the traditional assumptions and dichotomies (discursive grids) one is trying to deconstruct in the first place (Cornell, 1999). Rather, the “force of différence prevents any system … from encompassing its other or its excess” (Cornell, 1992, p. 2, italics in original). In negative dialectics the exclusion remains outside, uncolonized by systems of knowledge. In other words, secondness remains outside unviolated by the system of knowledge and outside of the gaze of science and technology. Researchers have to be careful that in exposing what the system excludes they do not harness the very freedom of that exclusion. In a manner, negative dialectics is the “ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it” (Adorno, 1972, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 15). The analytical task is to get at it without harnessing it to dominant discourses, leaving it free without incorporating it into an epistemic system or making it functional within a system’s economy (Pronger, 2002). In exploring secondness, important questions to ask include: What other possibilities does the system preclude? In the construction of an intelligible, embodied subjectivity, what does the system render unintelligible? How is the individual diminished? How is the possibility of freedom compromised?

Alterity. Lastly, alterity deals with the engagement of that which the system has made Other, leaving it free of the system’s circle of influence (Cornell, 1992, Pronger, 2002). Part of the philosophy of the limit is to demonstrate the Other to the system but there is an ethical dimension in which the Other must remain inaccessible to systems of interpretation and social organization. For the Other to remain free of the system, the ethics of alterity do not work by inclusion but rather openness. This is an openness to Otherness that allows for a deconstruction of the system by calling into question the system’s limits without constituting Otherness in relation to the system; that is, without appropriating Otherness. Secondness can only be appreciated by an ethics of alterity that is open to Otherness without judgment or calling it into question. Researchers must be cautious to enter into a non- violent relationship to the body so that they guard the body’s elusive Otherness and not inadvertently repeat an appropriating parergonal logic. Alterity is the poststructural commitment to reflexivity and it raises difficult questions: How does a researcher or physical education teacher, with their own objectives and sense of purpose, provide a safe and ethical space for alterity? How does an individual hold on to the values of alterity in a system dominated by instrumental understandings of the body, including as an indicator of gendered identity, health, and athletic prowess? What does a researcher or physical education teacher give up in terms of this ethical commitment? Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined my approach to data construction working both within and against traditional research methods. I have described the procedures involved in recruiting participants, conducting interviews, and carrying out participant observation and focus group sessions including how these are understood within a poststructuralist framework. I have described how one might go about analyzing a discourse, generally understood as deconstruction, by examining patterns of meaning starting with chunks of data, existing discourses, or cultural texts. In describing this process, I addressed some of the concerns raised against deconstruction. Lastly, I have proposed that discourse (understood as a set of relations that sets limits on possibilities), plugging in and a philosophy of the limit are compatible theoretical constructs within deconstruction. Plugging in, in its commitment to the constitutiveness of data/theory/researcher, allows for the opening up of new understandings and possibilities for engaging embodiment. The philosophy of the limit allows for the ethical engagement of the limits of discursive systems in a manner that respects Otherness by not constituting it as part of the system. Thus, I have aligned my analysis with the general academic, political, and ethical commitments that I have outlined within poststructuralist thought.

Chapter 4. The Absent Presence of the Fat Body In this chapter, my purpose was not to determine the truth of bodies but rather to describe how young boys constructed what they heard and said, and how they experienced their bodies as truth. That is, I have taken a discursive position in examining the social understandings of the body and, in particular, the fat body. A discursive position has to do with how different bodies are constructed, or made real, through the processes of representation. Of great importance in this task is Foucault’s understanding of the interplay of power and knowledge as they relate to the classification of difference (Foucault, 1980; Hall, 1997, 1997b). In what follows, I have aimed to show how body discourses functioned to position participants. I focused on discourses of body size (fatness and bigness), and how participants used body discourses to selectively and differentially position themselves in ways that allowed for the construction of livable subjectivities. The Representation and Production of Fat Two of the six participants in this study identified as normal weight. One of those was Ronny. Ronny was one of the smaller participants. He was an active boy and appeared well coordinated. What follows are two excerpts from my second interview with Ronny. In the first excerpt, I referred to his journal entry (written during of our focus group sessions), and I followed it up in the second excerpt: RB: In your journal (entry: June 16, 2015) you wrote, “What I like about moving is, it makes me feel more alive and I like to feel my heart rate go faster, the sweat running down my face.” That’s a great description, do you like that feeling? Ronny: Yeah. (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#6) RB: You seem to have very positive feelings about the things you can do and about your body. How do you think other people see your body? Ronny: Well, people [other boys], they used to call me fat. RB: You don’t see yourself as being fat any more do you? Ronny: No. I never did. (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#16)18

18 Below I have included a transcription and citation chart of terms and symbols: INT Interview FG Focus Group PO Participant Observation FN Field Notes Q Question […] Section of the transcript/narrative was removed … A pause or silence in the recorded dialogue [ ] researcher clarification/addition

This excerpt is deceptively simple; yet, it is a good starting point for the exploration of how discourse functions to position subjects. Ronny actively challenged how dominant discourses of fatness and movement positioned him. But first, I feel it is important for me to tell the reader that I agree with Ronny’s assessment of his own body: that he is a boy of average weight. However, as soon as I write these words, I am left feeling uneasy. Why do I feel the need to add my support to Ronny’s assessment? Why is there the need to comment on his weight at all, as if his ‘weight’ had meaning (i.e., existed) independently of the discourses that position him as average or fat? Moreover, now that the researcher – someone who is studying fatness for his thesis dissertation – has claimed that Ronny is not fat, how does that influence the reader’s perception of Ronny? If I had instead claimed that Ronny was fat, would it have made it acceptable for him to be called names? Certainly not. But would that representation of Ronny as fat position him differently and influence, in some way, what the reader might think of him? Discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault cited in Wright, 2004, p. 20). Fat discourses shape and construct fat bodies by providing a framework for thinking about, seeing, talking, and relating to the body19. Discourses of fatness function to position subjects, but the “reproduction of texts in life is a multi-layered enterprise” (Pronger, 2002, p. 145). Subjectivities are shaped by self and others, both in terms of the available ensemble of texts and in the individual’s response to those texts. Thus, the subject is not wholly without power. Next, I return to the interview with Ronny and his reaction to being called fat: RB: When they called you that, it made you feel really bad, right? [later I realized this was a leading question] Ronny: Yeah. RB: How did you deal with that? What did you do when they did that? And what did you think? Ronny: Not very nice words. Ronny’s Mother [sitting at the table]: Physical sometimes. Ronny: Yeah. RB: What do you mean physical? Ronny: Like sometimes, I’d get into a fight with them. (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#16) Acts of ‘reading the body’, such as “lipoliteracy” in fat-adverse societies (Graham as cited in Murray, 2008), exist due to an object-based, use-value orientation toward the body (Pronger,

19 The empirical (visual reading/observation in this instance) is often invoked to (re)produce normative ways of seeing, thinking, and being; effectively, it is (re)creative of notions of fat as an identity both static and foundational.

2002) that allows for the inferences of all sorts of characteristics and actions being inscribed upon the body. This is an extremely powerful force. Heidegger (1971) wrote that “to name a thing is to call it into being, as what it is called” (cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 151). As I have noted, the subject is able to accept, negotiate, redefine, subvert and resist discourses depending on a variety of factors including: social, cultural and economic contexts; the availability of alternative discourses; and physical resources. Although the obesity discourse, called upon by the other boys, sought to position Ronny as fat, he forcefully resisted. Ronny challenged that which he was being accused of. He did not accept the charge that he was fat – ever. Ronny was both able and willing to draw upon his physical resources to contest fatness discourses. In this case, I conceptualize the willingness to fight as a rejection that pushes back against discourses of fatness as inert, weak, ineffective, and unwilling. For Ronny, to accept the label of fatness might be to accept the accusations that fatness inscribes on its subjects – it might mean to accept an identity he could not bear and would go to extremes to prevent. Ronny literally resisted the accusation of fatness with his fists. The categorization of fatness positioned Ronny in a specific way – as a target to be bullied and picked-on. In the poststructuralist sense, the ‘realness’ of Ronny’s fatness does not exist. What is real are the discourses that are constitutive of what passes for fatness; what matters is that the discourses of fatness are real in their effects. Put differently, in normatively constructed systems for producing the appropriately sized body, constructions of fatness are marginalized and subjected to violence, physical or otherwise. The parergonal relationship between discourses that construct the normative body and its necessary by-product (non- conforming bodies) is an aggressive and unethical one, which I explore in the sections below. Discourses of Bigness: Avoiding the Fat Body My difficulty in recruiting participants for this study speaks to the continued social stigmatization of fatness and the construction of fat bodies as unintelligible; that is, fat bodies do not represent an acceptable view of the world and what constitutes proper action within it. It is possible that in the early stages of this study, the change in the recruitment criteria, as it was amended to include all bodies while specifically calling for bigger bodies, and not overweight or fat bodies, allowed me to recruit any participants at all. Whereas, in times previous, the word fat may have been the often-used vernacular, this study provides evidence that parents/caregivers as well as participants were very careful about how they differentially positioned themselves and others in relation to discourses of body size. A word search of the entire interview data revealed that the word fat was used only once by Ronny to repeat the name he was called. It is rather curious that the Boys in Motion Program worked directly with larger bodies, yet, the word fat was used so sparingly. However, the words “big” or “bigger” were used 16 times in direct reference to bodily descriptions. I contend that for these participants, the

81 labelling of a body as fat has become such an awful, egregious act that is only intentionally used to hurt someone, as in the incident with Ronny. Except for a few notable exceptions (e.g., Gross, 2005), I have spent a significant portion of this thesis describing the social and medical constructions of fatness almost entirely in negative terms; yet, bigness, as previously noted in the context of the school workshops/presentations that I instructed (see Chapter three), elicited quite different responses than fatness. This led me to explore how discourses of bigness might work to position subjects differently, but not wholly separately, from fatness discourses. Can understanding how participants used the language of bigness help us understand body discourses as a system? In other words, is a limiting parergonal logic at work in discourses of fatness and bigness? A look at the data has shed light on how bigness is constructed in relation to fatness. Below is a series of excerpts from personal communications I had with the mother of one of the participants (John) in the research study. The following exchange of emails occurred before the start of the Boys in Motion Program: We have spoken to John about the program, and if we are able to register him in the

program/study, we would like to. John is definitely in the 'bigger' category. (John’s

mother; email communication; May 30, 2015)

And in a separate communication, About my son specifically, he is VERY resistant to any organized physical activities.

So – if we are able to register him and bring him to the program, likely some bribery or

heavy pressure will be involved! Sorry to say so, but that is our reality – so I just

thought I’d put that on the table. I’m guessing that may be the case with many of the

‘bigger’ kids that you’re targeting. (John’s mother; email communication; May 29,

2015; italics in original)

This parent positioned her son as “bigger” and not “fatter”. Here “bigger” was used to allude to fatness, but not quite. Citing the social preoccupation for “social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions” (Douglas, 1973, as cited in Gilman, 2004; pp. 238-239), I contend that bigness exists in the “threshold as a site of transformation” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 7) with livable possibilities for the construction of the ‘fat self’. Using the logic of parergonality, bigness and fatness are Other to the limiting socio-cultural and bio-medical discourses of the normative, appropriately sized, healthy body. However, at the repressive limits of systems for constructing the normative body, bigness holds possibilities not afforded to the fat body. As Gross (2005) claims, bigness can represent a positive construction of the masculine self, alluding to a physical form of power and control. The shift from fatness to bigness in the

82 threshold is a site of transformation where “the divisions among and definitions of theory and data collapse” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 6). Fatness may enter the threshold, but there, it is deformed, made fluid, re-fashioned, and made intelligible as bigness. The Absent Presence of Fatness Normative discourses of the male body bring to mind the concept of “absent presence” (Norman, 2009, p. 128). The term has been used to describe the disembodied nature of the educational experience, suggesting an emphasis on the mind and a neglect of the ever-present and visible body (Shilling, 2004). The absent presence has also been used in a normative context to refer to both the visibility and the invisibility of the gendered male body – how men, because they are everywhere in representation and in power, have “no history as gendered selves” (Kimmel, 2005, p. 3). The suggestion is that men are visible everywhere and invisible because they are the accepted, common-sense, taken-for-granted centre. In other words, men are the invisible, normative, background against which all other genders are considered. The properly sized and shaped male body is an absent presence because it is the accepted standard against which male bodies are measured. In this process, the normatively sized/shaped body disappears and its central positioning goes unquestioned. Fatness is a transgression that stands out and visibly offends this standard. Below, the idea of the absent presence leads to a conceptualization of how the transgression of fatness was negotiated by the participants in this study. Every contact with, or iteration of, a text requires an interpretation. The terms and discourses associated with some interpretations will have more varied associative relationships to the terms articulated in the text than other interpretations. That is, the chain of signification associated with some interpretations is less ‘fixed’. I argue that iterations of bigness are especially fluid and can be located within multiple possibilities for constructions of the masculine self. As I have noted in my literature review, big can have positive constructions in the field of sport, as in football, sumo, baseball, and many others. These are constructions associated with the normative and culturally dominant ideals of masculinity which boys should strive for. These socially revered constructions include characteristics like aggressiveness, physical strength, toughness, drive, ambition, lack of emotion, and self-reliance (Atkinson, 2011, p. 20). In the emails from John’s mother, he was positioned by his mother as big and also resistant to organized physical activities. This is the fluidity I speak of that is afforded bigness but does not appear to be as readily available to the more stable constructions of fatness20. In

20 There are relatively few but notable exceptions in the works of critical scholars challenging the stability of fatness as a category of difference. For example, see Gard & Wright (2005); Rail, G., Holmes, D., & Murray, S. (2010); and Sykes, H., & McPhail, D. (2008).

83 this regard, bigness is a way of recuperating the fat body by aligning it to some dominant masculinity discourses. Bigness as constructed by participants in this study seemed to operate in the somewhat fluid parergonal limits of discourses of dominant masculinity. More specifically, in language acts, discourses of bigness and fatness were fashioned at the parergonal limits of normative and cultural ideals of dominant masculinity but occupied significantly different social positions. Bigness, as a signifier, was used to call on livable representations of the male body while re- working and maintaining a distance from representations of the fat male body. Acknowledging the fat body, indirectly through bigness, required significant compensatory cultural work and sometimes physical work as demonstrated by John’s mother and Ronny, respectively. The threat of the fat body necessitated such responses because as Pronger (2002) theorized, “fatness incites anxieties about the potential loss of motor and moral control and threatens the boundaries upholding a sovereign self” (as cited in Sykes & McPhail, 2008, p. 79). The threat of the fat body represented the absent presence supported by anxieties over neoliberal myths of sovereignty and self-control, which is a theme I develop later in regard to non-violent relations to the body. Throughout the study, the boys routinely positioned themselves in relation to sizeist discourses such that they avoided the pejorative positioning of fat. Below is part of an interview I had with Kenny as we discussed how he experienced his body: RB: So generally it seems like you feel pretty good about your body, about the things you can do? Kenny: Uhm, yeah. RB: Are there things you would like to change maybe? Kenny: I kinda like to lose some weight because I think I am 149 pounds, last time I checked. RB: And why do you want to lose weight? Kenny: Because I don’t want people to judge me by my looks and to reject me because I’m big. RB: And sometimes you feel that way – that people are judging you? Kenny: Yeah. RB: Where? In class? In school? Kenny: In class, in hallways – pretty much everywhere I feel like people are just looking at me and [pause]. RB: And you’re worried about what? What they might be thinking? Kenny: Yeah. (Kenny, INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#12) In this excerpt, Kenny negotiated the social constraints on fat bodies and talked himself into a livable subject position: big. As he stated, “I don’t want people to judge me by my looks and to

84 reject me because I’m big”. Around the time of adolescence, as the body is changing rapidly, participants are likely to be “trying-on” different bodies and performing different subjectivities21. Notably, in a “disciplinary society” (Foucault, 1975, p. 209), technologies of the self, working with and through a wide range of discourses and practices, are constitutive of the self; stated differently, technologies of the self are the tools of negotiation in the production of specific subjectivities. Perhaps more so than at any other age, subjectivities are performed at the level of the body during adolescence. These performances of subjectivities are attempts to inhabit the social locations that designate who belongs, and who does not. The move from fatness to bigness is a negotiation of fat-phobic, fat-averse, and sizeist discourses. It is not a subjection or outright rejection but, rather, a subversion. What is at stake here is social belonging, enforced by bodily systems of inclusion and exclusion. The non-use of the word fat (and the use of “big”) is a self-positioning move to allow for more positive constructions of the self. In this construction, fat designates an unacceptable social location, whereas big allows for gendered masculine possibilities. This interview segment also forcefully conveyed Kenny’s sense that sizeist discourses are ubiquitous and unavoidable. There is no reprieve from the technologies of surveillance such as the gaze of his teachers or that of his peers in classrooms and hallways. And, the more visible the body, the more vulnerable it is to forms of governmentality and the technologies of normalization (Smart, 2002, as cited in Norman, 2009, p. 240). According to Foucault (1979), through forms of disciplinary power that utilize surveillance rather than force, individuals are subject to productive forces that constrain, shape, and create. Like an inmate in Jeremy Bentham’s prison panopticon22, Kenny is in “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1975, p. 201). The “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault, 1975, p. 201) such that Kenny feels, “pretty much everywhere… people are just looking at me”. Because has been watched and judged negatively, Kenny disciplines himself. The coercive character of these disciplinary processes was internalized in Kenny’s

21Here, I refer to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Gender performativity “accentuates a process of repetition that produces gendered subjectivity. This repetition is not a performance by a subject, but a performativity that constitutes a subject and thus a space of conflicting subjectivities” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 8, italics in original). Agency is derived as the subject’s performative acts, technologies of the self, both reproduce and contest the foundations and origins of stable identity categories.

22 Bentham’s prison panopticon is an architectural structure with annular cells clearly visible by a central watchtower. Its genius is such that prisoners are under constant surveillance from the central tower and they are also visible to each other, from their cells. They are “caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves [partial] bearers” (Foucault, 1975, p. 201). This is “the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society” ((Foucault, 1975, p. 209).

85 desire to “lose some weight” (INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#12) and manifested less subtly in the case of John’s mother who had to entice him with “some bribery or heavy pressure [to join the Boys in Motion Program]” (John’s mother; email communication; May 29, 2015). The covert nature of these processes is “disguised and masked by their normative involvement in the troubles and problems of individuals themselves” (Evans & Davies, 2004a, p. 45). In continuing to explore the connections between the neoliberal biocitizen and visual surveillance, I asked Brett if male bodies should look a certain way and where individuals might get those ideas. He began his answer by describing how bodies should not look: Brett: It’s like you never see a big guy with a pretty girl in a movie. They’re usually the …worthless type of people. RB: Anywhere else besides movies? Brett: School basically, is the other one -- it’s like you gotta have a good body and a bad personality to have someone, apparently. (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20) Brett was a participant who identified as “above average … like, I’m overweight” (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#23). He joined the Boys in Motion Program for what he believed it could do for the physical development of his body. Here, Brett identified popular entertainment (the movies) and schools as cultural sites of practice where bodies are disciplined to look a particular way. According to Brett, the big guy never gets the pretty girl in the movies. Yet, big bodies (as in large, muscled, male bodies) often do get the “pretty girl” in the movies. Like our previous examples, Brett drew on the process différance as a way to differentiate and defer temporary, fixed meanings and ultimately to subvert traditional understandings of fatness. In Moss Norman’s (2009) study, he described how young men talked themselves into partial, situated, embodied subject positions by making distinctions between the “self-normal” and “fat-Other”. Norman’s participants used discursive grids associated with fatness to position themselves as self-normal. For example, participants who were “gamers” challenged the claim that the use of technology led to sedentary behaviours and fatness by pointing out that they used technology but were not fat. In the current study, Brett did something similar by re-positioning the self not in terms of fatness but rather bigness. In so doing, Brett (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20) created the space to locate himself as “big-self”, an alternative to the fat-Other. The fat- Other is the “worthless type of people” (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20) supporting LeBesco’s (2001) claim that fat bodies have become “abject bodies”. Further, in describing “unlivable” (and unspeakable) identities, Judith Butler (1993) wrote, “the abject designates… precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘unthinkable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of subject” (as cited in Norman, 2009, p. 118). In the construction of a livable sense of self Brett (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20) selectively took up subject positions to support intersectionalities of big-self and heterosexual- self. He called upon varied constructions to explain away his own perceived shortcomings. For

86 instance, he claimed, “you gotta have a good body and a bad personality to have someone”. The insinuation is: why have a “good body” if it comes at the cost of a “bad personality”? Here, Brett might have been referencing the stereotypical image of the narcistic, self-centered, shallow (i.e., “bad personality”) male with a “good body” who leverages his body to access romantic attachment. He may be attempting to explain that he does not have a girlfriend because he does not have the requisite “bad personality”, and not because he does not have a desirable body shape. He may also be calling upon common depictions of the “in-crowd” of popular boys and girls at school who have a “bad personality” and many relationships/friends. Possibly, visual economies did not allow Brett to claim a “good body” (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20), and he had to navigate a network of discourses to avoid being positioned as fat. There was an emphasis on the body as physical capital which permits access to particular relationships and to the construction of desirable subjectivities. As such, the construction of the self is (partly) a corporeal embodied undertaking and a relational process linking the individual and the group. As Shilling (2004) told us, the body is both a physical location on which culture inscribes its effects, and “[bodily] appearance constitutes a strong marker of identity and belonging” (p. xvii). Conceptualizing the Shift from Fat to Big I have attempted to show, primarily through a negative dialectic (the absent presence), that understandings of fatness have become contoured in extremely negative, pejorative terms. This is not to say that the meanings of fat have been finally fixed in negative terms; however, as much as it is possible to fix language in a specific cultural and historic moment, fat is a fixed signifier. Writing about the context of the technology of physical fitness, Pronger (2002) claimed that the intertextual ensemble that reproduces the body tends to reproduce it along similar lines, so that while a subject “is probably only exposed to parts of the whole, he or she may still be comprehensively indoctrinated into the fundamental logos of the body that those texts represent… [and give it] its intelligibility and apparent legitimacy” (p. 147; italics in original). The related discourses of an intertextual ensemble define, in advance, “a perceptual field structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry and registration of problems, and forms of intervention … [whose] set of relations and discursive practices… systematically produced interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and the like” (Escobar, 2012, p. 42). The interrelated fields of the ensemble, intersected and supported by body and medical discourses, produce a type of discursive ‘weight’ of fatness that functions within a discursive formation whose trajectory is extremely difficult to shift. Due to the difficulty in challenging the fundamental logos of the lean, athletic, fit, masculine body, one that leaves little room for the positive embodiment of fatness, I theorize that participants took on discourses of bigness over fatness in a quest for intelligibility. What

87 discourses or discursive practices might participants have selectively accessed to construct subject positions of bigness and not fatness? Many possibilities exist. For example, a baby can be described as a “big boy” to convey the notion of health; or a teenager as a “big guy” in a manner to convey strength and size as positive traits. To substitute the word fat instead of big is to significantly change the tone of the description to one of disapproval. In other instances, neoliberal discourses at the level of social structures also favour bigness. In capitalist societies, corporate mergers leading to ever bigger companies are regular, endorsed occurrences; the Gross Domestic Product is required to keep getting bigger (not fatter); within economics of scale, the capacity to produce more, and to consume more is getting bigger and is a requisite for capitalist structures. Bigger, often in terms of larger and more, is also incentivized at the individual level; for example, the price per unit of many commodities decreases as the number of units purchased increases. In other words, it is cheaper to buy in bigger amounts. Ironically, in a fat adverse society, this even includes food as consumers are constantly asked if they want their meals “upsized”. Significantly, in neoliberal, capitalist society the language of production and consumption is framed in terms of bigness and not fatness. The intertextual ensemble generally produces desirability using the language of “bigger is better”. To describe things using the language of fatness – as in the government has gotten ‘fat’, ‘fat cats’ in business, or ‘fat bodies’ – involves negative constructions. Whereas bigness mobilizes masculine and neoliberal incentives to act in ways that take up space, grow big, and be in control of self and others, fatness, in association with the feminine, evokes lack of control, softness, and passivity. To support this shift from fatness to bigness, I present a discursive argument based not on binary/oppositional language constructions but rather, on a philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002). Drawing on the contributions of Gross (2005) and Norman (2009), I propose that, for the participants in this study, the negotiation of the culturally dominant negative representation of fatness necessarily required the use of a new signifier. Recall that Gross (2005) reported some male hip-hop artists have been able to re-construct fatness as power, desire to consume, being in control of others, taking up space, desire to be recognized, and brute force. Gross connected this to the creation of new language: the homophonic shift from fat to “phat” (p. 66). Norman (2009) reported various understandings of fat by describing the differences between sedentary, unmotivated, “lazy fat” in contrast to athletically-productive, “sporty fat” (p. 168). These are constructions of fat based largely on an understanding of language structured in binary/oppositional terms. Hence, we get fat (as not powerful) to phat as powerful; or fat (as lack of control) to phat as in-control; or fat (as lazy, sedentary, and unmotivated) to fat as sporty. The (lack of “fat”) data in the present study, specifically, the “absent presence” of fat, suggests that these constructions are currently unlikely to garner much traction with the participants in this study. Indeed, the participants, their parents, as well as their

88 classmates during the workshops I presented during the recruitment phase, almost never used the word fat. I suggest, the homophones described by Gross (2005) and Norman (2009), “phat” and “sporty fat” respectively, were not sufficiently removed from the pejorative, fixed signifier, “fat”. Hence, the term “big” was used by the participants of this study, within a chain of signification to dislodge signifier/signified correspondences associated with fatness. They employed bigness in the subversion of fatness, shrouding it in elements of gendered, self- construction (i.e., power, control, strength, and size). Here, bigness was aligned with normative masculine constructions of the male body. However, the shift from fatness to bigness was a useful, pragmatic representation of fatness and not a direct rejection of, or binary to, fatness. Bigness emerged alongside fatness discourses as a response to the negative constructions of fatness. Understood in terms of a system of parergonality for producing normative masculinity, the appropriately sized male body is the “ergon… the accomplishment of the work” (Derrida & Owens, 1979, p. 20) of that system; fatness cooperates in the operation of that system by being defined as a waste by-product subordinated by the very signifying practices of the discursive system that constructs normative masculinity. Bigness is positioned in a different way. Bigness is not the binary representation of the masculine body. Masculinity/bigness disrupts the masculinity/fatness as an ergon/by-product binary relation. As part of the same system for producing normative sized masculine bodies, bigness, as a by-product, touches upon and brushes up against the limits of allowable constructions of normative masculinity. Performed by those directly involved the struggle for a livable subjectivity, bigness is a deliberate re- signification combining elements of performances of masculinity (as powerful and in-control) with the visual logics of size (as taking up space) in the fashioning of an intelligible big body23.

23 Given the shift from fat to big, significant concerns emerge. Although bigness may offer a respite from stigmatization and oppression for fat male bodies who are able and/or willing to perform bigness, it nonetheless traps those male bodies in performances of masculinity that severely limit the possibilities for other embodiments including, for example, those of care, connectedness, creativity, and nurture. Performances of masculinity, even ‘successful’ performances, do not serve all male bodies. In that respect, it diminishes the potentiality for the full embodiment of their humanness. More troubling still, in disassociating masculine-coded bigness from feminine-coded fat, it re-inscribes a masculine-feminine binary through weight and size. This has significant implications for the continued associations of fatness with previously marginalized groups that bear the discursive weight of the negative associations of fatness, as fatness continues to be part of the larger medical, body, and socio-cultural discourse (Rice, 2007). Lastly, the positive materialistic processes associated with fat – its physiological necessity for life, its importance in food, and its desirability in beauty and flesh – are not affirmed in the shift from fatness to bigness. In Chapter eight, on the ethic of alterity, I propose a different approach to addressing the intensely negative representations of fat.

Conclusion I have not claimed that bodily differences do not exist or that differences are not there. At some level, differences probably do exist; certainly, human sensory systems are sufficiently sensitive to allow for the perception of differences. Furthermore, the perception of difference is a necessary process in the construction of reality because “until you classify things in different ways, you can’t generate any meaning at all” (Hall, 1997b; p. 2). Individuals must use their senses, and other tools, to literally make sense of the world. However, as poststructuralists have argued, there is no direct access to reality, and it is in the process of perceiving, or making sense of the world, that individuals create the world. Thus, how difference is represented, the understandings and values attached to difference, is critically important. The greater consideration, adopting the strongest ethical stance, are the effects of discursive systems used to make sense of differences. It is the effects that matter, not whether some objective reality exists. In a way, the effects of discourse are the matter. In this chapter, I have attempted to describe how participants negotiated the absent presence of fatness, in constructing livable subjectivities, by using the language of bigness. I wish to make clear that the processes of identity construction cannot be simply described in this manner. The development of subjectivity is a much more complex task involving biological, social, and unconscious/physic processes including processes of identification as we “relate to others on the basis of our psychic histories and social locations” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 6). However, language, and the negotiation of language, is key in the discursive constitutiveness of the self and the world. The absent presence of fatness in the data suggested that normative body size/shape discourses, from which participants drew their intelligibility, constructed fatness negatively. The current intertextual ensemble has constructed long-standing and dominant renditions of fat that are extremely weighty, sedentary, and inert, allowing for fatness to be largely fixed as “worthless” (participant Brett), and its presence on the body, a rejection of the subject (participants Ronny and Kenny). Fatness has become a “representation of non-control… [and] many have testified how difficult it was to contest these negative discourses about fatness” (Sykes & McPhail, 2008, p. 79). So difficult that it was impossible to speak the concretized object-ness of the fat body without simultaneously re-inscribing its pejorative effects, as Ronny’s example demonstrated. In short, to identify oneself (as in the recruitment process for this project) or to be identified as fat is an “unbearable lesson” (Sykes & McPhail, 2008) that renders the subject unintelligible. Thus, I suggested, using a philosophy of the limit, that participants in this study positioned themselves in relation to constructions of bigness rather than fatness as a matter of intelligibility that for them was ultimately a question of belonging, of being accepted and acceptable in the world. When the fat male subject is re-positioned along the chain of

90 signification as big, conjuring up gendered constructions of masculinity, then it opens up possibilities for the redemption of the fat body.

Chapter 5. Constructions of Health In this chapter, I have addressed participants’ understandings of health as part of a group of entangled and sometimes conflicting discourses that shape how young people “come to know and act on themselves” (McDermott, 2010, p. 869, italics in original). This group of entangled and conflicting health discourses is known as a discursive formation. A discursive formation is a system of knowledge and practice that claims to understand the nature of human beings and the world in which we live (Escobar, 2012; Garner & Hancock, 2014). Discursive formations are able to adapt to new and possibly contradictory positions, always within the limiting framework of the same discursive space, by a set of relations and discursive practices that systematically produce interrelated objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and practices (Escobar, 2012). In the biomedical understanding of the body, health-related discourses converge on notions of body weight, level of physical activity, and calorie intake (Rail, 2008). This is part of the belief system that individual practices determine the weight of the body through fitness levels (participation in physical activity) and eating well in the right amounts. This oversimplification of health reflects the obesity discourse’s mechanistic approach to the human body where calories consumed are balanced by energy expenditure. I will argue that overarching themes that hold together body and health discourses include the neoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility/self-control (Crawford, 1980, 2006), and a visual economy of the body (Hall, 1997b; Sykes, 2011b)24. In the first half of this chapter, I have documented how the participants in this study made use of obesity discourses in their construction of corporeal or bodily health. In the second half, I have shown how participants also constructed health in much different and, at times, non-corporeal ways by interjecting and subverting these discourses as part of their personal and social practices. This required participants to conceptualize health outside of mechanistic, biomedical discursive health formations. Corporeal Constructions of Health While much research has described health as multifaceted, relatively little attention has been paid to how individual components are related and co-constructed25. In this study, almost all the participants described health as part of an interconnected set of elements. There were,

24 Stuart Hall was writing in the context of the visual discourses about racialized bodies, and Heather Sykes in the context of how heterosexist notions of body size and movement both produce and rely on the social exclusion and ‘difference’ of queer bodies. 25 For an exception, in the health promotion field, that explores how health components can be understood in relation to social and everyday behaviours see Ioannou (2005).

92 however, two times where health was described as a singular element. In the first example, Patrick described health in the following manner: RB: What do you think you need to do to be healthy? What does healthy mean to you? Patrick: Like, be active, and like, run and be healthy. RB: So, if you are active and you could run, you’re pretty healthy. Is that what you would say? Patrick: Yeah, kind of. (INT#1; May 19, 2015; Q#7) The second instance involved Jason: RB: give me some examples of what that [healthy living] actually looks like? Jason: Like, uhm, … say you are like skinny as a toothpick and its like… RB: is that healthy? Jason: Yeah, well trying to keep a normal look is healthy – someone who loses that isn’t healthy. (Jason, Int#1, June 17, 2015; Q#21) It should be noted that my questions possibly influenced the one-dimensional nature of the responses. In Patrick’s case, I asked, “What do you think you need to do to be healthy?” and he answered in kind; that is, in terms of productive, doing action: “be active, and like, run…”. In Jason’s example, I asked, “What does [healthy living] actually look like?” and he answered maintaining the emphasis on the visual reference, “To keep a normal look is healthy”. Although I wish I had been more careful and deliberate in my questions, I nonetheless include these excerpts because they support previous research on how young people construct health. In particular, Geneviéve Rail (2008) reported that youth emphasized three main corporeal themes or elements in their construction of health: being physically active, not being too fat or too skinny, and eating well26. I contend, however, that if health is to be better understood, it needs to be conceptualized as a discursive formation of interrelated corporeal and non-corporeal discourses. Outside of those two examples, the participants in this study constructed health as multi-dimensional. The notion that health could not be nailed down to one thing was a key idea that was present throughout the data. Health was understood as a set of discourses, which often also included attention to what one eats. For example: RB: What is a healthy person? What does health mean to you? John: Eating well and staying active and stuff. RB: And by staying active, what do you mean? John: Like doing physical activity often.

26 Rail (2008) also noted that health was not always constructed in bodily terms, and “much less frequently, participants described health in non-corporeal terms such as ‘feeling good’ and ‘having personal qualities” (p. 145). My point is that health has to be understood holistically – as a discursive formation of related corporeal and non-corporeal discourses.

RB: Like? John: Once a day ... [ voice trails off]. (John; INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#5) And in an interview with Kenny: RB: What is a healthy person? [track: 7:20] Kenny: Uhm, someone that eats right, good foods and stays active. RB: Anything else? Kenny: No, not really. RB: How about how they look? Does that have to do with health or not so much? Kenny: Uhm, yes it does. RB: And what would you say is a healthy look? Kenny: Uhm, well just fit – like toned body and stuff. (Kenny, INT#1; May 21, 2015; Q#6) Here, Kenny also introduced fitness as one of the elements that contribute to the entangled discourses around health. This is unsurprising as the potentially broader understandings and domains of health, physical education, and physical activity have been conflated with utilitarian and individual-centred ideas around fitness (Pronger, 2002). Indeed, Ronny had this to say about health and fitness: RB: Switching [our conversation] from health to fitness, what do you think it means to be fit? Ronny: Pretty much the same thing, do stuff – just not sit there and eat junk food all day. RB: So, is being fit the same thing as being healthy? Or how is fitness different from health? Ronny: Well, it’s not kind of really different because fitness is kind of being active, and you have to be active to be healthy. (INT#2, July 24, 2015; Q#12) Some scholarly literature has been crtical of the cultures of physical fitness. For example, the techno-scientific approach to the body and physical fitness has been described as a cultural practice for the production of difference that has contributed to the polarization and marginalization of individuals on the basis of physical strength, levels of body fat, and appearance (Pronger, 2002). Gender has been an important axis. The project of physical fitness has worked to ‘naturalize’ socially constructed power differences between and within genders, and has fostered “a virtual epidemic of exercise and eating disorders produced by the tyranny of changing images of the ideally fit body” (Pronger, 2002, p. 5). Moreover, the conflation of health and fitness discourses has served to narrow the scope of what we can think about in terms of health. This is an important observation in how individuals use health discourses to know and discipline themselves primarily as bodily beings, and it has implications for the development of a sense of self. As Brett shared with me:

I am insecure about my body – so that’s kinda that’s why I want to get active. But I am kinda scared too because I am afraid of what other people will think. (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#13) I noted at the start of this chapter that participants were familiar with dominant discourses of the body and health. They often re-iterated these body-centered discourses in their constructions of health. The data excerpts presented up to this point supported participants’ varied and interrelated constructions of health as a powerful matrix of body weight/physical activity/food consumption discourses acting at the level of the individual. Graphically, I conceptualize participants’ articulation of the dominant health discursive formation in Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1: Body and health discursive formation I have used double-sided arrows connecting each vertex of the triangle to get at the idea of co- construction; it is the set of entangled, interdependent relations between discourses that constitute corporeal health discursive formations as a matrix of power. This matrix, acting as a regime of truth to discipline bodies, relies on two integrated discourses shown in the middle of the diagram: a visual economy of the body that trades in the currency of normalized/fit bodies and the neoliberal notion of personal responsibility. Without the neoliberal discourse of personal responsibility the conceptions and interrelationships that are displayed in the matrix (Figure 5.1) could not exist. Much research has documented how widely circulating body and health discourses are downloaded as a personal responsibility via a variety of techniques, including stigma (see for example, Gard &

Wright, 2005; Lupton, 2014; Puhl & Heuer, 2010). The integration of personal responsibility in health systems is quite remarkable since it is accepted that the determinants of health reside largely at the macrolevel (e.g., socio-economic status, education, employment, physical and social environment) (Health Council of Canada, 2010). Also underpinning the matrix is the visual economy of the healthy body that binds the elements of a normatively sized body with physical activity/fitness/healthy diet. Writing in the context of race, Stuart Hall (1997b) noted that the central fact of gross physiological differences is that they are clearly visible to the eye. The body is a text, and, in the sense that ‘seeing is believing’, physiological differences are undeniable. There is a visual economy that connects the corporeality of the body (size/shape/appearance) with the doing (physical activity/eating) producing dominant cultural and historically specific ‘truth’. This has alternatively been described as “lipoliteracy” (Graham, 2005, as cited in Murray, 2008, p. 8), where the act of reading the body’s fatness reveals its health status, exercise habits, laziness, eating habits, and so on. The territorializing outcomes of health discursive formations have been depicted in a series of photographs (See Figure 5.2: Body images). I asked participants, individually, to write a description for the bodies in the pictures presented to them (Focus group #12; July 9, 2015):

Figure 5.2: Photo#1. This body was described as “average” (John; Jason); “healthy but out of shape” (Brett); and “beer belly” (Patrick).

Figure 5.2: Photo #2. These bodies were described as “thin” (John); “unhealthy” (Jason); “underweight” (Brett); and “to[o] skinny unhealthy; twig like, super skinny” (Patrick).

Figure 5.2: Photo #3. This body was described as “ripped” (John); healthy (Jason); “strong/in-shape) Brett; and “healthy rip[p]ed” (Patrick).

Figure 5.2: Photo #4. This body was described as “overweight” (John); “unhealthy” (Jason); “bigger/out of shape” (Brett); and “not really unhealthy” (Patrick).

Figure 5.2: Photo #5. This body was described as “potato” (John); “unhealthy the revolting blob” (Jason); “big/ unhealthy/ out of shape” (Brett); and “unhealthy” (Patrick).

Each participant brought to the photographs their own constructions of health, the body, and personal history. In the poststructuralist framework we would not expect these constructions to be consistent. What is important to note is the entanglement of body shape/size (level of fatness or muscularity), physical activity (level of fitness), and health as they intersect and are juxtaposed with each other in the construction of individually-responsible bodies in a visual economy. In some cases, this involved moral judgements such as: “unhealthy the revolting blob” (Jason, photo #5), “[couch] potato” (John, photo #5), and “beer belly” (Patrick, photo #1). An interesting side note is that the word “fat” was never used in the descriptions, whose use I addressed in the previous chapter. Challenges to Dominant Constructions of Health I have shown how participants made use of dominant body and health discourses in their constructions of health. This was not the only way in which they constructed health; the boys also made an effort to problematize the simplistic reiteration of the dominant health discourses (physical activity + healthy eating + maintaining a normatively sized body = health). They did this by articulating a complex understanding of the limits around these discourses. For example, Ronny problematized the recurring themes of being physically active and eating healthy food. RB: What is a healthy person? Ronny: Somebody who is active [long pause]… RB: What else? Ronny: They like, basically, mix their food so they have like [pause]. RB: A balanced diet?

Ronny: Junk food but they also have healthy food with it. RB: What kind of stuff makes you active? Ronny: Just basically being outside in general and doing things, like even walking. (INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#8). Here, Ronny challenged practices within the physical education community that an acceptable level of physical activity requires a “force[d], steady-state exercise prescription” (Prusak et al., 2011, as cited in Robertson & Barber, 2011, p. 2) by noting that healthy physical activity involves “being outside in general and doing things, like even walking”. He also disputed the limits around healthy eating that enforce an exacting and constant vigilance against the consumption of “junk food”. In a similar vein, Kenny challenged the often-cited values equating thinness with health, and overweight with illness; he called into question the limits to systems that construct health in these terms: Because if you’re not healthy, it’s not really good for you because you’re not eating right. You’ll kind of get overweight but being overweight is not always bad. Some healthy fats are good for you, and some [fats] aren’t. And if you’re eating less, you’re really skinny, you’re not eating that much food. That’s not good for you because you’re not getting the good nutrition you need. (INT#1; May 21, 2018; Q#8) Kenny called into question the limits of restrictive understandings of thinness, overweight, and healthy eating by noting that thinness can be unhealthy and “overweight is not always bad”. Using a different approach, Jason also took issue with the narrowness of the visual economy that binds together health discourses – even as it limits the discourses of the normatively sized/shaped male body in a society “that has very restrictive and narrow ideas of ‘normality’” (Rail, 2008, p. 151). As he stated, “A healthy body would be like someone who isn’t too skinny but also not too overweight.” (INT#2, July 21, 2015; Q#7; emphasis mine). Hence, as the boys made use of the visual economy of the body to categorize and make meaning – to construct the normative, healthy male body – they also stretched the dominant understandings of health discursive formations. Overall, a visual economy of the body maintains the body/mind duality by remaining trapped within corporeal constructions of the individual – which W. E. B. Du Bois called “the differences of colour, hair, and bone” (as cited in Hall, 1997b, p. 1)27. Also integrated into the visual economy of the body was the notion of personal responsibility. Kenny expressed this disciplining of the body quite well when I asked him if a boy’s body should look a certain way. He replied: You don’t have to look a certain way, you can look any way, but everybody’s body

27 For clarification, Du Bois and Hall were writing in the context of race.

image is they want to be like muscular and fit and so… [pause] (Kenny, INT#1; May 21, 2015; Q#15) Even as Kenny resisted the dominant construction of the male body as fit and muscular, he was nonetheless compelled by it. This speaks to the power of discursive formations that produce normative bodies, which I noted in my introduction to this chapter. These formations do not negate conflicting discourses but rather adapt, shape, and incorporate them within the same discursive formation. As a system, this discursive formation produces and relies on overweight, too skinny, unfit, inactive, and unhealthy bodies via a parergonal logic that produces these bodies as waste/by-product, and which the centre requires in order to define and maintain itself. Non-corporeal Constructions of Health Health is not only a bodily concern. The embodiment of health is constructed in relation psychic, corporeal, and social structures, as well as experiences systematically linked to other meanings and practices. As such, constructions of health that have focused on the physical have never been able “to contain the irrepressible proliferation of meanings associated with health” (Crawford, 2006, p. 401). In this study, the irrepressible proliferation of meanings clearly extended beyond a visual economy supported by the materiality of the body. As an example, I present this exchange with Brett. RB: What is a healthy person? Brett: Just depends what you mean by healthy: emotionally or physically[…] Emotionally, someone who is confident about themself and isn’t a bully to other people and can just be nice and accepting about people because he is accepting about himself, and someone who is like a healthy eater – the physical part is the healthy eating, strength all that stuff, they can be just strong. (INT#1; May 23, 2015, Q#5) I asked Brett the same question during our exit interview and he replied in a similar way. Brett: Someone who’s fit and mentally stable, I guess you could say. (INT#2, July 24, 2017; Q#12) Similarly, Patrick (who preferred doing activities outdoors over being in a gymnasium) described health in both corporeal and non-corporeal terms. RB: What is a healthy person? What does “healthy” mean for you? Patrick: I think it’s like being active; eating healthy too is part of it. It’s not always about, if you don’t go outside you’re not healthy but it’s, it’s a good feeling. RB: Say that again, it’s a good feeling to be healthy? Patrick: Yeah. RB: Tell me about that good feeling. Patrick: [pause] I don’t know how to explain it. (INT#2, August 12, 2017; Q#7)

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Patrick was clearly referencing something aside from physical health-related behaviours (specifically, being active and healthy eating) that are primarily concerned with their biomedical link and the prevention of ill health (Ioannou, 2005). Brett and Patrick’s inclusion of mental health as part of a holistic conceptualization of health is not new, and indeed, there is a heightened awareness of mental health in schools (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8: Health and Physical Education, 2015). Beyond the necessary emphasis on the connections between corporeal and mental health, I suggest that the context is which participants talked about health was closely related to the importance they gave to their own health. Put more precisely, participants seemed to place greater importance on health when they defined it in terms of their own mental health. The corollary is that corporeal health did not seem to be overly significant for them, as evident in this exchange with Brett about corporeal health. RB: Is being healthy important to you? Brett: It’s important to me but I don’t really do much to change … [my body]… Like I want to change it but … I am sure after I start noticing changes like after I go to camp [Boys in Motion] and stuff I probably like doing it [exercise] a lot more. (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015, Q#7) Along the same lines, this was my discussion with Jason: RB: Is being healthy important to you? [track: 9:25] Jason: Kind of. RB: What do you mean? Jason: Like, uhm, I don’t really worry about being healthy too much – just like my friends – it is kind of like [inaudible] and stuff, want to keep my life interesting really. RB: What did you say about your friends? Jason: They, just like, keep my life interesting, really. (INT#2; June 17, 2015; Q#9) Health, in the corporeal sense, was not as important to Jason as was his relationship with friends, and Brett was not willing “to do much [exercise] to change [his body]”. In general, (physical) health-related behaviours – including exercising, healthy eating, controlling one’s weight – were not done to improve physical health or prevent illness28. Rather, health-related behaviours seemed to accrue importance in domains of life outside physical health concerns,

28 There were, however, a couple of qualified exceptions. Kenny placed an equal emphasis on the corporeal and non-corporeal. He stated that keeping fit and staying active were important because it made people, “happier and healthier in life” (INT#1; May 21, 2016; Q#16). Ronny positioned himself more in the biomedical camp in that being active and having a balanced diet were important because, “when I get older I don’t want to have health problems” (INT #2, July 24, 2015; Q#8-9). His mother, who was present at the interview qualified this by offering that she had fibromyalgia and another family member was in a car accident. Thus, Ronny was able to see poor physical health first-hand and this may have influenced his connection of health-related behaviours and poor health outcomes.

101 and mental concerns in particular. My conversation with Brett was a good example. It must be noted that the following discussion occurred after he confided that his physical education teacher had “called [him] “out-of-shape” (Brett, INT#1, July 23, 2015; Q#5,), which in biomedical understandings of the body is linked to the unhealthy body. RB: Is being healthy important to you? Brett: It is now. Yeah. RB: Why? Brett: I don’t know, it’s just… being unhealthy also creates its sadness I guess you could say. RB: Is that the mental health part you are talking about, maybe? Brett: Yeah. So if you’re sad and you’re still unmotivated it just gets worse and worse until you try and fix it […] RB: What do you think you need to do to be healthy, to not feel sad? Brett: Uhm, just get to know myself a bit, like stay confident and all that. Like I know I’m getting there, like I’m getting in good shape and I’m building up more confidence, I’m less shy around people now and that’s pretty good… I’m getting there. RB: Can other people help you to be healthy or is it just kind of your responsibility? Brett: Well, other people can help too but … well, people can help with mental health but they can’t really help with physical health. (Brett, INT#2, July 24, 2015; Q#13,14) In this excerpt, Brett highlighted the connections between the physically unhealthy body and the non-corporeal (not being sad, unmotivated, staying confident, and being less shy) while simultaneously placing great emphasis on the importance of mental health. The implication is that the importance of physical bodies must be understood and their significance appreciated in relation to the mental health impacts on their owners. Also significant is that Brett described physical health as an individual pursuit whereas mental health extended beyond the boundaries of the individual to where “other people can help”. This, I propose, has implications for conceptualizations of the individual increasingly defined as independent and sovereign (Gergen, 1999, 2009), which render the body susceptible to techniques of social control and isolation through the project of pouvoir (Pronger, 2002). Perhaps, the most intriguing description of the connection of the physical body and its importance to mental health came from Jason: RB: Is being healthy important to you? Jason: Yes. RB: Why? Jason: Didn’t you ask me this question? RB: No… Jason: ‘Cause uh, being healthy will make it look like a completely different what the

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life looks like... Living a healthy life [allows] seeing the world in a different way. RB: How? Jason: Like, a happy world instead of like a grey world or just like blank world… You know like the colours in the really tall bad buildings in like movies know what I mean -- just like those -- somebody who is not healthy sees like those kind of colours – like of like beige, grey… People who are healthy sees them like colours and people who aren’t healthy sees them as greys. (Jason, INT#1, June 17, 2015; Q#7) Conclusion In this chapter, I aimed to describe participants’ biomedical (corporeal) constructions of the body and non-corporeal constructions as part of an entangled discursive formation. The corporeal constructions of the body centered on health-related behaviours including controlling body weight, eating well, and doing physical activity. As a discursive formation, this matrix is difficult to dislodge as it is interconnected and held together by a visual economy of the body and neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility. Indeed, participants noted that not everyone needed to look the same way and it was not always possible to identify healthy or fit bodies, yet, in general, “everybody’s body image is they want to be like muscular and fit” (Kenny, INT#1; May 21, 2015; Q#15). I suggested the matrix erected around dominant constructions of the body and physical health was, for participants, more strongly connected to mental health concerns and social relations than to disease prevention and ill-health29. That is, when participants explored constructions of the body and health in terms of mental health outcomes they gave it greater importance than when they did so using the biomedical lens of ill health and disease prevention. This is likely because disease prevention is not a concern for youth (Ioannou, 2005). Youth are generally free of medical risk factors and disease, and thus the emphasis on physical health promotion by educational and medical institutions is possibly a misguided effort. It may be that the mental health and relational aspects of health are more relevant for youth and a fruitful avenue of exploration for education as a whole, and physical education classes in particular. Finally, I suggested that a challenge to the construction of the individual as independent and sovereign may hold promise in ameliorating mental health and social relationship concerns of participants.

29 I attempted to incorporate mental health and social relations into the graphic matrix of dominant constructions of the healthy body depicted in Figure 5.1. That mental health and social relations were both an outcome of, and a challenge to, the components of this matrix made a simple graphical representation untenable.

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Chapter 6. Sport Discourse in Physical Education The aims of physical education, as stated in The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education, Grades 1-8 (2015), revolve around the concept of physical literacy (see Whitehead, 2001, 2007). Physical literacy is described as the ability for students “to demonstrate a variety of movements confidently, competently, creatively and strategically across a wide range of health-related physical activities” (The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education, Grades 1-8, 2015, p. 7). While the importance of moving in “multiple environments” is noted, the context for such movement is not provided, except as bounded by the domain of “health-related physical activities” (p. 7). Notably, there is no elaboration on how different forms of movement, specifically physical literacy and health-related physical activities, take on meaning and value within the frameworks and limits of physical education classes, and within the greater context(s) of social and cultural environments. Students learn about movement in physical education classes, and within the context of this study some questions arose. For example: How did participants understand the possibilities for movement both within and outside physical education classes? What embodied sense of self/selves was made possible? And, what, if any, were the restrictions imposed upon potentialities for movement and being? Perhaps, the relatively open-ended approach described in the curriculum document is deliberate; by not being overly prescriptive of movements, social contexts, and pedagogical approaches, the intention may be to maintain an openness to diverse student needs and contributions, to a range of performative embodiments, and to non-traditional approaches in delivering the curriculum. By non-traditional approaches I am referring to practices other than the conventional ways of structuring and organizing physical education knowledge and practice around traditional sports seasons; for example, football and volleyball in the Fall; basketball and hockey in the Winter; and baseball and track & field in the Spring30. In the following section, I have explored how the boys in this study understood the aims and practices of physical education, as well as their own embodied participation in the Boys in Motion Program. I have investigated the extent to which the openness to a wide variety of physical movements as depicted in the curriculum document was reflected in participants’ understandings and participation in the activity portion of this study. A key focus of this study investigated the implications for students when the cognitive, emotional, and relational dimensions of physical education, in their broadest embodied sense, were curbed by restrictive movement and body discourses. In this chapter, I have argued that the emphasis of sport in

30 For detailed examples and critiques of this practice in the Canadian context see Petherick (2011); and Robertson & Thomson (2012).

104 physical education, what I call physical education-through-sport31 represents a limited, repressive, and ultimately alienating and harmful conceptualization of movement. I have explored sport related practices as a practical expression of movement and key organizational principle in physical education. In my discursive analysis, I have looked at how physical education-through-sport draws on masculinity discourses to reproduce, and in some ways challenge, established ways of moving and being. Physical Education-Through-Sport Although we32 will see that the participants in this study understood the purpose(s) of physical education in different ways, the current focus examines how a physical education- through-sport approach was the concretizing, practical approach through which physical education was to be achieved. My use of the terms sport and physical education require some elaboration. Sport, for my purposes, is both an identifiable category of physical activities and a way of doing those activities. The way of doing sport is aggressive, competitive, and strategic with an emphasis on product; that is, an emphasis on performance and winning. Although sport often takes place in team settings and purports to support relational values like teamwork and cooperation, it ultimately confers valour on the independent, skilled performer above all else. What sets sport apart from other forms of physical activity, including games and play, is the over-riding focus on structure, rules, competition, and performance. To refer to the infinitely broader forms of movement, I use the terms movement, physical activity, or physical movement, interchangeably. In regard to physical education, this thesis has not directly addressed the health (classroom) component that is part of the physical and health education curriculum delivered in Canadian elementary and secondary schools. It should be noted that co- educational physical education (joint instruction for both boys and girls) has replaced sex- segregated instruction as the norm from Grades 1 to 8 in Canadian schools. Generally, but not always, in a physical education class, the teacher presents instruction on a physical activity or skill and then the students will practise and implement the instruction during game/sport play.

31 I wish to differentiate Physical education-through-sport from David Kirk’s (2010) “Physical education- as-sport”. Kirk uses the terminology “physical education-as-sport” and “physical education-as-sport- techniques” (Kirk, 2010, p. 6) to argue a very different point; namely, that physical education has lost its connection to sport as a whole and has been reduced to a type of isolated skills development. 32 My intention in using plural pronouns including “we”, “us”, or “our”, is not to refer to a generalized imagination of a society or a public. Since the Enlightenment period, language has developed within contexts that favour the construction of broad homogenous groups on one hand and the bounded, independent, separate individual on the other, without a language to highlight the connection between the two (Gergen, 1999, 2009). I use these pronouns as a signpost to invite the reader to explore the argument ‘together’, but not to infer agreement. However, these pronouns purposely hint at the broader metaphysical relations that connect us all. This is not a moralizing stance meant to erase difference but rather an openness to differences we may not yet understand – and it is a theme I develop later.

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As one of the study participants stated: “There’s like a couple of days where [my teacher] teaches the skills and the rest where there’s just playing” (John, INT#1; June 5, 2015). In addressing the prevalence of sport in physical education, the following conversation with Ronny took place during our first interview. RB: What do you think your teacher is trying to teach you in physical education? Ronny: Like maybe how to do the sports better. RB: Anything else? Ronny: I don’t think so. (INT#1; June 15, 2015; Q#20) And I had a similar interaction with Patrick: RB: What do you think physical education is trying to teach you? Patrick: I don’t know… they teach us sports but they… RB: Some people say in Phys Ed they are trying to teach you, maybe, respect or… Patrick: Yeah, he was talking about respect and all that, not goofing around when he is trying to talk, and let’s get everything organized. RB: From your perspective, […], in your own words what do you think he’s trying to teach you? Patrick: Be more active. And like, try new things. (INT#1; May 19,2015; Q#6) When I asked what Patrick meant by “try new things”, he replied that it had to do with participation in sports the class had not yet tried. Another participant, Jason, described the physical education curriculum in this manner: At the beginning of the year we had like soccer for like the entire month, then basketball, then tennis, then volleyball, then it came to the end of the year and it just kinda got lazy and let us do whatever we want outside […] because there is only like 2 weeks left. (INT#1; June 17, 2015; Q#9) While for Ronny and Patrick physical education and sport were literally synonymous, it was also the case that the other four participants strongly associated physical education with sport – at least as a means to achieving other ends. This was articulated during my second interview with Kenny. RB: What do you think physical education is trying to teach you? Kenny: Uhm, how to be healthy and stay active all throughout your life so, uhm, […] RB: Do you think they are doing a good job? Kenny: Not really because not a lot of people participated […] [in] sports and stuff. (INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#15) Here we note that the goal of physical education, in Kenny’s estimation, “to be healthy and stay active”, was, again, to be achieved through participation in sports. As Kenny noted, a sports- based physical education program presented a problem for some of his classmates in that “not a lot of people participated”. Research supports the finding that a sport-focused approach in

106 physical education, with an emphasis on competition and/or performance, has been an alienating experience for many students (Ennis, 2012, as cited in Sprake & Temple, 2016; Sykes, 2011b, p. 60). A focus on sport is exclusionary in that it privileges pupils who are proficient within a very restricted understanding of physical movement while literally neglecting more personal and embodied ways of moving and meaning making. This has appeared to manifest itself primarily through non-participation. Indeed, concerns over non- participation in physical education classes surfaced regularly in this study (for example: Brett, INT#2; July, 24, 2015; Q#3; and John, INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#13). Curriculum Organization in Physical Education Some of the participants expressed dissatisfaction at the lack of variety in the physical education curriculum, and that some of the units were too lengthy. When asked if there was something in the Boys in Motion Program that physical education teachers could think about or do differently, John replied: John: Doing more varied things rather than doing the exact same thing at the exact same time every year. RB: Did you like it when we switched activities very quickly [in the Boys in Motion Program]? John: Yeah. Like instead of a few months at a time doing one specific sport or whatever. RB: It is like a week or two weeks where you do a specific unit or sport [in your physical education class]? John: It is more than two weeks. It is like a month (John, INT#2; July 16, 2015; Q#16). […] [We] do the same thing, repetitively. (INT#2; July 16, 2015; Q#12) The reason for the repetitiveness and length of units became clear in an interview with Patrick and his mother. RB: Units are about a week long, usually? Patrick: Well, some. Basketball and baseball, like the bigger ones were longer. Like, badminton went on for like 2 weeks maybe. (Patrick, INT#1; May 19, 2015; Q#6) Patrick’s Mother: [Interjecting] They go longer because that’s a sport they go on to play other schools. (INT#1; May 19, 2015; Q#6) We see above that Patrick’s mother shed light on why curricular units were repeated at the same time on a yearly basis and tended to go on for too long; they mimicked the extracurricular school sport seasons33.

33 This practice is present in the secondary school system in the province of Ontario. The public school system (secular, publicly funded) has their competitive soccer season in the Fall season, whereas the Catholic school system (publicly funded with religious education), has theirs in the Spring. It is common practice for the timing of the curricular soccer units to mimic the schedule of their respective school teams. As a physical education teacher and a member of the school board’s sport executive group

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In the province of Ontario, each school’s extracurricular sports teams are often coached by its physical education teachers. While the coaching of extracurricular sports is considered volunteer work, it is the tacit expectation that physical education teachers coach these teams. In this coordination of the physical education department and the school’s extracurricular sports program, physical education classes may become convenient recruitment tools for extracurricular sports teams, and an informal audition for athletic students. Moreover, some teachers have reported a greater sense of fulfilment from their coaching than from their teaching duties (Active for Life, 2017). There are many different ways to configure and organize knowledge and movement practices within curricular units that may have to do with, for example: sending objects, receiving objects, manipulating the body, personal and relational explorations of movement, a focus on the outdoors, and many others. Further, there are various pedagogical approaches to teaching physical education34. For these boys, however, the physical education-through-sport approach prevailed. I have started by providing evidence that, according to most of the participants in this study, physical education classes focused very much on a traditional teaching approach organized around sports units. The coordinated entanglement of physical education and sport, physical education-through-sport as I have called it, was used to delineate the activities, practices, and scheduling of the physical education curriculum for almost all participants. Performative Embodiments in Physical Education In Foucault’s (1980) conceptualization, the knowledge/power nexus is neither malevolent nor mystifying, but productive. The operation of power, formerly understood through a top-down, economic/class structure (Marx’s means of production), was replaced by discourse “as the generative force in a culture… [working through] the control of truth and the reproduction of knowledge” (as cited in Segrest, 2002, p. 31). The physical education curriculum, as both a text and discourse, is a conduit of power – it is neither neutral nor apolitical but a domain of struggles. It is in and through language and discourse that the subject is constituted (Davies, 1993; Heron, 2007). In this view, the discourse of physical education- through-sport had an effect on the participants’ subjectivities in relation to their understanding of physical movement and embodied sense of self.

committee, I both participated in and witnessed this practice. The need for different extracurricular competitive soccer seasons was primarily due to the necessity of sharing limited, after-school field space by the two school systems. In practical terms, this should have no impact on the scheduling of curricular units during the school day. 34 Some models include “Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility Through Physical Activity” (Hellison, 2011) and “Teaching Games for Understanding” (Griffin & Butler, 2005).

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As the physical education-through-sport discourse was restrictive in its possibilities for movement, it was also productive and the boys in this study found ways to negotiate its enclosures and demonstrate complexity in their performative embodiments. Below, in describing participants’ general relationship to physical movement, I have sought to describe some of the ways in which the physical education-through-sport discourse was productive, even as it excluded some participants from the very activities it sought to engage them with. The aim is not to infer causality between discourse and its ‘effects’. Any such causality would be an illusionary form of control. Rather, the intent has been to outline the discourse and the possibilities for fluid and partial subject positionings in relation to that discourse. In this task, I begun the analysis with John, a 13-year-old participant in Grade 7. My observation notes on John, written after our first participant observation (i.e., group activity) session35 included the following. John is resistant to [doing] physical activity. [He] stated that he prefers to stay inside [at

home] although he likes swimming, walking, not organized sports, and he likes

badminton. His body language [during the participant observation session] conveys a

lack of comfort in the physical activity environment 36. He keeps his hands in front of

his belt-buckle area, and nervously rubs his fingers. When I demonstrate and ask him to

get into a ready position for our ball name game37, he juts out his knees and tucks his

bum under. I gently move him into [a more balanced] position... [He was] hesitant to

move in close [to the group] and [when throwing] stepped with same foot as throwing

hand38… John’s parents have to bribe him to attend [the Boys in Motion Program].

(Personal Notes; PO#1; June 2, 2015)

John described his complex relationship with physical activity in this way: “I like hiking and walking and swimming and stuff but I am not a really big fan of competitive stuff” (John, INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#1). However, “competitive stuff” (as a type of activity and way of

35 See Appendix G for the outline of all activities in the Participant Observation sessions. 36 At the YMCA we had access to a racquetball court, half a gymnasium, and an outdoor grassy area when the weather permitted. 37 This is an “ice-breaker” name game for participants to get to know each other. As each participant tosses the ball to their partner they will call out the partner’s name. In a more advanced version the receiver starts by facing away from the thrower and, when they hear their name being called by the thrower, they have to spin around, locate the ball mid-air, and catch it. Soft “nerf” balls are used. 38 This is considered an ineffective way to throw, and indicative of someone learning how to throw. More practiced throwers step with the foot opposite the throwing hand allowing for greater generation of force.

109 doing that activity) seemed to comprise the majority of activities in his physical education class which, according to John, included, “baseball, track and field, basketball, and badminton… soccer, I think, yeah”. (INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#1) Activities that he perceived to be competitive had little chance of engaging John. Interestingly, this included some activities remotely associated with sports. Early in the Boys in Motion Program, I used basketballs instead of medicine balls for core-body activities because basketballs are lighter and they bounce. As a physical education teacher, it has been my experience that many students consider them an engaging version of medicine balls. This was not the case with John. He so disliked all things ‘basketball’ that the mere presence of a basketball turned him off, regardless of how it was used. Regarding my medicine ball activities (using basketballs), he asserted, “Uhm, I don’t personally do it” (INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#5). While activities with basketballs excluded John and he tended not to participate in what are generally called competitive sports, there was not a clear distinction. For example, he stated, “I don’t like baseball and basketball and I don’t mind badminton (INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#5). Badminton could be considered a competitive sport, and to my great amazement, John also said he enjoyed playing dodgeball (INT#2, July 16, 2015; Q#5). As our program went along, John showed less anxiety, and seemed to enjoy himself more. His posture became more open in that his arms were no longer folded in front of him in a protective stance. In one of his journal entries, he wrote, “Today was fun and I feel like I had a great workout. I hope we can do what we did today again” (June 16, 2015). My purpose for our participant observation sessions was not to have a “workout” but simply to be active and explore movement in a variety of ways. On the day of his journal entry, he had participated in activities that could be considered competitive, including a game of ultimate frisbee. This made me question how John distinguished between the activities he liked, and participated in, from those he did not: Did some activities shine a spotlight on him more so than others? At times, did he feel like he was being watched? Did some activities expose what he perceived to be vulnerabilities or shortcomings? Equally important, what was it about the activities he liked that made them enjoyable? I tried to ask about his activity preferences in a variety of ways, being careful not to suggest answers, and each time I received the same general response: “I don’t really know why I like it. I just enjoy it” (John, INT#2; July 16, 2015). The inability of some of the boys to articulate a thoughtful and well-reasoned response may be considered a disadvantage in doing research with young people. This idea, however, comes from positivist and humanist research traditions that value logical and well-reasoned articulations of rational thought. Due to their age, young people will not have had a lengthy exposure to rationality discourses and their answers may draw on various ways of knowing and decision-making. John’s repeated response that he simply enjoyed some physical activities, and not others, suggested an emphasis on feelings and emotions associated with embodied ways of

110 knowing, rather than on rationality. It also suggested an openness to important things that may not be accessible to rational ways of thinking. It may be that his were ‘reasons’ inconsistent with logical analysis; put differently, they were ‘reasons’ (i.e., sensings) that suggested a different way of ‘thinking’ (i.e., embodied sensing or knowing). There comes a point where discourse and language are inadequate and “what is known and expressed in the subject is an uncertainty, an impulse, or a dread” (Frosh as cited in Sykes, 2011b, p. 131. John’s physical activity preferences suggest that in systems of parergonality there is a level of fluidity between what gets constructed as the centre and the margins. For instance, although John was adamant that he did not participate in “competitive sports”, he nonetheless, participated in activities that could be included in that category. In many aspects, John’s choice of activities – specifically, as a way of understanding and relating to movement – were very different than Brett’s, another boy in the study. Brett, who was in Grade eight, was very clear about his choice of activities and how he went about them. In describing his approach to the physical education classes at his school, he offered: I would bring my stuff and then find out what we were doing and […] it would depend on what we were doing if I wanted to go get changed [in order to participate] or not. (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#3) Interestingly, Brett’s criteria for participation in physical education classes depended on whether or not the day’s activity was a “professional sport” (INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#3). If it were, then he would participate and if not, then he would sit out. So, for example, Brett would participate on days when sports like basketball or football were offered but would sit out when the activity was a low-organizational game39. As he explained: … so I like the sports that you can do inside of school like extracurricular type stuff and outside like in big leagues and all that. And those are the activities that I like. I don’t really like uhm, I wouldn’t like soccer-baseball 40. (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#3) All the other boys in the study reported that they participated in a variety of low organization games and did so during the Boys in Motion Program. Brett, on the other hand, showed a strong preference for participating only in sport-centered, masculine activities. For Brett, young children’s activities like soccer-baseball were not considered to be ‘real sports’ and he avoided them. If competitive sport epitomizes dominance, control, aggression, and physical strength, then Brett’s choices would fit well with notions of dominant masculinity (Atkinson, 2011).

39 Low organizational activities or games are inclusive, movement-oriented activities. They tend to me more cooperative, more accepting of a variety of ‘skill levels’, and less competitive than traditional sports. 40 Soccer-baseball is a “low organizational game” based on general baseball rules. A large soft ball is rolled to a “batter” who kicks the ball instead of hitting it with a bat. As in baseball, fielders attempt to either catch the ball in the air or throw it to a base ahead of the runner.

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Indeed, references to dominant masculinity were very much evident in Brett’s general approach to physical activity. As he stated: Punching stuff, lifting weights, huh, all that type of stuff. I always wanted to lift weights – that’s the stuff I jump into but mom says it’s not the best to do – start with the push- ups. (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#22) Earlier, I argued that physical education-through-sport was the prevailing approach in physical education classes for almost all participants; the lone exception was Brett. He described his physical education class in the following manner: [The physical education teacher] usually gets us to play like soccer-baseball and stuff like that – the stuff I don’t enjoy doing all that much because I am not like a big runner so I am not kinda good at that. She just gets us to play all those types of sports –it’s like the ones that you played as a younger kid – she likes to do that. (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#9) In this example Brett has reproduced dominant sport discourses. In the traditional understanding of the hierarchical power structures of schools, it is the teachers, from their positions of authority, who monitor, impose, and police hegemonic discourses, and it is the students who are acted upon and made docile. In the current example, the social locations have been changed. It was Brett who directed a type of surveillance back at his teacher. He watched what his teacher did, and when it did not meet his normative expectations, he did not participate. Non- participation is a form of power students can yield over their teachers whose job it is to engage students. According to Foucault, power in the period of modernity has ceased to be so much a matter of visible, external force and has become more the diffuse circulation of power (Foucault, 1975). The flow of power and its contestation can occur at multiple levels and directions. Resistance to change in schools can come from many directions including teachers, administrators, policy makers, parents and students, who are all implicit in power structures. Brett’s surveillance of his teacher and subsequent resistance speaks to the challenges for teachers who try to implement change. It was Brett’s expectation that “big leagues” sport is what he would do in physical education (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#3). When it was not, his increasing non-participation was unsettling for both himself and his mother (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#3), and I suspect, for his teacher. I place Brett alongside John to explore how discourse functions in tandem with subject positions. Brett’s desire to fit into physical education-through-sport was highlighted in contrast to John’s resistance, and vice versa. If we accept the discourse of physical education-through- sport as operating in a cultural site of practice where gendered norms are routed and brought to bear on individuals, then discourse provides a way to understand what resources are available to individuals as they take up particular subject positions. In the negotiation of discourses, subjects engage in technologies of the self, actualized by agency and self-disciplinary practices (Davies,

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1993; Foucault, 1975; Heron, 2007). In this perspective, there is no unmediated access to knowledge/reality. There is not one truth but a relation of power and knowledge, and a resulting capacity to determine truth/reality. Hence, there is not one knowledge but multiple, conflicting and unstable knowledges. Thus, John and Brett may have been influenced by very different so- called truths. This may help explain John’s paradoxical relationship to competitive sport. There is “no stable, core subject at the centre of language” (Norman, 2009, p. 116). In the same perspective, Brett’s participation in normalized forms of (hyper)masculine construction may have the appearance of freedom of choice but the process of subjectification is, instead, a push and pull of being “simultaneously enabled and constrained by the same institutions and norms” (Taylor, 2014, p. 173). Brett’s comments are elucidating. It’s important to me but I don’t really do much to change … [my body]… Like I want to change it but … I am sure after I start noticing changes like after I go camp to [Boys in Motion Program] and stuff I probably like doing it a lot more (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#7). There is a real sense of ambiguity and impermanence in this passage. Notions of identity that suggest coherence, stability, and permanence do not apply. Given that language and discourses are the “fabric through which the subject makes sense of the world and their place in it, the subject is likewise fragmented, multiple, and contradictory” (Norman, 2009, p. 116). It is the nature of identifications that they can be temporary attachments and not an ontological given. That is, they can be contradictory, fluid, partial, and multiple (Sykes, 2011b, p. 81). Far from being a self-fulfilling prophecy for the changes he wanted to make to his body, Brett’s accounts continued to demonstrate his ambivalence in developing any sort of unified sense of identity. As he later confided: I haven’t really tried anything out. I did baseball like when I was about eight [years old] but that doesn’t really count. But I think I am good at some things like punching or something like that, I don’t know. (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#16) The aggressive, violent, hyper-masculine male subject appears to be for Brett both an object of desire and uncertainty. Confusion as multiple identifications can contribute to the de- stabilization of a sense of identity (Sykes, 2011b). As Judith Butler (1996) explained in Jackson and Mazzei, (2012), it is in the repetition and inconsistencies of performance, in taking up a gendered identity, that the category and the instability of the very category that it constitutes is established. The citational practices that compel a ‘fitting into’ an identity category do not imply that the subject is locked into that category (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). A repetition never looks exactly the same, never exhausts its performative possibilities, and therefore “constitutes and contests the coherence of that [subject]” (Butler, 1996, as cited in Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 76, italics in original). In other words, it is through re-iterative performances that both discourses and subjectivities are made possible and challenged.

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An interesting development occurred toward the end of the Boys in Motion Program. Brett missed a few of the later sessions because, as he told me in our exit interview, we had not done enough “real sports [or…] the harder stuff” (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#2). It seems that my efforts in helping him explore a more frequent and diverse physical activity practice proved similar to his physical education teacher’s efforts. Neither one of us provided enough of an emphasis on competitive sport to fully sustain his interest. On the other hand, except for his proclaimed interest in dodgeball, John’s positioning relative to competitive sport could not have been more different. Gender and Physical Education-Through-Sport I have explored the embodied performativities of John and Brett in relation to the discourse of physical education-through-sport. Discourse is inseparable from historical, social, and cultural contexts; it is not to be understood as an independent element but as the establishment of a web of enabling and constraining institutions and social practices (Escobar, 2012). I have continued this exploration by more widely exploring the overlap between physical education-through-sport and gender; specifically, I have explored embodied movement in terms of gender binaries and the abject. I start by examining a dance unit as described by three of the participants in this study. Although none of the participants were in the same physical education class, the task was similar in each case: to perform a choreographed routine in front of the whole, mixed-sex class, performed in sex-separated groups. The boys all described how they went about choreographing the dance routine in a similar manner. For example, one participant described it this way: “They [the teacher] give us stuff [list of dance moves] that we have to do” (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#17); and another said that “[the teacher] had a sheet of moves” (Patrick, INT#1; May 19, 2015; Q#4), from which each group could put together a series of dance moves. The curriculum documents describe expectations that can be supported by dance. These include demonstrations of movement concepts having to do with the body, space, effort, and relationship (The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education, Grades 1-8, 2015). What struck me about the boys’ description of their dance unit was how closely it mimicked the characteristics of what I have described as competitive sport; namely, an emphasis on structure, performance, and product. Students performed a series of prescribed skills (dance moves) in order to deliver a product for evaluation. Consistent with sport practices, a spotlight on performance put the materiality of the body on display. Social environments where bodies are being judged and attention brought to bear on gendered movements makes bodies more visible. Being evaluated in how the body moves, in front of peers, could be an anxiety producing and even traumatic experience, particularly for students who identify as different – whether they are fat bodies, trans bodies, or disabled bodies (Sykes, 2011b). Participants like Ronny felt “like I’m

114 being judged… By everyone … [and] I’m not really good at dance and I don’t really like it.” (INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#17). This was somewhat surprising for Ronny’s mother because, according to her, “Oh, yeah, he’ll dance at home. He moves! He’s danced since he was little” (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#17). Through movement and music, dance can be a pathway for individual and group expression. It can be a vehicle for opening up spaces to challenge sovereign and controlling masculinity by emphasizing a sense of connection to space, to objects, and to others; however, for these three participants, dance reproduced dominant ways of moving and binary gender through a limited conceptualization of movement. Discourses function not by dissolving or negating but rather through processes of incorporation (Atkinson, 2011; Escobar, 2012). One of the ways this can be done is by bringing otherwise marginalized practices like dance into a more central position, under the policies and practices of inclusion or diversity. This is a technology of power that “re-positions marginality [both bodies and practices] not as a positive space outside the centre, but as constituted within the centre” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 8). A set of relations establishes the conditions under which elements can be brought within the discourse; this set of relations determines the discursive practice of what can be thought, said, and done (Escobar, 2012). Hence, dance and the possibilities it may have offered as embodied practice was subsumed by the established discourses of inclusivity, and skill performance and evaluation in physical education. In neoliberal societies, the flow of power cannot be overt, as in totalitarian regimes. Confining and coercive relations work while maintaining an illusionary sense of movement of the elements within the limits of discursive systems. Boundaries must ostensibly present permeability to allow for illusions of merit and equity. The network of relations, however, allows this ‘movement’ only within the restrictive framework of a discursive formation that is flexible enough to allow such illusions, and yet sturdy enough to maintain the integrity of the system; that is, the set of relations continues to reproduce and perpetuate the system, as a system. It is the embeddedness of discourses within discursive formations (systems of thought and practice) that makes them so difficult to shift. In this case, the potentialities of dance to transcend the discourse of physical education-through-sport was normalized and made productive within a set of cultural, social, and curricular relations that outlined in advance what could emerge as viable representations of the active, healthy, heteronormative child (see Escobar, 2012, for a general explanation on the expansion of discourse).

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Abjection and anxiety. Next, I continued to explore the constitutiveness of physical education-through-sport and gender discourses by turning to an interview with one of the participants. This exchange with Kenny, about participation in physical education, helps to make visible the overlapping discursive relations that support normative constructions of movement and gender. Kenny: Most of the girls don’t participate [in physical education] – only, like, a handful do because they’re into sports and stuff but the rest of them sit out [of] doing stuff. RB: Why do you think they don’t participate? Even, some of the boys in our [Boys in Motion] group, they participated in our group but often they did not participate in Phys Ed [class]? Kenny: Yeah. RB: Why do you think that is? Because you have no problem with participating in Phys Ed class? Kenny: I think some girls just don’t like to get all sweaty and smell and stuff because they might think boys might think that’s gross, and uhm, I don’t think they are that active. And there’s a lot of girls in my school – like breathing problems, I guess. RB: They have breathing problems, because they’re exercising and have a tough time getting air? Kenny: I just think they are very like … [ ]…Most of the girls don’t like anything that involves sports because they don’t like running and doing physical activities. RB: But they did when they were younger? Kenny: Uhm, I guess so. RB: So, where do they get these ideas, do you think? Kenny: I don’t know. (Kenny, INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#15) Gender was central in Kenny’s establishment of the social boundaries needed to maintain a separate, independent self, configured around ways of moving. In this passage gendered discourses of male physical superiority intersect with physical education-through-sport in Kenny’s construction of the sovereign male subject. The performance of an embodied masculinity constructed through physical exertions, required the abjection of feminine, non- athletic attachments. Julia Kristeva (1982) described the abject as “anything that threatens the bodily boundaries” (as cited in Sykes, 2011b, p. 111), and the process of abjection is connected to the maintenance of discursively constructed sovereign body boundaries. That is, the desire to preserve part of oneself or one’s identity is done by casting off/expelling what is “not me”. In the interaction with Kenny, the “not me” was decidedly feminized and constructed in terms of non-participation and inactivity in general. In contrast, running, doing sports and physical activities, sweat and (foul) smell were described as the stuff of boyhood construction.

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Abjection, as a process, “rises in the fear of the loss of borders” (Pronger, 2002, p. 180). It is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva, 1982, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 180). Within the boundaries of the self and what one defines as outside the self (objects, others) there exist pieces that were once part of the self or one’s identity that have since been rejected – the abject. Consequently, the abject was always of the body; it was always already part of ‘me’. In this sense, the abject is a technology of the independent, sovereign self that points to the fear of the relatedness that connects all selves. In exploring the relation of gender and movement, I pointed out to Kenny that not only girls but also some of the boys in the Boys in Motion Program often chose not to participate in their regular physical education classes. With his reply, he acknowledged my comment, albeit, without letting it interrupt how he positioned himself as a boy, and how he positioned girls. Dominant, widely circulating discourses about masculine and feminine ways of moving and non-moving are continuously inscribed and reproduced on the body, and make challenging normative stereotypes very difficult. Sykes (2011b) contended that projected anxieties about peripheral bodies circulate beneath dominant activity discourses and serve to maintain illusions about the healthy, normal, male body. Kenny’s “refusal to implicate [himself] in what [he] may already know” (Britzman, 1998, as cited in Sykes, 2011b, p. 110) represents psychic anxieties that can be taken up by members of dominant groups as well as by peripheral bodies. They are “defensive mechanisms that animate anxieties about the theft of enjoyment, smooth over the awfulness in fun and continually seek control over a fortified, sovereign physical body” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 110). Anxieties inherent in the construction of hegemonic masculinity have been explored through an understanding of the centrality of gender as a “central mechanism of power in society” (Kimmel, 2005, p. 6), first brought to our attention by feminist scholars and women’s studies. Previously, classical social theory made “sex roles” appear historically invariant, and the natural order of things, and therefore invisible (Kimmel, 2005, p. 6). This has perpetuated the inequalities of men over women but also some men over other men through the distribution of rewards among men “by differential access to class, race, ethnic privileges, or privileges based on sexual orientation [and I add, ways of moving]” (Kimmel, 2005, p. 7). The current study has shown that ways of moving intersect with gendered categories of otherness that assert inequalities among groups in society. According to Kimmel (2005), making the normative into the normal has been the discursive mechanism by which hegemonic masculinity has been constituted. It is by the process of making a relation of power appear as the natural order of things that traditional authority works in making things disappear. This construction has left men and boys who do not conform to normative ways of moving unsure in their person-hood and susceptible to anxieties

117 about manhood. These anxieties can be manifested in multiple ways including a sense of disconnection from one’s own body and sense of identity. More evident, these anxieties can manifest as non-participation in physical education classes as well as in the expression of the docile body of (hyper)masculinity discourses (as seen in Brett’s responses). Through the process of abjection, Kenny’s claim to an embodied masculinity demonstrated the construction of binary masculine and feminine gender. Girls, constituted in hierarchical and oppositional ways, were cast off from the normative masculine as peripheral bodies. According to Kenny, girls do not sweat, they do not smell, they do not run, and they do not do sports; more generally, in the world of physical activity, girls were seen by him as non- participants. In sporting contexts, Heather Sykes (2011b) argued that the sweat of male bodies is a highly gendered substance infused with masculine potentiality. … masculine, athletic sweat is a mobile, virile expansion of the athletic, sovereign

subject; however, this sweat can only be signified as such through the abjection of all

manner of peripheral bodies. (p. 46)

In this sense, “properly masculine sweat is unremarkable” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 46) whereas the sweat of female and marginalized bodies in movement spaces is intensely regulated, in that it may be seen as out of place and peripheral to those spaces. Physical education-through-sport supports and is supported by normative masculinity: the strong, competitive, tough, unfeeling, sovereign physical body desired by boys. It teaches boys how to be men, as it is normatively defined, but always out of reach. Indeed, in following Michael Atkinson I ask, “Which men [and boys], precisely, are actually privileged by impossible or untenable expectations, standards, and norms of manliness extolled in Western nations like Canada?” (2011, p. 2). To take on a masculine subject position is also to take on related psychic anxieties attached to both normative and marginal subjectivities. At an age when gendered identity is so strongly connected to the body, these anxieties represent a threat to the construction of the independent, sovereign self. As boys of Kenny’s age are performing masculinity and trying to fit-in to a masculine subject position, what anxieties might be provoked if a girl could participate equally well in the domain of male sport enterprise (when masculinity is itself constructed against anxieties over femaleness)?41 Also, what

41 I bring to this question my own embodied history with masculinity discourses. At the start of high school, I joined the wrestling team. I was not a good wrestler and lost almost all my matches. In a sport where the body and masculinity are in obvious display, it left me feeling very inadequate as a male. It was my sense of whom I was out there on the mat being quashed. In those days, girls were just beginning to participate in wrestling and there was talk of a girl wrestler who was better than some boys. I remember that I was literally and completely terrified that I would have to wrestle her and possibly lose. Hierarchies of masculinity imposed on the wrestling mat were challenging enough but losing to a girl would be psychic devastation for an immigrant kid trying to fit in somewhere.

118 anxieties might be provoked by having to adhere to the restrictions of masculine forms of movement? These psychic anxieties may be incited by the aggressions of the independent, sovereign self attempting to fortify its boundaries and sense of self from the otherness of what is ‘not me’. Of course, the what is ‘not me’, the abject, is always already a part of the interrelated and interdependent me. Much psychic work is necessary to support the performance of gender as well as hold back the anxieties aroused by the illusion of the independent, sovereign self. The performance of masculine gender, examined in this study through ways of moving, is a disciplinary technology involved in the maintenance of the separate, controlling self. Thus, gendered movement represents a parergonal limit to the infinitely broader, non-violent, desiring emptiness of movement. In other terms, gender restrictions imposed on movement represent structures of repression employed to defend the independent, sovereign self against other selves, which already share a relation with the self. If we take “against” to infer opposition, aggression, and control, then a self that defines itself against other selves is a fair description of dominant masculinity as it operates in within masculine movement environments, including physical education-through-sport. Conclusion In this chapter, I argued that physical education-through-sport represented, for these participants, the prevailing but not totalizing approach to physical education. I outlined connections between this approach, curriculum organization and scheduling, ways of moving, and embodied constructions of gender. In the physical education-through-sport approach, sport is connected to masculinity discourses as an aggressive, competitive, and domineering way of living the body. Physical education-through-sport is a biopedagogy for producing the visibly engaged, athletic, sport-centred, heterosexual, male body. Sport dominates other possibilities for movement in a variety of ways, including by absorption. To paraphrase Escobar (2012), the system of relations allows discourse to adapt to new conditions (within the same discursive space) such that seemingly opposed options (for example, dance) can coexist within that space. Like other discursive systems, this approach both produces and challenges normative constructions of gender. It is not the case that physical education-through-sport determines the performative embodiments of gender and movement but rather, the strong overlap and interaction with dominant bodily discourses of gender and movement work to subsume difference and thus other potentialities, even as it produces difference. My analysis stands in stark contrast to the relatively open-ended curriculum expectations of physical literacy that advocate for a diversity of movements in multiple environments (The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education, Grades 1-8, 2015), which should conceivably lead to multiple forms of expression. However, forms of movement

119 and ways of being only gain meaning and value within cultural frameworks. Thus, possible challenges – like dance and other forms of movement that may challenge the idea of the independent, sovereign self – are likely to find only limited expression within the restrictive organizing principles of traditional physical education classes with an emphasis on sport instruction and practice. In this manner, new possibilities are likely to be normalized by the existing discursive formation. Indeed, educational research conducted in the United Kingdom reported that “increased flexibility amidst curriculum reform has been found to perpetuate inequities in both breadth and quality of experience” (Wilkinson, 2016, as cited in Sprake & Temple, 2016). Lastly, I argued that anxieties over marginalized (for instance, feminine or non-athletic) bodies are projected onto the unmarked potentialities for embodiment and serve to maintain the illusion of the masculine, controlling, self. More specifically, the performances of ‘masculine’ movements are anxiety-producing defence mechanisms used to protect the sovereign, independent self from infinitely broader relationships. These anxieties can be manifest, on the one hand, via non-participation in physical activity, and on the other, by extreme expressions of hegemonic masculinity. I suggested that understanding the abject as already part of the self (as well as part of other selves) can begin to point to the relatedness of the body. In the next chapter, I have explored the moving body more broadly. In this task I have used the logic of parergonality and the philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992; Pronger, 2002) to look at how movement brings the body to presence in different discursive contexts.

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Chapter 7. The Parergonal Logic of Movement Discourses The Ontario Physical Education curriculum document has done little to outline their vision of “physical literacy” (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8, Health and Physical Education, 2015, pp. 6-7). Along with an emphasis on self-assessment and personal responsibility, this document also noted that physically literate individuals “are able to demonstrate a variety of movements confidently, competently, creatively and strategically across a wide range of health-related physical activities” (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8, Health and Physical Education, 2015, p. 7). This strongly aligns with the idea of the body-as- object and Whitehead’s (2007) conceptualization of physical literacy, which I critiqued in the previous chapter. Forms of movement are historically and socially contingent. They are comprehensible within the context of the social and cultural discourses in which they emerge, and in turn help shape those same discourses as to what are normal and marginal ways of moving. In the first part of this chapter, I have explored movement in relation to social locations and spaces and how the participants were positioned across those same social locations and spaces. I then considered how subjectivities are constructed around discursively valued forms of movement and ability. Lastly, I reflected on the moving body using Brian Pronger’s (2002) theory of the body in which he proposed that movement is being. Throughout this chapter, I have set the groundwork for challenging constructions of the independent and sovereign self that support the privileging of sport in physical education. Like other technologies of control, these represent “a calculative mastery over the uncontrollable nature of the body” (Pronger, 2002, p. 167) that organize the puissance of the body via the projects of pouvoir. Movement at the Intersections of Social Locations and Spaces Movement both produces and is produced by the relations of power in social locations and spaces. The following discussion with Patrick highlighted how the diversity and freedom of movement can be harnessed and re-sourced along social spaces and locations. RB: In your journal [June 23, 2015] you wrote that, “Moving around makes me feel really good that’s why I like sports and playing outside”. Can you tell me a bit more about how you feel when you move around? What does it make you feel like? Patrick: Good, like, I don’t know, really – hard to say. RB: Does it make you feel alive? Energy? Strong? That you can do things? Patrick: Yeah, like I don’t know – I just can’t think of it right now. Especially with my friends, we all do that usually; we usually build forts in the bush, run around, don’t even go home all day. Can’t really do that all the time ‘cause I have to look out for my brother – ‘cause I don’t know anything that he likes playing other than video games.

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RB: Do you have a younger brother? Patrick: And older. RB: You seem to make a difference between playing sports and playing outside, of playing inside and playing outside. Patrick: I like playing outside more, usually. RB: Why is that? Patrick: I don’t know. It is just like nice and it’s not [pause/silence]. RB: You’re an outdoorsy kind of guy? So you would rather be outside than in the gym? Patrick: Yeah, other than hockey. RB: You usually play hockey inside, in the gym. Anything else about being outside that you like? Patrick: It is just that you can do a lot that you can’t do inside. Like, you can build forts inside but it’s just not as fun. RB: Could it be that someone is watching you inside? Someone like a Phys Ed teacher or me? Outside you get to do whatever you want? Patrick: Yeah, outside you get to roam free. RB: More freedom? Patrick: Freedom [in agreement]. That, like, sometimes near the end of the year, like he [Phys Ed teacher] just says, let’s go outside and you guys can play basketball, four- square, football, soccer, anything, wall-ball. And you can choose whichever one you want. Or you can just walk around the track or do running long jump. RB: You like that best, when he says you can do whatever you like? Patrick: Yeah, like inside we have to do whatever [the teacher] tells us – it’s not always what we want, nobody really likes […] Like the BEEP [cardiovascular fitness] test or whatever you guys call it. I couldn’t run, like the second time we did it, I couldn’t run because of my feet, and nobody believed [I had plantar fasciitis]. (Patrick, INT#2; August 12, 2015; Q#5) In the above, we see that the environments around the bush and the gymnasium operationalize movement potentials very differently. Patrick positioned himself, and is positioned, in relation to these two different social spaces, and the social locations he inhabits in those spaces. Drawing on Bourdieu (1992), Evans (2004) explains that discursive fields are conceptualized as discrete but overlapping social spaces (including the gym, outside spaces, school, the internet, the home and so on) that are intersected and constituted in relation to social locations (including class, race, gender, dis/ability, and others). Importantly, social locations and social spaces are never constituted independently of each other. Each is diffracted through the other, producing, and reflecting the socio-historic contexts in which they function. The intersecting nodes of social locations and social spaces – the configuration of which can be described as a “system of

122 relations” or “discursive formation” (see Escobar, 2012, pp. 40-41) set the context for what emerges as intelligible (and marginalized) movement. Made intelligible within the context in which it emerges, infinite movement is re- sourced, made functional, confined, and rendered meaningful in the parergonal logic of use- value (Pronger, 2002). Some forms of movement are made to be useful, efficient, and desirable whereas others are viewed as wasted, unproductive, and useless. Patrick highlighted how the moving body comes into the process of being by contrasting the restrictions imposed by the built architecture and the teacher in the gymnasium with the potentiality and freedom of the “bush”. The bush, as it is referred to in North Bay, is any treed, natural area that has not been cultivated; it has been left to grow unattended and unsurveilled. As Patrick stated, “It is just that you can do a lot [in the bush] that you can’t do inside”. Movement in the bush allowed Patrick to “roam free”, lose track of time and “[not] go home all day”; whereas, inside the gym, “We have to do whatever [the teacher] tells us – it’s not always what we want”. Even when the outside was brought inside, it was not the same. According to this participant, “Like, you can build forts inside but it’s just not as fun”. The constitutive intersections of the social space of the gym (the controlling, functional, and predictable built architecture) and social location (Patrick was a student and was therefore required to follow the teachers’ instruction) did not allow for simply transplanting outside activities indoors. This analysis – an understanding of the movement of the body examined through the limiting (and productive) work of discourses functioning within social spaces and locations – meshes favourably with Cornell’s (1992) philosophy of the limit and Pronger’s (2002) theory of the body. In my exploration of the moving body below, I have continued with the deconstruction analysis modelled in Cornell’s (1992) and Pronger’s (2002) work. Puissance and Pouvoir: The Desiring, Moving Body as Source and Re-source Pronger (2002) conceptualized the re-sourcing of the moving body through what Martin Heidegger (1938) called Gestell (enframing) which proposed that the discourse of “beings as calculable objects comes to limit the sense of what can emerge” (p. 63, emphasis mine). This foreclosure on possibility, the notion of the body as calculable (predictable and therefore controllable), is achieved by objectifying the body. Knowing the body in its objectness, as a thing, requires “the power to project onto things conceptual frameworks for knowing them in advance of empirical encounters with them” (Pronger, 2002, p. 62). One such framework is that of the sovereign, “modern scientific subject” (Pronger, 2002, p. 62, italics in original). Pronger (2002) explored the systemic parergonal logic through which some dimensions of the body, and indeed some bodies, are rendered useful and others useless with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) supportive power relations of puissance and pouvoir. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) define desire as “a process of production without reference to

123 any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it” (p. 154). A comparison of the desiring potential of puissance that Patrick described in the bush with the project of pouvoir in the gymnasium provides an example. Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined as a “capacity for existence,” and a “capacity to affect or be affected” which refers not only to emotion, but to the augmentation or diminution of the body’s capacity to act (Pronger, 2002, p. 66). The puissance “of the living, desiring body is its production by movement... Only in motion does the event of the body happen” (Pronger, 2002, p.79). Following Pronger (2002), who follows Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I have referred to the desiring body not in its general usage “in which desire is socially, economically, and culturally produced to crave and therefore to realize itself according to the accumulative logics of capitalism” (p. 78) but in envisioning a kind of desire that is open-ended “with an intensity of zero – i.e., without craving” (p. 79). Desire is “the flow of energy … the force by which we move at all” (p. 76). “The movement of desire is the essence of the body” (p. 76, italics in original). By essence, Pronger is referring to social, cultural, political, and economic processes, or the “manner in which things come to presence, the way in which they are realized” (p. 58). This is not to be confused with the more common understanding of essence as the stable, transhistorical aspects of human ‘nature’42. On the other hand, pouvoir is similar to Foucault’s governmentality “as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential” (Deleuze,1992, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 66). “Rendered useful by pouvoir, desire’s puissance – its erotic power of connection – is transformed. Pouvoir makes connections, but they are functional and rendered meaningful in the parergonal logic of use-value” (Pronger, 2002, pp. 114-115). In this view, puissance and pouvoir can be effectively employed in our exploration of the moving body. I have used the word movement to signify all types of movement. The moving body is any body that has the capacity for movement; that is, any living human being. It is conceptualized as including normalized and marginalized forms of physical activity including movements that some call non-participation. Hence, the moving body includes bodies associated with bodily difference; for example, a body in a wheelchair is a moving body as are ‘disabled’ bodies, ‘awkward’ bodies, ‘fat’ bodies, and all others. Importantly, the moving body is also conceptualized in its relatedness to other moving-bodies and to all elements of existence. For the participant, Patrick, the gymnasium environment, as a regulator of overlapping social location and space, functioned to organize the desire of the body in such a way that sought to (re)produce movement forms (and bodies) through notions of skill development,

42 Neither Pronger (2002) nor I use the word “nature” to refer an essentialist reading of the body. In reference to puissance, the nature of the body is the productive flow of non-craving desire that cannot be controlled but can be appropriated by the projects of pouvoir.

124 sports ability, fitness, and health. For example, in the physical education context, movement that demonstrates ‘developmentally appropriate’ levels of biomotor abilities (strength, speed, cardiovascular fitness, and flexibility), and skill execution (for example, shooting a basketball) is seen as useful. Forms of movement that are not functional to the system are marginalized (for example, slow or awkward movements or movements from other movement cultures like building forts). The project of pouvoir in the gymnasium environment re-sources the coming to presence of the moving body through the intertextual ensemble of the built architecture, teachers, the curriculum, institutionalized procedures and practices, students, and so on. Therefore, discursive manner by which things become the way they are, sets what they become (Escobar, 2012; Pronger, 2002). It is a disciplining of the body by a channeling of desire that curtails the infinite possibilities for the embodiment of movement. In this view, physical education is a marshalling of the movement of desire in the production of the ‘normal’, active, able-bodied, athletic child – “the imagined child of physical education” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 112). Alternatively, the bush organizes desire in a much less coercive manner. It presents a shifting canvas of light, terrain, materials, and weather conditions for the moving body to move into that canvas, perhaps to move with that canvas. The bush is not a repressive overcoding of the body but rather allows the body to “roam free”, as Patrick put it. In that sense, the bush is much more open to the puissance of playful, free, limitless, pathways of desire, which is the power of our relatedness to everything. Significantly, Pronger (2002) made the point that puissance and pouvoir must not be “mistaken as a constitutional polarity (puissance = good, pouvoir = bad). Puissance is not the opposite of pouvoir; it is a resource for the governmentality (Foucault 1979; 1980b; 1988) of pouvoir” (Pronger, 2002, p. 67, italics in original). Therefore, I do not mean to infer that the freedom of puissance can only take place outdoors or that it cannot occur inside the confines of the gymnasium. Puissance as the moving event of the body is available to all paths of desire. Having said that, Pronger (2002) wrote of a ‘direction’ of puissance that is a limitless “inwardlyness” of movement “in the sense of going into the wholeness of becoming … as when we speak of being in tune, in harmony, or in love” (Pronger, 2002, p. 97). This is a deeply personal connectedness of the body event that “is the freedom that allows rhizomatic becoming” (p. 97). In the sense of a self-penetrating movement that goes into the wholeness of being (not to be confused with going into the Self, or going into oneself), puissance has no spatial restrictions. This “self- penetrating, inwarding movement [has] no limits” (Pronger, 2002, p. 97, italics in original) and can possibly take place either in the bush or in the gymnasium. Nonetheless, “only by taking up personally one’s own movement does one authentically discover the movement that is being itself. The meaning of being… is not a doctrine to be learned but a risk to be taken” (Sheehan, 1983, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 72).

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Another participant, Jason, described the flow of desire or energy of the moving body this way: “when I move i feel like im useing all the energy that is stored up” (Jason journal entry; June 18, 2018). In a similar way, John wrote in his journal. today was good because it was very active and i feel like i got a good workout so I don’t have a bunch of built up energy be cause you can tell I need to work out when i start to get hyper and stop making sense”. (John; Journal Entry; June 23, 2015) I was also able to follow up on John’s comments in our exit interview. RB: You wrote down in your journal that getting in a “good workout” and getting rid of “built up energy” so you don’t “start to get hyper and stop making sense” seems to be important to you. It is great that you recognize when you begin to feel like this! What do you normally do when you start to feel like you have too much built up energy? [See June 23 journal entry] John: We have like an exercise bike down in the basement and stuff. Sometimes I’ll go on that for a bit. RB: Is there anything else you could do when you feel like that? At school, what would you do there? John: Not really at school. RB: I guess because there’s other stuff going on? John: Yeah. RB: Do you feel like that when you’ve been playing on your computer a little too long? When you feel that energy because you haven't been moving. John: Uhm… no, just every now and then I feel like I haven’t done anything for a while. I’ll go on the exercise bike or go swimming or something. (John, INT#2; July 16, 2015; Q#6) Both Jason and John described their experience of how the desiring moving body requires expression through movement. Pronger (2002) argued that it is the puissance of the moving body that makes it susceptible to the intrusions of pouvoir. Specifically, it is the flow of desire of puissance that makes the moving body vulnerable to the project of pouvoir. In the next section, I explore how the energies of the moving body are available to be harnessed by the projects of pouvoir, which include those projects involved in the discursive construction of the subject. Functional Constructions of the Centre and the Margins in Parergonal Systems of Movement Building from Patrick’s comments wherein I began to explore movement and the process of subjectification in physical education spaces/locations, I have continued by looking more closely at how categories of difference get named through movement, and how they are

126 policed. In this task, I have focused on one of the participants, Jason, and have offered a variety of perspectives. Following are some of my field notes taken after our first interview43: Jason appears anxious in social environments and he was very anxious during the interview (arms crossed, fingers fidgeting with opposite side arm, minimal eye contact). Was brought to Tim Hortons [for our interview] by [his] sister (another sister and aunt also present). Dressed the same way he participates in Boys in Motion – jeans, t-shirt, red cap, old shoes falling apart. [At times, speaks with] slurred speech. Sometimes quiet, faces away, challenging to understand. Jason attends [same school] with Jackson. He probably has an IEP [individual education plan] (mentioned that he attended a mentorship group today). (Jason Field Notes: June 17, 2015) Brett, another participant described Jason in the following way: Do you remember, the one guy, I can’t remember his name, he was always in the jeans? He didn’t seem like the big sporty type. He seemed more like the video games stay inside, all that stuff. He was trying hard at things we did but didn't really quite get it…[ ] I don’t really know how to explain it. (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#23) In one of the focus group sessions, Jason described how he spent one weekend in the following way: Jason: I sat at a computer and played video games with him [points at another participant, John]. I talk to my friends [through Skype] while I play. (FG#7; June 23, 2015) I was told by both Jason and John that, particularly during the winter, they spend most of the weekends playing video games while talking to their friends on social media. However, after my initial reading of Jason, I noted that he moved well enough in the Boys in Motion Program. Jason whose physical development is delayed (probably because he has never [had] much physical activity)44 picked up the throwing extremely quickly; threw long spirals [with the football]. (PO#4; personal notes; June 11, 2015) I also wrote the following notes after a participant observation session during which we practised hitting a baseball with a bat and running to first base. Jason also took [a] turn hitting and running. First time up he stood right on home plate and faced the pitcher [me]. I placed him sideways and off the plate. Positioned his hands – he did not know whether to go right or left handed and grabbed [the] bat cross-

43 Jason’s first interview occurred after starting the Boys in Motion Program so I had already had a chance to see him in the program. 44 Of course, I had no way of knowing this. It is an assumption I made in making meaning of Jason’s movement while trying to provide an ‘appropriate’ physical activity experience. In retrospect, I am quite embarrassed by my judgemental position.

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handed. He hit well and ran after minimal instruction. He was enthusiastic about it. (PO#12; personal notes; July 9, 2015) My purpose in providing these descriptions of movement and being, at the intersections of the physical and the social, was not to essentialize Jason nor to connect the dots of cause and effect, thereby foreclosing possibilities. Yet, in some ways that is what I have done. As I describe bodies and movements so do I “do things with words” (Austin, 1962, as cited in Gergen, 2000, p. 35). This is the productive character of language. In ‘contextualizing’ Jason, I have also located him in the humanistic myths of the independent, sovereign self along the lines of power relations and hierarchies active in movement and body discourses. Although I have provided various perspectives on Jason, they enter into the relatively coherent intertextual ensemble of “the fundamental logos of the body that those texts represent” (Pronger, 2002, p. 147, italics in original). These descriptions summon established discourses supporting the idea that the body can be measured, organized, and controlled, and, thus available to be directed by technologies for greater control of its health, productivity, and desirability. As such, these descriptions function to categorize difference and simultaneously position Jason as someone who was different: perhaps, as someone who moved awkwardly, was relatively inactive, was socially uncomfortable, and/or dressed differently. Thus, in describing Jason as peripheral in relation to normative body discourses, I have enframed and made him functional to the project of pouvoir in the sense that my descriptions have helped to establish those same normative bodily discourses. It is precisely these types of body and movement descriptions that play into the established imaginary of the active, healthy, able-bodied adolescent who is proficient at sport. Put differently, description outlines the “framework for coding and therefore for territorializing the flow of desire in the abstract terms of value” (Pronger, 2002, p. 153). Descriptive practices call the body’s movement to the discourses of the ‘physically literate’ adolescent. Even when challenging such discourses, researcher’s description calls upon them and reiterates them in the construction of meaning. Drawing on parergonal logic, description enters into the system for understanding the body, marking what can and cannot be included in the system for understanding and organizing the body and its movement. Indeed, without a logos of the body as a measurable, calculable object that is amenable to being changed by the technologies for changing the body, my descriptions would be meaningless. For me, the question becomes: how can such a limiting logos of the body be challenged? In the first part of this chapter, I explored the movement of the body taking as a starting point the intersections of social location (student) and space (the gymnasium and the bush). I noted that social spaces and locations were both productive and reflective of movement forms. Specifically, through the project of pouvoir, movement could be harnessed and made useful in alignment with the power relations of the intertextual ensemble at work in physical education

128 spaces. In envisioning movement, Pronger (2002) went further in conceptualizing “being itself as movement” (p. 68). According to him, movement is “the process by which the living body comes to presence” (p. 68) in the connectedness of a “transpersonal dimension” (p. 73). If movement is being (Pronger, 2002) then movement is inextricably linked to the process of subjectification and to subjectivities. Subjectivity refers to one’s shifting conscious and unconscious feelings, beliefs, and desires regarding experiences and relations to the world (i.e., to objects), and how discourses are constitutive of identities (Davies, 2003; Heron, 2007). In poststructural thought, an emphasis is put on the multiple recognitions and multiple commitments to the discourses each person actively takes up as they “speak/write [and I add, move] the world into existence” (Davies, 1993/2003; p. 14). Below, I explored my participant data within the framework of Pronger’s (2002) “moving body” (p. 97) by first exploring the intersections of subjectivity, the independent self, and movement. In the next exchange Patrick, who regularly took part in a wide range of physical activities including after-school team sport programs (Patrick, INT#1; May 19, 2015), described his relationship with one of his classmates who tended not to participate in physical education class: RB: Even when you go outside [in physical education class] and you have choice, are there some boys who don’t participate? Patrick: Yeah, some of them just – well some – like my friend he is like one of the nerdy ones. He will kind of play with us, like wallball45 or something but he’s not the sports person running around. RB: So, are there some boys who even though they have choice, choose not to do anything? Patrick: [Agrees] RB: Why do you think they do that? Why do they choose not to do anything? Patrick: Because they’re not confident or they don’t know how – they don’t want to learn, I guess. (Patrick, INT#2; August 12, 2015; Q#5) Here, I noted an intersecting web of social locations (friend, nerd, sports person, non- participant, and individuals who don’t want to learn/don’t know how/are not confident) and social spaces (physical education space outside the gym on school grounds) and movement forms (wallball and sports). It is noteworthy that these intesections are insinuated by notions of ability. This passage also reflects the same physical education movement hierarchy previously

45 Wallball is a low organizational game played in physical education in which players use their hands to strike a tennis ball against a wall, and the other players have to do the same without allowing the ball to hit the ground more than once. Low organizational games are movement-oriented activities that require few resources and are inclusive of a wide range of skill levels. These games tend to be more cooperative and less competitive than traditional sports.

129 articulated by another participant in which “real sports” were at the top (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#2), and games like wallball somewhere below. According to Patrick, “nerdy” students participated in playground-type games like wallball while participation in sports was the performative embodiment of a group of boys identified by Patrick as “us”. Turning to Patrick’s classmate and friend, he is one of the “nerdy” students, who “will kind of play with us, like wallball or something but he’s not the sports person”. In this excerpt, forms of movement were appropriated by the project of pouvoir to establish categories of difference intersected by social locations and space, and effectively secured ‘us’ and ‘them’: the “sports person[s]” and the “nerdy ones”, respectively. Relations of power codify and organize forms of movement in social spaces such that the doings of movement are linked to the conditions of being. The centrality of movement in social relations, or at least the centrality of the body in social relations, is not without precedent. Shilling (1991) has argued that Bourdieu’s physical capital (the body) should not be seen merely as an embodied resource for conversion into the more significant economic capital (money, goods and services), cultural capital (education) and social capital (social networks which enable other forms of capital). According to Shilling, the management and development of the body is central to human agency in general, to the production of cultural and economic capital, and to the achievement and maintenance of status. Therefore, bodily management “can be seen as the fundamental constituent in an individual’s ability to intervene in social affairs and to ‘make a difference’ in the flow of daily life” (Shilling, 1991, p. 654, italics in original). Shilling (1991) also posited that the notion of “physical capital” more accurately captures the importance of the body in its own right, and “views bodies as both constructed by social relationships and themselves entering into the construction of social relationships in an interrelationship” (p. 667). Particularly for young people, movement and exercise provide avenues for the assurance that they are okay and that they belong in a youth-centered, able-bodied culture (Pronger, 2002, p. xiii). Combined, how the body is represented – in its materiality and participation in movement discourses – is central in the development of social relations and an embodied sense of belonging. While there are a myriad of power relations that constitute subjectivities in various social spheres, the able sports subject prevails in the physical education-through-sport context described by Patrick. Patrick positioned himself as a “sports person”, defined by his ability to participate in sports. Scholars have proposed that skillful participation in sports is constructed as ability (Evans, 2004; Wright & Burrows, 2006). In the context of Australian young people, Wright and Burrows (2004) argued that “what we mean by ability, how we use it, and in relation to whom, are crucial in physical education where organized sport, recreation and exercise remain privileged over other constituents of physical culture” (p. 275). In this view, ability “is an embodied social construct, meaningful only in its display and is always and inevitably defined relationally in reference to values, attitudes and mores [ascribed to gender,

130 age, ethnicity, and disability] prevailing within a discursive field” (Evans, 2004; p. 7). Ability, as a construct referencing a specific discursive field, can be used to also explore the social locations of Patrick’s classmate. Accepting Patrick’s perspective, the classmate who did not regularly participate in the sports component of physical education occupied the social location of one of ‘them’, one of “the nerdy ones” without the requisite ability to participate in sports. Patrick’s classmate may be considered to have an enduring deficit or unfulfilled potential produced in the deficit terms of disability, as “not confident”, not knowing how, or not wanting to learn. The logic of parergonality in this system was established by a set of relations (the network of social locations/spaces, understandings of ability, the curriculum, and others) normalizing sport and producing as a by-product/waste movement forms like wallball. The attempt to control the puissance of the body is “the lack that must always appear wherever there is socially constructed desire for sovereignty” (Pronger, 2002, p. 167). The puissance of the moving body was appropriated using the construct of ability, and made functional within the project of pouvoir that I have called physical education-through-sport. This project can only be maintained through the concomitant production of lack. In Pronger’s (2002) conceptualization, the desiring freedom of the moving body, its puissance, is prone to pouvoir’s enframing. Yet, according to Pronger, the grasp of pouvoir as it seeks to systematically exploit puissance is not full authority. The same set of relations that produce dominant discourses also produce opportunities and freedoms for the construction of different subjectivities – freedoms that can escape the territorializing reach of pouvoir. The social locations available to wallball players can be thought to represent a moderate expression of such a freedom. This freedom can be conceived as a partial escape from the grasp of pouvoir that is physical education-through-sport. Thus, the social location inhabited by Patrick’s classmate can be understood as shifting from a non-participant to a “friend” who plays with Patrick – no longer one of ‘them’ but one of ‘us’. Conclusion In this chapter, I argued that movement discourses, specifically physical education- through-sport, gain meaning in social contexts. For example, the social space/locations of the bush, physical education gymnasium, and wallball organize the resources of the body differently and are constitutive of different movement forms. This resourcing of the body was explored using the concepts of puissance and pouvoir as they work within the parergonal logic of systems for controlling the moving body. I have attempted to show that the construction of the physically able, sport subject is a form of such control. The power to describe and to determine ability is used as a marker of the self in the project of pouvoir, which enframes the subject and movement (re)producing them as functional or waste. Physical education-through- sport is part of this neoliberal project. However, the logic of parergonality is not all-

131 encompassing and using the game of wallball as an example, I attempted to explore freedoms within the system.

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Chapter 8. The Ethic of Alterity In this chapter, I have addressed the last research question: How might we move forward ethically in the conceptualization of embodied movement, the lived physical and psychic experiences of our moving bodies? My aim was to bring into focus the parergonal limits of systems of pouvoir46 by searching the subtle and complex tensions between resistance and compliance. In this task, I examined the ‘strangeness’ and ‘peculiarities’ of participants’ language – both verbal and body (movement) – with a focus on how they may represent a challenge to discourses that enclose the body and the self. Using a method of poststructuralist deconstruction called the philosophy of the limit (Cornell, 1992), I plugged in the constitutiveness of data/theory/researcher (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) in formulating an answer. To begin, I have described the supporting framework for my answer. The entire project of the philosophy of the limit is driven by the desire to enact the ethical relation – the aspiration “to develop a nonviolative relationship to the Other” (Cornell, 1992, p. 13). The development of the ethical relationship has been the overarching pragmatic motivation for this thesis. The ethical relationship is nonviolative in that it does not seek to position the Other as functional to the system. I include both the normalized and the marginalized (by-products/waste) as being functional to the system; together they constitute the system, as a system. Functionality territorializes the centre and the Other within a specific and limiting system of thought. The logic of parergonality demonstrates how the very establishment of any normative system, composed of central and marginalized elements, also implies a beyond, precisely by virtue of what is unintelligible to the system. This beyond is secondness: what we may only approach but never fully know; secondness is the ‘materiality’ that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Although we can never directly engage with secondness, there is an ethic of openness implied in the process. The ethical stance should not be confused with a morality that spells out “how one determines a ‘right way to behave,’ behavioural norms which, once determined, can be translated into a system of rules” (Cornell, 1992, p. 13, italics in original). Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s (1973) Negative Dialectics, Cornell (1992) stated that this understanding of morality would produce “the normalizing effect inherent in the generalization of one behavioural system of ‘rules’” (p. 13). Rather, the ethical stance is a way of being in the world that “focuses instead

46 Systems of pouvoir, as they pertain to the body, are not transhistorical or pan-cultural but address a neoliberal capitalist resourcing of the individual. To re-iterate, systems of pouvoir are understood as closely related to Foucault’s notion of governmentality; specifically, pouvoir is an instituted and reproducible relation of force that selectively resources the body’s capacity for existence, which is puissance. Pouvoir (and not governmentality) is used in this study specifically in reference to puissance as “[i]n practice they work or play dynamically” (Pronger, 2002, p. 66).

133 on the kind of person one must become in order to develop a nonviolative relationship to the Other” (Cornell, 1992, p. 13). This is the practice of open, non-craving desire that frees the body and produces reality in a way that engages and cares for the profound interdependence of all life (Pronger, 2002, p. 88). In the conceptualization of a profound openness to otherness, the ethic of alterity relies on the poststructuralist47 insistence on the limit to positivist descriptions of the principles of modernity long-elaborated as the ‘last word’ on ‘truth’, ‘rightness’, etc. (Cornell, 1992). In challenging ontological and epistemological assumptions, this ethic spans divergent value systems while allowing dialogue across systems. I will argue that, in de-territorializing difference, the ethical nonviolative relationship rests upon the conceptualization of an openness to what lies beyond parergonal limits, which is the openness to secondness. The openness to secondness illuminates the development of ethical relationships within the limits of parergonality (for example, relationships to bigger bodies and fatnesss, awkward and non-athletic bodies, and so on). This openness to the Other, is the ethic of alterity. Important to this thesis, the interrelationality of the self is the ground upon which an openness to secondness, and to parergonal by-products, can be developed. In other words, underpinning the ethic of alterity is the self in-relation. I use the term self in reference to the individual “imagined differently – as embedded, embodied, extended, and enacted” (le Grange, 2018, p. 41), as inextricably bound up in the connectedness of all things while affirming the importance of human interdependence and relatedness. The term self suggests both a condition of being and a state of becoming or continuous unfolding. The self is differentiated from the subject which is the term I use to refer specifically to the subject of discourse and poststructuralist theory. An openness to difference that does not territorialize, I suggest, should also be embedded in the research process. Researching Difference An analysis of the generation of difference was crucial to this study. I understand the workings of difference in three separate ways. Most commonly, the idea of difference can be used to support categories of signifiers used to represent reality, and (re)produce hierarchies founded on use-value (for example, the overweight body as an undesirable category when compared to the idealized fit, lean body). In the poststructural sense, difference stands for categories that are pragmatically useful and, at the same time, require deconstructing; thus, for example, the overweight body. This recognizes the problem of an iteration that both territorializes and perpetuates difference. The problem is that iterations of ‘the overweight body’ draw upon contexts (for example, biomedical, physical education, popular culture, and so on) that, in their very use, support the categories one is attempting to dismantle. Lastly,

47 Cornell (1992) uses the term “postmodern”(p. 11).

134 difference, in terms of the connected self of interrelationality, is already of the self. Difference is the condition of fluid, shifting, unfolding, and connected subjectivities. In this respect, the iteration of difference fails to (re)produce difference outside of the self; that is, it is not used in formulations of the Other since the Other is already recognized in ‘me’. Who I am is a shifting, interrelated co-construction. However, my conceptualization is not an attempt to erase difference in a move toward a unified, homogenizing, ‘we are all one’ rationality that eliminates subjectivity and fails to recognize systems of oppression. Rather, the conceptual framework I describe attempts to de-territorialize and de-objectify difference by imagining the self (and subjectivity) differently, which is crucial to transformative processes and movements. Below, I briefly reflect on a research process that, I suggest, is supportive of my conceptual framework, and outlines the implications of the research process for this study. Scholarship on physical education, and physical activity generally, has primarily paid attention to singular categories or poles including, for instance, health, obesity, longevity, disease prevention, fitness, mental health, physical and social skills development, and many others. Alternatively, applying the process of plugging in, Jackson and Mazzei (2012) called for the disruption of the various poles in a myriad of binaries by employing “a flattening and attentiveness to how each constitutes the other and how each, as supple, sprouts as something new in the threshold” (p. 10). When I began to work with the process of plugging in, which also included the “folding” of the researcher into the data/theory threshold, certain co-constructions emerged that would not be possible with more traditional coding methods. That is, meanings and representations surfaced in their constitutiveness. In this chapter, the constitutiveness of all elements may seem to appear at once but this elides the process. Presumed simultaneous rhizomatic sproutings were instead the product of having worked and re-worked the data/theory/researcher matrix in purposeful but uncertain methodological repetition. This was a process that built on coding, even as it moved away from it. According to Jackson and Mazzei (2012), coding takes us “back to what is known…to a territorialized place of fixed, recognizable meaning” (p. 12). Alternatively, mapping is not about signifying but about repetitively surveying different rhyzomatic possibilities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is about deterritorializing by resisting the known route that makes easy sense. Mapping puts us into “the threshold – the dynamic space that is always becoming” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 12), and prompts the asking of previously unthought questions. In this chapter, I have worked coding and mapping in a productive, generative fashion. The concepts and relationships among parergonality, secondness, relationality, and bigger bodies emerged with other concepts over a long period of time through new ways of working with data and theory. Ideas, categories, themes, and theories were not imagined as discrete poles sticking up in a landscape; that is, texts were not imagined as connected, fixed, and unmoving. Rather, texts in the threshold were seen as both pole and landscape made visible in their

135 interrelatedness and constitutiveness, in their totality. Used in this way, as I attempted to show, coding and mapping broadened horizons and opened up possibilities. The Enframed Subject of Pouvoir In this section, I have drawn on participants’ interview and focus group data to interrogate the restrictive and normalizing discourses of body size/shape and health. I then appealed to the literature to argue that the subject of pouvoir is represented in the individualistic subject of neoliberal capitalism. In one of our focus group activities, Brett mentioned that he wanted to work on his midsection and I asked him about this. RB: One of the things you said was that you wanted to change your midsection. Why? Brett: I don’t know. I’m not the skinniest person on earth and other people may have made comments about that before… and that’s not very fun to hear. RB: So, you’re working on yourself so other people won’t say that about you? Brett: I’m working on myself for myself but it’s also going to help stop people from talking trash. (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#18) In this excerpt, I understood “talking trash” to be a reference to Brett’s physical education teacher who had called him “out of shape” (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#4). Being called out of shape contributed to a deterioration in Brett’s relationship with his teacher to the point where, according to his mother, “We’re just trying to get to the end of the year” (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#4). Brett’s desire to change his body shape supports the idea that individuals are increasingly encouraged to take greater control over their bodies and their lives by exercising and watching what they eat (Pronger, 2002). In this context, Brett’s comment about “working on myself” can be seen as the interpellation of the subject by normative size/shape discourses. There are both regulatory and disciplinary forms of control at work in processes of self- control over the body. Dominant discourses not only impose upon the subject, they also align personal agency with dominant interests. These forms of control reproduce established hierarchies, and foreclose rather than open up potentialities. The puissance of the body (open desire) harnessed by the projects of pouvoir is the alignment of subjectivity with external forces in the interest of mitigating risk. Risk management “is a project of containing the threats that lack of control pose” (Pronger, 2002, p. 157), and in this project, self-control over the body mitigates the risks of fatness “in the accounting systems in such forms as leanness and muscularity” (Pronger, 2002, p. 179). Through embodiment processes, the project of risk management outlines the conditions of subjectivity, and in the quest for a normalized body- shape/size the full potentiality of the self is restricted. The various discourses that support the loss of belly fat that Brett refers to, affirm the potential for power over life in terms of better health, fitness, increased attractiveness, self-

136 esteem, productivity wellbeing, and so forth. Discourses, like those of those of physical fitness, affirm “the potential for humans to seize power over life, by assuming that such power is lacking and that without it life is diminished” (Pronger, 2002, pp. 156-157). In doing so, these discourses subtract the range of possibilities by affirming particular paths requiring practitioners to follow strict guidelines in terms of exercise regiments and food restrictions. Hence, the limited affirmations supporting the constraints for ensuring health, happiness, and an appropriately sized/shaped body is the partial concretization of the individual by the projects of pouvoir. It is a discursive form of control that works by “the action of an imposed scarcity, with a fundamental power of affirmation” (Foucault as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 156). The affirmation of a healthy and active life is, at the same time, backed up by the threats presented by a lack of control. Take my discussion with Kenny: RB: What do you think physical education is trying to teach you? Kenny: Uhm, how to be healthy and stay active all throughout your life so, uhm, you’re not unhealthy and unhappy, by yourself. (Kenny, INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#15) As described by Kenny, it is the threat of disease, unhappiness, and loneliness that maintains the regimented discipline of imposed scarcity required to live a healthy life and active life. This is an extremely limited affirmation of health and physical activity. Understanding the body in deficit terms and in need of accumulating resources to protect itself against the dangers of lack is a familiar approach to thinking about the body (Pronger, 2002, p. 157). These are constructions of the self that (re)assign the acceptable, and indeed accepted notion of the self as individual, autonomous, responsible, and sovereign. This way of understanding the self imposes a singular finitude, an enframing, that is both limiting and isolating. The self re-sourced by the projects of pouvoir – including ability, size/shape, and health discourses– has been portrayed as the self of the broader discourses of neoliberal capitalism; this self is increasingly described and inscribed by discourses of personal growth and development in a never-ending search for productivity and consumption (Pronger, 2002). Social justice activist and feminist scholar Mag Segrest has commented on the “Western self”: [This is] the understanding of the self that drives capitalism: the isolated, repressed,

resentful, individualized, competitive, hyperrational, dominating psyche articulated

variously by Descartes, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These were

European men who somehow inscribed that self as they described it. (p. 3)

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In this view, neoliberal capitalism48 is an economic, political, and social system. Wendy Brown (2006) argued that neoliberalism is more than a spillover of the logics of free market economic policies to broader society. Understood in post-structural terms as an ensemble of interconnected discourses, neoliberalism is a specific form of normative and achieved practices for organizing the political, the economic, and the citizenry. As such, it “governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains” (Brown, 2006, p. 693). Neoliberalism “figures citizens exhaustively as rational economic actors in every sphere of life... and produce[s] citizens as individual entrepreneurs and consumers whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’ – their ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions” (Brown, 2006, p. 694). The logic and organization of neoliberal capitalism is such that the puissance of the body (desire) is not restricted as a standing reserve but is instead restricted in the direction of its application. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Pronger (2002) argues that capitalism has freed the flow of desire (puissance) to such an extent that, at the same time, it must channel desire – as a useful resource either in the production of goods (material, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and so on) or of their consumption – so that the organization of capitalism is not undone. The projects of pouvoir do not diminish the flow of desire but rather organize it. In short, neoliberal capitalism has a keen appreciation for the production of “a subject at once required to make its own life and heavily regulated in this making—this is what biopower and discipline together accomplish, and what neoliberal governmentality achieves” (Brown, 2006, p. 705). I suggest that the achievements of neoliberalism – without which it would unravel – are supported by the construction of the self as independent, autonomous, self-contained, competitive, and responsible49. It is generally noted that the dominant conceptualization of the independent self can be traced to the Enlightenment period (see for example, Cornell 1992; Escobar, 2012; Gergen, 2009; Pronger, 2002; Segrest, 2002).50 Descartes’ well-known proclamation, Cogito ergo sum, transferred the sovereignty of divinity to the sovereignty of the subject, without subverting the logic of repression. In getting out from under the control of divinity, the subject was imagined

48 For clarification, Brown (2006) uses the term “neoliberalism” almost exclusively, whereas Pronger (2002) uses the terms “modernity” (p. 56) and “modern capitalism” (p. 104), and Mag Segrest (2002) uses the older, more traditional “capitalism” (p. 3). 49 Of course, neoliberal capitalism refers to only one particular, albeit extremely powerful, network of discourses for directing and controlling the energies of the self. Related systems of oppression, also supported by atomic conceptualizations of the self, include patriarchy, racism, religion, secular philosophy, and others (see, for example, Mignolo, 2011). 50 A related conceptualization of the individual has been traced to the much earlier European colonial expansion of 1492: “I conquer, therefore I am” (Gosfoguel as cited in Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2016, p. 360).

138 in terms of use-value hierarchies. The subject reduced to ‘objectness’ became available to new technologies of production and control, and the problem of mastery and slavery was relocated rather than resolved. This signaled the expression of “the Enlightenment’s radical divide between subject and object, mind and nature, and body and soul” (Cornell, 1992, p. 14). These constructions, useful to the projects of pouvoir, rely on a humanist version of the agentic, personally responsible individual who possesses a core, unitary identity. I proposed, in Chapter six, that physical education-through-sport is one such technology for the inscription of the body: a biopedagogy that produces the athletic, developmentally appropriate, normative, male body. This body, in its ‘objectness,’ is a commodity that has exchange value in several respects including the symbolic value of the fit, ripped body and the heterosexual, hard, masculine body. Bronwyn Davies (2003) argued that there are limitations inherent in the humanist/modernist version of the individual: [Humanism] constrains each person to constitute themselves as rational, unitary and

non-contradictory, and as if they were distinct and fundamentally separate from the

social world. This prevents them from seeing the multifaceted and fluid nature of their

own experience, drawing tight boundaries around the self and its possibilities. (pp. 10-

11)

Understood as projects of pouvoir, neoliberalism, humanism, and physical education through- sport function as part of a network of relations. In challenging these projects of pouvoir, I suggest that significant advancements have been made by imagining the subject differently. For instance, subjectivity is poststructuralism’s response to unitary identity. Subjectivity has de-centered the notion of an essentialized self with a core identity; with each new discourse encountered there are new possibilities for the creation of the self. Discourse has also helped unveil the techniques of control over the subject. These are beneficial constructs but they do not address how selves are profoundly related in social life. There is a need to go further in de- stabilizing neoliberal and humanist conceptualizations of the self that re-source open desire and the puissance of the body. Pronger (2002) has suggested where we might look. There are regions of desire of the body, dimensions of being human, of being at all, that

may be inaccessible to discourses – particularly nihilistic ones – and they are

inaccessible precisely because of the violence of the discourses. There may be

dimensions of being that cannot be violated. Incomprehensible to the violent parergonal

logic of modern technology, such dimensions are rendered second, ignored but not

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eradicated. Such regions are culturally enframed in such a way that they may be more

accessible to those who are made second/other than to those who fit the culture. (p. 146)

Projects of pouvoir do not completely territorialize the puissance of the body, and it may be the marginalized who have the most to say about escape routes and the workings of such projects. Moving forward, and as I have noted, the orientation to secondness can help in the ethical conceptualization of difference in parergonal systems. In this task, I explored secondness in the following section, and then theorize the parergonal limits of the relationship to the Other. Secondness Secondness cannot be apprehended directly but rather through negative dialectics in an attempt to reveal negatively what a system omits (Cornell, 1999). Thus, secondness appears as suggestions, avoidances, or omissions that infer as much about circumventions as they do about systems of oppression. In this sense, the relation to secondness is foundational to an ethical engagement with the Other; it opens a space for such an engagement. I suggest that we may find intimations of secondness where the subject becomes unintelligible to the system; where categorizations of central and marginal are meaningless, and where the subject’s language remains unknowable to the parergonal logic. I present two such examples using data from participants John and Jason. Both examples can be analyzed using the parergonal logic of the centre and the margins; yet, I propose, secondness can be overlaid in both examples and helpful in the ethical conceptualization of difference. John. Below are some of my notes taken after one of the participant observation (physical activity) sessions. On that day, John did something that I did not understand. Today, during participant observation, John did something similar to what he did last

Thursday. We were playing tail tag and I was careful to make sure everyone had enough

‘tails’ (ribbons dangling from waist belts) so they could not be eliminated from the

game. I thought this would address issues of visibility or feelings of not being good

enough. The game itself allows players who may not be as fast to spin and turn as a way

of avoiding their tails from being taken. It is a low organization game that can be played

in smaller spaces. As other players came near, to tag John, he would just grab his [own]

tail ribbon and toss it at them before they had the chance to try to take it. At the same

time, he often made an immature child-like gesture (‘baby face’, elbows together with

hands close to his face). He did the same thing when we practised shooting basketballs

last Thursday, shooting the ball no more than a couple of feet and then made the same

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gesture. [I] will ask him about this. Is it the idea that if you don’t try, you can’t fail?

What is he feeling? Why does he do this? (Personal notes after Participant Observation

and Focus Group #7; June 23, 2015)

In both activities John made little effort to ‘play by the rules’. During the basketball shooting activity in particular, John did not attempt to shoot the ball at the basket. When it was his turn, he took the ball with both hands, tossed it slightly in front of him, sometimes made a child-like gesture, and went to the back of the line. I knew that John did not like basketball but the other boys in our program had told me they wanted to play. I thought a compromise that might work for everyone would be to practise shooting from fairly close to the basket (the free throw line), followed by some dribbling skills, and finishing with a short game of two-on-two (players). John had told me he liked dodgeball – the epitome of violent, aggressive school sport – so I did not think that a modified version of basketball would be problematic. Clearly, I was wrong. I tried to ask about the basketball activity during the exit interview. Following, is our exchange: RB: Do you ever mess up because you can’t do something – like on purpose? Not to annoy teachers. But people don’t do things for many reasons and what I found out is that it isn’t because they are just trying to be annoying. Often there is another reason why students don’t do certain things. Like, for example, you may not like an activity and you mess up as a way of telling the teacher, I don’t like this. Do you think sometimes you do that? John: Yeah, I guess. RB: Can you tell me how? Can you tell me an example? Is there an example from our Program you can mention? John: I remember in school when we were doing shot put and it got really boring because like we were doing it for 2 days straight, so I just started dropping it. (John, INT#2; Q#9; July 16, 2015) I was trying to ask John about the basketball and tag activities in the Program but instead, he referenced his physical education class. John’s reaction to these activities demonstrated resistance to, and a circumvention of, what I have called physical education-through-sport. His actions could be understood as a rejection of processes of normalization that make visible awkward, non-athletic, or non-normative bodies. His actions, however, were not typical of the language of resistance. They represented a departure from what the system might perceive as intelligible. Physical education instructors like myself often negotiate the language of resistance but this was something different. I had never seen such a response and only gained limited insight from his journal entry. Most of today was enjoyable except for basketball mostly because I signed up for a way to get active without playing sports and we played sports today. (John, Journal Entry;

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June 18, 2015) John’s journal entry and reaction to some physical education activities demonstrated a general rejection of physical education through-sport. However, a deeper understanding of his actions is difficult to achieve in terms of physical education’s grids of observation, registry of problems, and possibilities for forms of intervention. As a physical educator, I was used to providing feedback based on grids of observation that identified, analyzed, and evaluated movement based on, for example, biomechanical principles that targeted preparation, execution, and follow- through movement phases. John’s actions afforded no opportunity for such an intervention. Unable to use this as a ‘physical literacy opportunity’, I was at a loss as to what to do. I have come to appreciate that any response based on ideas of physical literacy would territorialize by making John functional to a project of pouvoir. Indeed, my discussion with him attempted to get at an explanation for his actions so that he could be more fully integrated into our activities. In retrospect, this was a form of violence through inclusion. In the logic of parergonality, I wanted to use my knowledge of movement, and through inclusion help move John from the margins to the center, and thus normalize his functionality within discourses of movement. Still, for me, the questions remained: Why the baby face? Why the obedient return to the back of the line? To overlay secondness on the same incidents, John’s actions, in their circumvention of ‘how things are done’ and in their unintelligibility to the system, imply a beyond. His actions represented the ontology of the “wrong state of things” (Adorno as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 15). In his language – the child-like face and behaviour – there was the insinuation of a different project, perhaps, a “sense of longing for that which is lost but not entirely forgotten” (Pronger, 2002, p.16). According to Cornell (1999), secondness indicates “the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Secondness, in other words, is what resists” (p. 1, italics in original). I am not suggesting that the Othering that John experienced was secondness; this is not meant to be a final position. It is only a way to start to think differently about the Other. Secondness only hints at a different ontology, and to try and get at secondness is to miss the point. We may only go so far as to accept that secondness is something we cannot grasp. It is a way to think differently about difference and useful in that process. Therefore, I have used secondness in order to think about relations of parergonality without territorializing those relations. I have used secondness to ask the important question: How can encounters with difference be respectful of difference itself?

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Jason. The second example involved Jason. In this analysis, I have explore Othering using the conceptualization of physical education as a system of parergonality requiring normative and marginalized bodies for its very functionality. This system has aimed at inclusion through body and movement normalization processes, while simultaneously requiring the production of marginalized bodies and movements. Then I looked beyond the limits of the parergonal system; that is, secondness. In the following data excerpt, Jason described his understanding of his body and his challenges in dealing with sport discourses in physical education classes. RB: How do you feel about your physical abilities? What are your best moves? Do you think you use them in physical education class? Jason: I think I am kinda like a mix of both [strength and speed]. Not too strong, not too fast. RB: Are you able to use your skills in Phys Ed class – your speed or your strength? Jason: Not really. RB: Why? Is it a small area? Jason: It is not really a small area – it is a huge gym. RB: So why can’t you use your skills? Jason: Because like there’s uh, like, I would say 20 other boys. Sometimes I am like that one kid who is always forgotten about.., like, sitting in the back. RB: So you don’t participate sometimes? Jason: Yeah, it depends what it is – like we just finished baseball. RB: Did you participate in that? Jason: Tried my best not to. RB: Why? Jason: Probably just, like, standing there –what am I going to do? I am just going to get hit in the face by a ball. RB: Who pitches? Jason: Pretty much everybody [takes turns]. (Jason, INT#1; June 27, 2015; Q#12) It surprised me that Jason described this apparent violence so nonchalantly. I wanted to make sure I had correctly understood, so I brought up the incident again during our exit interview. RB: You think sometimes guys throw right at your face, or at your head, or it’s just an accident? Jason: I could tell it’s on purpose. RB: You could tell it’s on purpose? Jason: Yeah. (Jason, INT#2; July 21, 2015; Q#3)

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Learning sport skills is never purely a technical matter and a person can, at the same time and in the same setting – depending on how the sport culture is organized – “learn, internalize, and operationalize oppressive cultural discourses” (Pronger, 2002, p. 122). The performance of skills and demonstrations of ability could be used to veil and even justify the violence couched in a wide range of body and movement discourses intersecting at various social locations (for example, gender, race, class, body shape/size, and dis/ability) and social spaces both geographic and virtual (for example, classrooms, playgrounds, gymnasiums, and the internet). In the context of a game of baseball played in a physical education class, throwing the ball at the hitter’s head could be operationalized as the performance of a skill: a pitcher “brushing back” the batter51, as “part of the game”. This act, however, rests on a construction of the self that is separate from other selves, ranked in a hierarchy of use-value categorizations. In this hierarchy Jason inhabits the margins, located by various measures of functionality within a system of parergonality. In the parergonal logic of the system, Jason is the necessary by-product required for the construction of the able, athletically-skilled student. Marginalization is built into this system through the production of by-products/waste (non-normative bodies and unskilled movements) that are necessary for the validation of the system’s values, organization, and practices. Put differently, if the performance of dominant masculinity requires demonstrations of strength, control, competitiveness, and dominance, then it also requires for the domination of Other bodies, as well as the expulsion of weakness, vulnerability, and inferiority onto Other bodies. In their functional interdependence, the centre and the margins do not exist in pristine form and Jason represents what the system sees (and fears) is already itself, and seeks to expunge. The emphasis on sport, as an instrument to (re)produce body and movement hierarchies, is thus an effective framework from which to categorize and enforce the separation of beings. In the process, violent oppression is systematically normalized. In inhabiting the margins, Jason represents the abject. As I noted in Chapter six, on sport discourse in physical education, the abject functions to support constructions of the atomized and autonomous individual. Although there are some similarities between the abject and secondness, a critical distinction must be maintained. Unlike the abject, secondness supports the construction of the interrelated self. The abject represents what one wishes to expel and project onto the Other while secondness represents an openness to all that is ‘me’ and ‘not me’. In secondness, the so-called abject is already and will always be part of ‘me’ – the Other is already and will always be part of ‘me’. To return to the analogy of death, in order to live a free

51 In baseball, the pitcher “brushes back” a hitter who is trying to gain an advantage by standing (too) close to the plate. By throwing the ball close to the hitter’s body, the pitcher moves the hitter off the plate thereby making it more difficult for the batter to hit balls pitched on the outside corner of the plate.

144 life (in terms of being open to the puissance of the body) one must accept the inevitability of death. Otherwise, the management of the risks to life in the anticipation of death will manifest as a limiting project of pouvoir. I have continued the second part of this analysis as I have overlain the idea of secondness by exploring outside parergonal limits. In the data chunk above, Jason also described himself as “that one kid who is always forgotten about” (Jason, INT#1; June 27, 2015; Q#12). Being forgotten in the open space of a gym challenges the objectness and corporeality of the body and I was interested how this could happen. How could an independent, demarcated, material body hide in plain sight? I thought that perhaps his teacher could simply be paying more attention to other students, and I asked Jason about this. RB: Does the teacher have any favourites in class? Jason: No, I don’t think so. RB: But he ignores you? Jason: He doesn’t really ignore me. RB: He forgets about you? Jason: He doesn’t really forget about me. It’s like uhm, I just kinda sit there. He just can’t really see me – I am just like behind this guy… RB: So there are many students in the [physical education] class and he can’t see you – you can hide? Jason: No, he can see me. RB: Then how can he forget about you? Jason: I don’t know. (Jason, INT#1; June 27, 2015; Q#16) I used this perplexing exchange to inquire further about constructions of the physical body and the self of physical, psychic, and social experiences. Using negative dialectics to explore the physical body in terms of what is not there, this interview text is not referencing the body in its objectness and separateness. In the accepted context of moving bodies in a gymnasium, to be forgotten/not seen/ignored implies a materiality and visibility that, Jason claims, does not apply to him. In an intriguing manner, this text challenges what is accepted as obvious: the materiality of Jason’s body. Furthermore, I suggest that Jason’s account does not reference an independent, separate, individual self. Jason, said that he did not know how categorizations by which one may be ignored, forgotten, and seen, applied to him(self). In other words, his self was not manifest or brought to presence by the separateness and objectness of his physical body under visual gaze. To clarify, his ‘participation’ in physical education class (the second part of this example) was not an attempt at inclusion (as was going up to take his turn at hitting the ball), nor could it be understood as a rejection of that process (as would be, for example, ‘sitting out’ or ‘acting out’). Indeed, Jason’s teacher did not seem to understand what to do with him; that is,

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Jason was not recognized by the parergonal logic of the system. He appeared not ‘available’ to the logic of functionality via inclusion or exclusion. Jason was holding undetermined space; avoiding meaningful productive (central or peripheral) participation. This was a paradoxical space in that Jason was ignored by the teacher but not really ignored; forgotten but not really forgotten; and visible but not really seen. Jason represented a self that “just kinda sit[s] there” invisible in its indeterminateness. His status in the parergonal logic of central or marginal functionality, could not be pinned down. John and Jason, I propose, begin to tell us something about domains of secondness. They do this in defying the functionality of the centre and the margins, and in the strangeness and peculiarity of their language as it remained unknowable to the parergonal logic of the boundaries of the body and the self. John and Jason have, in their own ways, negotiated a liminal space in the particular project of pouvoir that I have called physical education-through- sport. Their language could be interpreted as an attempt at escape or freedom from boundaries that revolve around the separateness, individuality, objectness, and independence of the physical body. Underneath my analysis, there remains a question waiting to be asked. If using the logic of parergonality can challenge the categorizations of centre and margins by demonstrating their functional constitutivenes, why bother with secondness? I have briefly referenced the answer earlier in Chapter three, Data Analysis and Construction, but I wish to be clear. Cornell (1992) noted that to describe the limit of any system as an oppositional cut or merely as the system’s own self limitation is to allow the system to perpetuate itself as a whole. The uniqueness of the philosophy of the limit, and Derrida’s deconstruction process, is that it does not re-instate the traditional assumptions and dichotomies it seeks to deconstruct. The Other must remain other to the system, and not encompassed in the system’s excesses, if we are to remain faithful to the ethical relationship (Cornell, 1992). That is, we must be respectful of Otherness to any system of conventional definition. Put differently, to make sense of difference in terms of parergonality is to territorialize difference and make it functional to systems of inclusion and exclusion. I was guilty of this when I tried to get John to participate in the basketball and tag activities. Moreover, parergonal logic, as it relies on instrumental rationality, is not helpful when we encounter differences we cannot understand; in those encounters, secondness, in its unintelligibility, goes ignored/forgotten/unseen. At this point, I ask, what might be learned from the examples I alluded to as secondness? If the orientation to secondness can help illuminate ethical relationships within systems of parergonality, how might those ethical relationships be conceptualized? And, how might those ethical relationships challenge restrictive and limiting constructions of the self being enacted through oppressive body and movement discourses like physical education through-sport?

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The Self In-Relation With these next data texts, I have proposed the self in-relation as an alternative to dominant constructions of the self as sovereign and separate. In this task, I “seek to unsettle the ‘I’ of both the researcher and the researched who is a static and singular subject” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 10). In making the research process more transparent (and less territorializing), I try to illustrate how coding is embedded in mapping. In working the processes of coding and mapping in a repetitive layering to read data texts through one another, the following excerpts were first coded, put into categories, and thematically explicated (Saldaña & Omasta, 2017). These were organized under the headings: friends, physical activity, and movement. The ideas of relationality (and secondness) emerged later during the mapping process. Mapping in the threshold is a process of transformation, and I invite a multiplicity of readings as a way to challenge the atomized self. To start, during a focus group session, I asked the boys about the Boys in Motion Program. RB: What do you like about the program? Jason: Fun is hanging out with friends, people I know. Maybe I’m supposed to meet people I don’t know. I know everybody here [today]. RB: Is being with friends more important than doing the physical activity? Ronny: No. John: [almost simultaneously] Yes. RB: Is not doing activities with friends, a reason you might not do activity on your own? John: Yeah. I prefer hanging out with friends. Ronny: One of his friends (pointing at Kenny) is always doing something else inside, or he doesn’t want to do physical activity. Another friend, I don’t know if he’s at his mom’s or his dad’s, so I’m kinda at a loss. Other friends left last year [moved out of the neighbourhood]. (FG #8, June 25, 2015) While Ronny emphasized the doing of physical activity, the other boys – John, Kenny, and Jason – talked about doing physical activity with friends. There is the sense that without relationality or connectedness the opportunities for physical activity were constrained. Hence, the relationship with others participating in physical activity appeared to be at least as important as the physical activity itself. At times, physical activity only seemed to occur because of the relationality involved. I followed up on this idea in my final interview with John. RB: In one of our group talks you said that the people you do physical activity with is [sic] more important than the physical activity itself.

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John: Like if you do it with a bunch of your friends it makes a difference than doing it with a bunch of people you hardly know or don’t like or whatever. RB: With your friends you are more likely to do certain things you might not do otherwise. Would you do things you are not keen on if your friends were doing it and it is physical activity? John: Uhm… RB: Say baseball. I know you don’t particularly like baseball. But if your friends were doing baseball, would you do baseball? John: No … but if it is like the stuff I like it is a lot less awkward if you’re playing with friends. RB: That’s interesting. What do you mean by awkward? John: Like if you mess up they could like think differently of you, whatever I don’t know. RB: So, you would feel more comfortable playing with friends. John: Yeah. RB: If you messed up they wouldn’t get on you or laugh at you? John: Yeah. (John, INT#2; July 16, 2015; Q#8) The relationality involved in doing physical activity with friends mitigates the risks of the independent, responsible, sovereign self that is evaluated as a static, finished product – in short, an object. The self as an object is susceptible to being positioned in hierarchies of use-value. When I asked the boys about their ideal physical education program, the idea of doing things with friends was consistently strong in the data. Relationality, however, also came up against the independent subject as shown in the following: RB: If you could create your own physical education program, what would it look like? Maybe yours would be different than other peoples? Kenny: Well, I think mine would be, involving, like everyone can go and do their own thing with a group of friends, maybe. (Kenny, INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#16) In Kenny’s comment there is the suggestion of both an independent self and a connected self. We see the independent subject doing “their own thing” and the self in-relation “with a group of friends”. Others have suggested that the self be conceptualized as having both a particle/individual nature and a wave/connected nature (Gergen, 1999, 2009; Pronger, 2002; Segrest, 2002). When dealing with the body and the self, it is important to sustain multiplicity and keep a myriad of metaphors and images alive (Gergen, 1999, 2009; Pronger, 2002). By removing the idea of the single truth of the independent self, we remain open to greater participation. This is necessary in the practice of non-craving desire that is open to difference. Desire, the coming to presence of the body, is open, already connected, expansive and non-fearful, and, as such, it is also susceptible to being directed by the project of pouvoir (for

148 example, re-sourced in dealing with risk and fear). Both enactments are overlaid in the following two data chunks describing participants’ relations with each other and with me: RB: How did our relationships affect your participation in the program? Jason: Like, I knew some of the people there. Like I knew some of the people but I didn’t fully know them. RB: So, if you don’t know them, does that affect – Jason: Well, I just kind of get a little bit scared because I don’t know who they are. But the people are kind of new because I went to the same school as them, except for Brett. RB: So, it helped having people from the same school? Jason: Yeah. RB: What were the things that I did that you liked? Jason: Let us choose the activities. Put that rule down that no one can make fun of you - - yeah. (Jason, INT#2; July 21, 2015; Q#12,13) And for example, Ronny: RB: Were there things that I did that you liked? Ronny: Yeah, cause you’re kind, not like judging us, [not] making us do certain things. (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#13) Different practices of desire are illustrated above. There is a fearful practice of desire in “being a little bit scared because I don’t know who they are”. As Pronger astutely notes, where desire “is discursively loaded, tyranny lurks” (2002, p. 99). There is also desire that is compassionately empty, open, non-craving, and non-territorializing that is very important to the relationality I have explored. In the Boys in Motion Program, there was the attempt to create the conditions for the expression of this desire – not that it was necessarily achieved – in the openings for participants to choose activities, in creating safe spaces without name calling or judgment, and in the deliberate attempt at the practice of kindness. Up until this point, I have suggested that exploring the idea of secondness as a form of Otherness that is unintelligible to systems of parergonality is a useful way of thinking about a non-territorializing approach to difference. I have also suggested that difference is manifest in the enframed subject of pouvoir, which is represented in the subject of neoliberal capitalism. Lastly, I proposed a different version of the self – the self of relationality as a response to the subject of pouvoir. The self of relationality rests on open, compassionate, non-craving desire that underpins ethical relationships to differently shaped/sized bodies. Next, I draw on available literature to explore the self of relationality further. The various relations and locations of where and how we enter into social relations define our being. Thus, how we think, feel, and see the world around us, not only define our being, they are part of a social tradition – this includes the “orientation of our bodies, gestures, and musculature” (Madison, 2012, p. 9). Furthermore, what we take to be knowledge “grows

149 from relationship, and is embedded not within individual minds but within interpretive and communal traditions” (Gergen, 1999, p. 122). Key in this conceptualization is that relationship precedes being (Gergen, 1999, 2009; Madison, 2012). There is “no subject prior to infinitely shifting and contingent relations of belonging” (Rowe as cited in Madison, 2012, p. 9), and none of us is purely an ‘individual’ but rather, a subject in continual formation with others and with discourse. Hence, what is being described are not relations involving “bounded units [individuals], causing each other’s movements like so many billiard balls” (Gergen, 2009, p. 255) but instead engagement in relationships of mutually creating meaning, reason, and value. There can be no separate selves when each individual is at least partly constructed in relationship with others (Glass, 1995, p. 74 as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 89). I suggest that Brian Pronger’s conceptualization of the moving body is helpful here. The body, when reflected upon as static, allows for its insertion into specific social locations – including size/shape, ability, health status, ways of moving, and so forth – and makes it susceptible to being lodged within categories of difference. Pronger (2002) makes the intriguing point that “reflecting on the body as essentially moving, … undefines it, empties it of its distinction from everything else and allows its essential relatedness, its interdependence, with all elements of existence to show” (p. 81, emphasis mine). This conceptualization of the moving body in its shifting, impermanent relatedness makes it harder to ‘pin down’, to ‘fix’, or to define it within stable categories of difference. The projects of pouvoir attempt to bring the body to presence along the basic doctrines of intertextual ensembles that outline how desire should unfold (Pronger, 2002). Crucial to understanding the body brought to presence as moving “is the potential that it affords for profoundly ecological, collective, and transcendental rather than individual, anomic, ways of finding meaning and of living” (Pronger, 2002, p. 73, italics in original). Indeed, technologies that seek control over the essentially moving body attempt to get control over being by bringing stasis to its movement. This method of controlling being as been called the “hypostatization of being” (Sheehan, 1981, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 68). Surprisingly, support for the moving, shifting, related self has come from the study of quantum physics. In this, Pronger (2002) references the idea that light has both a particle and wave nature. Drawing on Glass (1995), Pronger makes the point that, perhaps, the self is best conceptualized as a wave of brilliant light. “This wave of light is not static but moves, and exerts a ‘force’ upon particle-selves” (Glass as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 90). Seeing the light as interconnected particles does not negate its wave nature just as seeing the light as wave does not negate its particle nature. Following this metaphor – and once the action of the wave on the particle is realized; i.e., the particle is already in the wave – the self can be understood both in its individual particle nature and in its wave-like connection to other particles. That is, we must seek to understand ourselves individually and in-relation to other selves. Here, wave-nature is primary, and Pronger (2002) speaks of an engaged practice that “produces desire through selves

150 that manifest primarily the whole rather than desire that manifests primarily the particular” (p. 90). In this respect, the ethical self is manifest through a non-craving, desiring energy of already-relatedness. Conclusion In his early writings Foucault positioned the subject almost entirely (and possibly completely) within the constraints of knowledge/power relations (Foucault, 1980) such that even when the subject spoke, it was merely mimicking discourse. Translating from Foucault’s lectures in French, Paras (2006) attends to this idea, “Discursive practices, Foucault said, are just that: practices. To elucidate them in their thickness and complexity was a way of showing that to speak was to do something, and something quite other than to express what one thought” (p. 40, italics in original). This was strictly an understanding of the subject in relation to discourse without attention to how subjects themselves might be related. Foucault later became interested in the “arts of living” (Paras, 2006, p. 127), and in the need for taking care of oneself, otherwise the concern of the self (Foucault, 1983b). This necessarily required attention to a way of being and relating to others. In a series of interviews on the “Culture of the Self”, Foucault (1983a) postulated that if we are acted upon by power relations ‘internal’ to our own sense of ourselves then the resistance to power must, perhaps, ultimately take the form of a type of self-repudiation. Understanding the “culture of the self” is inseparable from promoting new forms of subjectivity (Foucault, 1983a). As Foucault himself acknowledged, he had earlier “insisted maybe too much” on the centrality of practices of domination in the shaping of subjectivity (Paras, 2006, p. 122). I accept that Foucault’s methodological approach to, and direction in, promoting new forms of subjectivity, are very different from mine. Nonetheless, I draw on Foucault because I find similarities in the broad trajectory of his treatment of the subject; to get the subject out from under the weight of discourse requires a move that takes into account a social ethic (Paras, 2006, p. 127). For myself, this must also attempt to address the territorialization of difference. For this, I proposed the conceptualization of the self-in-relation. The ethic of alterity is an ethic of openness that helps us conceptualize and understand encounters with ‘difference’ without fear of Otherness. This ethic of openness rests on the conceptualization of an interrelated and interdependent self that is a response to the independent, unitary, sovereign, humanistic self of the Enlightenment. It helps conceptualize ethical encounters with embodied movement, and specific to my purposes, encounters with bodies that move ‘differently’ and/or are shaped/sized ‘differently’. In this chapter I argued that ethical encounters with difference require a re-imagining of the self. In proposing the interrelated and interdependent self as key in the development of ethical relationships to different embodiments, I presented the argument working backwards

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(towards the relationship to difference). I first explored the idea of secondness as a form of Otherness that lies beyond parergonal limits, and as such is unintelligible to systems of parergonality. The concept of secondness was important to establish because, like death, it cannot be territorialized; that is, we can never know it directly. In different terms, the Other must remain other to the system, and not territorialized by the functionality of systems of parergonality, if we are to remain faithful to the ethical relationship. To speak of difference in terms of inclusion and exclusion would be to territorialize difference and make it functional to a particular system. This framework was used to show how bodily difference is manifest in the subject of pouvoir as the product of systems of parergonality. I then explored how the subject of pouvoir has been represented in the subject of neoliberal capitalism and Humanism. In this subject – produced through the project of pouvoir – the puissance of the body is made available, commodified, and re-sourced for its use-value. This process imposes a singular finitude on the self, an enframing that is both limiting and isolating. Lastly, in dealing with this concretization of the self, I proposed a non-territorializing approach to difference by re-imagining the self in social relation. That is, in freeing the puissance of the self from the projects of pouvoir, I imagined a self that was not discursively loaded, and proposed the self-in-relation as an ethical approach to differently sized/shaped embodiments.

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Chapter 9. Summary and Reflections on Physical Literacy, and Physical Education In this study, I explored the normative body, health, and movement discourses that shaped the embodied experiences of boys, ages 12 to 14 years. I focused on how the participants negotiated limiting discourses that circulated in physical activity and physical education contexts. Using interviews, participant observations sessions, and focus groups, I documented the absence of the use of the word “fat” and how overweight bodies were instead (re)positioned under discourses of male bigness. In examining health discourses, I explored how participants placed greater importance on social and mental health rather than corporeal health (as has been the traditional focus of the biomedical and physical education communities). I also inquired into the prevalence of sport as the prevailing form of physical education, and suggested that the concept of physical literacy (Whitehead, 2001, 2007) has been used to focus extensively on the development of sport related motor skills, to the exclusion of other activities. In the latter portion of this thesis, I employed a more philosophically grounded approach to understanding embodiment as a way of being-in-the-world through the integration of body, self, and the environment. Using a philosophy of the limit, I reflected on body movement as the puissance (flow of desire) of the body, and how the body’s limitless expression of puissance can become organized under the restrictive projects of pouvoir, including physical education-through-sport and gender. Lastly, I proposed that the independent, fortified, and sovereign self of neoliberal capitalism be replaced by an interconnected and interdependent self as a way to move forward ethically in the conceptualization of embodiment. This has far-reaching implications for developing relationships with variously sized/shaped bodies and for the teaching of physical education, which I reflect on in this concluding chapter. Thesis Summary In this study, hierarchical categories of fatness, health, body shape/size, and movement were not understood as real but as a set of discursive relations that influence the way we think, see, and experience our own bodies, and the bodies of others. Taking a parallel epistemological and ontological approach to scholars that deeply influenced my thinking (for example, Cornell, 1992; Foucault, 1979, 1983a, 1983b; Gergen, 1999, 2009; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Pronger, 2002; and Sykes, 2011b), I viewed bodies and movements not as biological and physical realities but as the outcome of complex discursively loaded relations that produced some bodies as healthy, desirable, and socially acceptable while disparaging others as unhealthy, undesirable, and unacceptable. I used these scholars in a generative and productive manner. That is, I did not attempt to represent the sum of their work as a unified, coherent whole but instead plugged in specific aspects of it (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012),

153 in developing my own understandings. In this, I hope that I was able to define clearly how I used each idea and concept. My process allowed me to investigate and theorize the hidden discursive relations behind widely accepted systems centered around the body, health, and movement. Searching out the limits to these systems, I explored how participants accepted, re-defined, subverted, and sometimes rejected discursive systems in forming their subjectivities in novel and unexpected ways. These systems were amenable to analysis using a parergonal logic that constructed both normalcy and marginality as systemically functional. For example, I proposed that the fit athletic body draws its intelligibility from the co-production of awkward and unfit bodies through various discourses, including physical education-through-sport. Also, the limits of this discourse for producing the body and movement were suggested by actions that were unintelligible in the context of physical education. These perplexing actions also pointed to a construction of the self that lies outside of normative neoliberal systems for producing the subject. More specifically, in Chapter four, I analyzed the representation, production, and treatment of the bigger body. Starting with the depiction of an incident where a participant was called fat, I explored how body discourses functioned to position participants. I focused on discourses of body size (fatness and bigness), and how participants used these discourses to position themselves and others selectively and differentially in ways that allowed for the construction of livable and unlivable subjectivities. I explored how systems of parergonality could be used to understand the construction of bigger bodies as a by-product of normative constructions of the appropriately sized/shaped body. I argued that the lack of specific “fat” language in the Boys in Motion Program and in the many workshops I led with young students – the absent presence of the fat body – reflected the unacceptable embodiment of fatness. For example, participants represented overweight people as “worthless type of people” (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#20), and the evidence of fat on the body, a rejection of the subject (Ronny, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#16; Kenny, INT#2; July 22, 2015; Q#12). In subverting and re-imagining discourses of fatness, participants positioned themselves in relation to partial, situated, and embodied subject positions of bigness as a matter of belonging and intelligibility – ultimately a matter of being accepted and acceptable in the world. I also suggested that in gendered constructions of the masculine subject, bigness offers up representations of taking up space, strength, and control, and opens up possibilities for the redemption of the fat body. However, masculine-coded bigness does nothing to affirm fatness or address the negative associations of fatness for bodies that do not identify as masculine. To the contrary, masculine-coded fatness may actually re- inscribe a masculine-feminine binary. In Chapter five, I documented how the boys in this study articulated dominant body and health discourses. For example, they talked about controlling health by drawing on the idea of

154 the body as a machine. In attempting to control the machinery of the body, the boys referenced health discourses of regulating body shape/size, participating in physical activity to develop fitness, and eating the right foods. The boys also recognized, articulated, and questioned, and the power of these discourses in their lives. Indeed, participants noted that not everyone needed to look the same way, and that it was not always possible to identify healthy or fit bodies; yet, in general, “everybody’s body image is they want to be like muscular and fit” (Kenny, INT#1; May 21, 2015; Q#15). These conflicting discourses, I conceptualized as working together in a discursive ensemble supported by a visual economy of the body that attempts “to keep a normal [healthy] look” (Jason, Int#1, June 17, 2015; Q#21), and the neoliberal notion of personal responsibility (John, INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#5). However, although the boys were able to articulate these discourses effectively as part of their lives, they did not infuse them with much personal significance. Rather, in subverting the idea of the body as a machine, they put greater emphasis on a holistic understanding of health. In particular, they highlighted the importance of mental health (Brett, INT#1; May 23, 2015; Q#5; Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#12,13), being with friends while doing physical activity (John, INT#2; July 16, 2015; Q#8,15), and how physical health opened up possibilities for a more colourful, happy, and interesting life (Jason, Int#1, June 17, 2015; Q#7; Jason, Int#2, July 21, 2015; Q#9). In Chapter six, I drew on Escobar’s (2012) claim that to understand discourses, we need to look at the system of relations established among the elements and not simply at the elements themselves. Namely, I explored sport discourses in physical education by looking at the network of relations that established the conditions under which the body and sport practices were incorporated into understandings of physical education. I argued that physical education- through-sport, as a prevailing but not determining pedagogy, was connected to physical literacy theory, curriculum organization and scheduling, ways of moving, and embodied constructions of gender. I proposed that physical education-through-sport is a biopedagogy for producing the visibly engaged, athletic, sport-centred, heterosexual, male body. In this, other ways of moving, including dance, were not so much negated as adopted within a dominant ethos of competition, surveillance, and evaluation. I suggested that the open-endedness and flexibility of physical literacy works against meaningful change as its adaptability is subsumed under the traditional role of sport in physical education. Moreover, prevailing sport discourses in physical education continue to be supported by the idea of the independent, sovereign self and dominant constructions of the masculine self. I proposed that these discourses perpetuated inequalities in both breadth and quality of experience for the boys in this study who avoided sport altogether (John, INT#1; June 5, 2015; Q#1) or, in taking a completely different tack, chose to participate only in hyper-masculinized expressions of physical activity (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#9,16). Lastly, I suggested that performances of masculinizing movements were anxiety-

155 producing defence mechanisms used to protect the sovereign, independent self from the relatedness of the body. In Chapter seven, I explored how the puissance of the body, its capacity for existence, was differentially organized in the intersections of social spaces and locations. These intersections helped to organize the movements of differently sized/shaped bodies outdoors in “the bush”, in the gymnasium, and in the playing spaces of a playground game like wallball. Each of these intersections coordinated the desiring energy of the body and offered up subject positions through notions of (dis)ability at play in overlapping social locations and spaces. This resourcing of the body was explored using the concepts of puissance and pouvoir as they worked within the parergonal logic of systems for controlling the moving body. Determinations of ability were used as markers of the self in the project of pouvoir, which enframed the subject and movement, (re)producing the subject as valued or waste. I proposed that the construction of the physically able, sport subject was one form of such control. However, the logic of parergonality was not all-encompassing and using the examples of building forts in the bush (Patrick, INT#2; August 12, 2015; Q#5), and playing the game of wallball (Patrick, INT#2; August 12, 2015; Q#5), I explored the freedoms and gaps exploited by participants who were constrained by dominant forms of movement. In Chapter eight, I enlisted the philosophy of the limit to conceptualize an ethical relationship to non-normatively sized/shaped embodiments. I began by documenting restrictive and normalizing discourses for producing appropriately sized/shaped, and healthy bodies; and how these work through regulatory and disciplinary forms of control by aligning personal agency with dominant interests (Brett, INT#2; July 24, 2015; Q#18). Discourses of appropriately sized/shaped and visibly healthy bodies functioned as part of a biopedagogy that has produced the body in deficit terms and imposed a singular enframing finitude, both limiting and isolating. This, I proposed, was the inheritance of neoliberal capitalist and humanist systems for producing the body. Following Pronger (2002), I suggested that there are dimensions of being human that may be inaccessible to oppressive discourses of the body; furthermore, resistances, evasions, and freedoms “may be more accessible to those who are made second/other than to those who fit the culture” (Pronger, 2002, p. 146). In citing specific examples as suggestive of the dimension of secondness, I referenced participants’ actions and language that could not be understood in terms of of physical education’s grids of observation, registry of problems, and possibilities for forms of intervention (John, INT#2; Q#9; July 16, 2015; Jason, INT#1; June 27, 2015; Q#12). I proposed that these regions of desire and attempts at escape also represented a move away from the socially constructed and embodied boundaries of the separate and independent self. Lastly, in challenging this individual self as the dominant construction, I posited the ideas of the moving body and the interrelated and interconnected self as underpinning ethical relationships to differently sized/shaped and moving bodies.

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Reflections on my Thesis Journey My lived experiences as a bigger boy, and now working in a body normalizing profession, has made this study a deeply personal journey. My history and research have positioned me well in relating to differently sized/shaped bodies (my own and others), and this thesis has helped me to understand, conceptualize, and articulate those experiences. As I explored and learned, and shifted in my own understanding and teaching, the central focus of the thesis changed from making fat embodiments more intelligible to a more compassionate acceptance and valuing of bodily difference. This was a shift from practices of inclusion and assimilation to an ethic of compassionate openness to bodily difference that required an examination of my implication in the process. To backtrack, my doctoral journey has been a long and meandering passage. From a positivist and quantitative beginning, it has morphed into a poststructuralist reading of the world. Indeed, my own ‘body as machine’ experiences in elite level competitive sport and Master’s thesis on hormonal response to exercise (Bernardes & Radomski, 1988) were diametrically opposed, epistemologically and ontologically, to this project. In retrospect, the long time to completion of this work was not that surprising given where I started. For me, poststructuralism could not be an intellectual enterprise that sought to understand the power of language and the nature of knowledge and reality; it had to be about practice. Poststructuralism was a process and a way of relating to the world that had to get into my bones. I had to learn to think the everyday in poststructuralist terms in order to write it effectively in academic ways. During that process, I found that positivist undercurrents too easily crept into my ways of thinking, researching, and writing. My relapses into rationalist thoughts of causality and foundational truth occurred many times, and in hindsight, they were necessary refrains in the process of unlearning to learn. Reflecting on my own development as a researcher, teacher, and human being, I find that it is mirrored in this thesis. The early sections of this thesis, in particular the heavy critique of the positivist, ‘hard science’ of obesity in Chapter two, maintain a trace of rationalist thinking – my reminder of a past life. I believe this was a necessary step in the transformation of how I looked at the world; I needed to exhaust the usefulness of depictions of the body and physical activity that are not of the body but are about resourcing the body. At one point, I did contemplate going back and changing the first chapters to make this thesis a more coherent and unified poststructuralist text. Two sources helped to convinced me otherwise: Foucault’s idea that the purpose of writing is not to leave a coherent systematic whole but rather to leave traces of where one has been, and because of said writing and intellectual work, one is no longer (Paras, 2006); and Jackson and Mazzei’s (2002) key stance on the inextricable entanglement of the

157 researcher, data, and theory. To leave a residue of where I have been, I concluded, was a more respectful, transparent, and ethical representation of my journey. Reflections on Teaching Practice In many ways, my journey into poststructuralist thought has been most impactful in my teaching practice. I now start all my classes by questioning fixed notions of truth and reality. I ask students to tell me a ‘forever truth’, past or present, and we discuss alternative views to capital T ‘Truth’. We usually come to an agreement that Truth has changed over time and continues to be debatable; we then settle, or perhaps compromise, on the idea of a small ‘t’ truth that works in particular places, situations, times, and for some people. We usually accept that we require a practical, localized, working version of truth to create meaning and to get things done. Next, we talk about reality, and I like to bring in Donna Haraway’s (1985) story about walking her dog, and feeling sad that dogs are limited in their ability to appreciate the beauty that is all around them since all dogs are colour-blind. Then, as her dog sniffs around, she is reminded that the dog’s keen sense of smell constructs the world in very different terms whereby it can detect the presence of an animal that crossed the path many hours earlier. This leads into a discussion about what is real, and we talk about other examples demonstrating that our ability to grasp reality is limited by the methods and technologies used in perceiving it. I find this is a most important exercise because it brings into question the position of teachers, knowledgeable others, and textbooks as the knowers of all things thereby devaluing the students’ own lived experiences and construction of knowledge. Most importantly, it puts everyone in the position of humble learners as we begin to understand that there are other truths and realities besides our own. Hence, I remind students and myself that no one is the owner of Truth and Reality, and so, these cannot be used to make someone wrong; most importantly, I am conscious not to wield “the dominant competence of the teacher’s language” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 15) as an instrument of control and dominance. Reflections on Physical Literacy In physical education, there are ostensibly anatomically correct and biomechanically efficient ways of moving judged to produce the best results. Movements and motor skills are broken down, analysed, practised separately, and re-assembled in a regimented and systemic manner. Perhaps in no other academic discipline is ‘the right way’ of doing things more closely scrutinized than in physical education where the body is under sustained, unrelenting public surveillance and evaluation. Throughout the process, particular bodies are deemed to be physically fitter, stronger, faster, and more skilled. Hence, some bodies, movements, and performances are made right, and others are made to be in need of correction.

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In this ordeal, physical education has approached the body not as lived experience but as a disembodied entity to be programmed and controlled; in short, the body is treated as an object to be re-sourced by the projects of pouvoir (Pronger, 2002). Responding to concerns over the mind/body split of Cartesian dualism, the ‘body as object’, and ‘body as machine’ (Whitehead, 2001, 2007), Margaret Whitehead (2007) has noted that “physical education in school should be less focused on specific activity skill development and immediate fitness and more concerned with developing and maintaining all-around embodied competence” (p. 287)52. Embodiment is a way of being in the world that integrates the body, mind, and environment, and “recognizes students’ bodies as a medium for making sense and making connections with a world in which they co-participate in creating” (Neto & Ovens, 2017, p. 329, italics in original). Indeed, Whitehead (2007) conceptualized physical literacy as “a commitment to the pivotal role played by our embodiment” (p. 283). If, as Whitehead (2007) claims, physical literacy encapsulates the “capacity to capitalize fully on our embodied dimension” (p. 286), and physical literacy has been adopted as the key movement pillar in the physical education curriculum (The Ontario Curriculum: Health and Physical Education, Grades 1-8, 2015, p. 8), it begs the question as to why physical education- through-sport continues to be the prevailing practice in physical education (see Chapter four)53. What might be the shortcomings of physical literacy such that it has been subsumed under the umbrella of sport (at times with the blessings of Ministries of Education)? I suggest that the conceptualization of physical literacy (Whitehead, 2001, 2007) has itself contributed to the sport emphasis in physical education by using embodiment and physical literacy as a means to achieve other ends. I must point out that Whitehead (2007) has provided multiple cautionary warnings as to this very misuse: [T]he body-as-object is an established part of contemporary discourse… [and] it is not

appropriate to play up the role of prepositional knowledge [of the body] in a concept of

physical literacy. (p. 293)

Whitehead also stated, [W]e can and do objectify our embodiment, and this has been a significant stumbling-

block to the proper appreciation of the multidimensional role of embodiment. (p. 293)

And lastly,

52 Whitehead was writing in the context of the school system in England. 53 This is a consistent finding that, along with the focus on physical fitness, has been supported by other scholars (Petherick, 2011; Pronger, 2002; Robertson & Barber, 2011; Whitehead, 2007).

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Whenever the expression of the body is used one is, in one breath objectifying,

mechanising and devaluing this [embodied] dimension of ourselves. (p. 293)

Yet, inexplicably undeterred by her own warnings, embodiment and physical literacy are used to objectify and re-source the body in order to enhance or improve physical performance. In executing a remarkable turn-around, Whitehead (2007) stated, “what is at issue is the ability to capitalize on our embodied state or motility to reap the rich rewards available from this form of interaction with the world” (2007, p. 291). The capitalist undertones in this passage are as undeniable as they are puzzling. Specifically, under the guise of students taking responsibility for their own learning and being able to take a critically reflective approach to their own mastery, physical literacy is used to support physical education curricular expectations for selecting and applying skills, tactics, and compositional ideas, and evaluating and improving performance (Whitehead, 2007). As Whitehead (2007) sums up the argument, To be physically literate therefore would need to include reference to a basic ability to

appreciate the nature of one’s embodied activity, an ability to identify aspects of

movement that enable a particular end to be achieved, and elements that need attention

for the skill to be more effective. (p. 294)

Without sufficient attention to the inherent worth and interrelational aspects of movement and embodiment, Whitehead’s (2007) conceptualization of physical literacy effectively validates the continued domination of sport and fitness related activities by making embodiment subservient to skill development, performance, and sport. There is another argument to be made against the case for physical literacy. The conceptualization of physical literacy, in its political and social aspects, did not attend to the relations of power and forms of knowledge that set the conditions for the establishment of discourse. Dominant discourses adapt to new conditions within the same discursive space through incorporation (Escobar, 2012); and these dominant discourses include those that resource the body through the project of pouvoir. While stating that “the embodiment differs markedly depending on the culture within which we live”, Whitehead (2007, p. 291) underestimates the discursive power of capitalist neoliberal “injunctions to know how and to endlessly enjoy becoming fitter, healthier, ever ‘altius, fitius, foritus’ by consuming and producing more knowledge, techniques, venues, and time” (Sykes, 2011b, p. 117) thereby producing the “capable, moving, productive …fortified, athletic body… [striving] for secure body boundaries (Sykes, 2011b, p. 112). Whitehead fails to take into account the power of neoliberalism, as a dominant logic of modern times, “that inserts the body’s [useful, desiring] movement into the economic machinery of production and economic processes” (Pronger, 2002, p. 104), thereby producing subjects “exhaustively as [individual] rational economic actors

160 in every sphere of life” (Brown, 2006, p. 694). Indeed, Whitehead’s (2007) conceptualization of physical literacy falls into this trap itself. In aligning the aims of physical literacy with those of neoliberal demands for producing citizens measured “by their ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions” (Brown, 2006), the following has been added to the working definition of physical literacy: “In addition the individual has the ability to identify and articulate the essential qualities that influence the effectiveness of his/her own movement performance” (Whitehead, 2007, p. 294). Taking a broader philosophical perspective, I suggest that the misuse and re-purposing of ideas like embodiment “is part of the radical discontinuity between the human and non- human domains… [that] along with the idea of a separate self (the “individual” of liberal theory, separate from community) … is seen as the most central feature of modern ontology” (Escobar, 2012). Lastly, we may productively employ Deleuze and Guattari (1987) if, instead, we think of embodiment as part of a “rhizome” (p. 7) that offers endless multiplicities and potentialities for the construction of the self. Thus, a rhizome for the construction of the self would contain “lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 9). If we think of embodiment as representing possible lines of territorialization and deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) warn that “you [embodiment] may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still the danger that you [embodiment] will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, [and] attributions that reconstitute a [neoliberal] subject” (p. 9). A New Intention for Physical Education? I start this last section with a question: How might physical education be approached so as not to treat bodies as disassociated and disparate objects to be manipulated, re-sourced, and positioned on either side of a parergonal logic of functionality/waste product? Asking the question in terms of the argument I made in Chapter eight, how might we re-imagine the interrelated self in physical education? It is in the imagination where oppressive discourses are first realized and it is in the imagination where they may begin to be dismantled. In this task, I do not pretend to offer solutions, only possibilities. The sovereign, self-contained, neoliberal subject is not going to disappear. Nor is it my purpose to attempt to negate such a subject. Rather, my aim as a teacher is to support students in both their “particle sensititivies” and “wave sensitivities” (Glass, 1995, as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 90); that is, both as individuals and as interrelated and interdependent beings. Glass (1995) commented on this connectivity by stating: “There can be no separate selves when each individual is at least partly constructed in relationship with others” (as cited in Pronger, 2002, p. 89). How is this connectivity brought to presence in the moving body? Pronger (2002)

161 advocated a “practice of emptiness [that] produces desire [as a source of movement] through selves that manifest primarily the whole rather than desire that manifests primarily the particular” (p. 90). The practice of emptiness is full alterity as a desiring production of reality that is open to difference/secondness. Rather than approaching difference with the fear and loathing of abjection, the practice of emptiness is drawn to difference compassionately. And here lies a key conceptual difference between the practice of emptiness and abjection. In emptiness, there is no abjection as any difference already exists in the interdependent, interconnected, wave sensitivities of the self. As Pronger stated, the movement into the emptiness of “compassionate desire is pure, unfettered love. In such love there is no abyss, no abjection, no fear, no loathing. Instead there is a profound acceptance” (2002, p. 91). Such a practice in physical education would recognize the moving body, and by extension the embodied self, as an always emerging co-construction. Indeed, in physical education it is the moving body that gives us “the potential to be active and animate within the world, exploring, touching, seeing, hearing, wondering, explaining; and we can only become persons and selves because we are located bodily at a particular place in space and time, in relation to other people and things around us” (Burkitt, 1999, as cited in Whitehead, 2007, p. 285, emphasis mine). Sensitivity to our interrelatedness is necessary to the manifestation of a reality that emphasizes our wave-like qualities. The best example I can think of, and speak to with some experience, is the practice of ‘flow’ in Olympic style wrestling. This is a form of extended play often lasting an hour or more. Each wrestler ‘plays off’ the movements of the other in an improvised session of give and take. Each body both initiates and responds. There is no script except attack, defend, and counter-attack in a seamless, continuous dance of action and reaction. There is no referee, score-keeping, winning or losing. Creativity and attempts at different moves are both encouraged and supported; each participant presents just enough resistance so that their partner can properly get a feel for the movement but not so much resistance as to negate the movement. There is constant, unbroken, bodily dialogue as each move has a counter, and each counter has its own counter. There are no winning moves as each wrestler is granted the freedom to exit a poor position. In this dance, there are no hierarchies; only the continuous, interdependent ebb and flow movements of two moving bodies exists. I defer to the eloquence of Brian Pronger (2002), bending the context of his words to my wrestling analogy54: [The practice of] emptiness here is the creative discerning power to realize the

movement of the body in the brilliant wave of light, to actualize, in the dynamics of

54 I do not think that Brian Pronger would object too much. As young men, we were once in the same physical education wrestling course and it was, perhaps, the very transcendent power of wrestling as an embodied co-creation that drew him.

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drawing-penetrating-absence-presence, not the primacy of the particular socially

constructed self, but the primacy of … the wave of the entire universe. (pp. 90-91)

It must be noted that these descriptions do not reference the mimicry of mirror exercises or traditional forms of dance where participants take turns leading and following. Rather, all lead and all follow in constant dialogue as they explore/create the terms of their embodied connectivity. A useful imagery may be strands of seaweed as they move in drawing-penetrating unison to the motion of the waves. It can be said that, when oriented to each other, two strands of seaweed do not mirror each other; instead, as one bends forward, its partner bends backward in their responsive sensitivity to their wave environment and to each other. Another example might be the adaptation of an activity like capoeira (see Neto & Ovens, 2017). Capoeira is a form of movement that involves play, dance, acrobatics, music, and martial art. Practitioners can be expected to respond to each other’s movements and improvise in an uninterrupted coordination of give and take. Other physical activities can be adapted to this philosophy for embodied movement with its emphasis on the interrelationship of the group, and not the singular. The group or class can be considered to be one wave, albeit one that allows for the diverse expression of each and every student. This would have to take into account all physical challenges in those present and work with what students can do as opposed to highlighting any limitations. The focus of these activities would be on the inherent value of embodied movement for its own sake. The expression of the full puissance of connected moving bodies is the desiring end. To conclude, future practices and research might explore how conceptualizations of the interrelated body and self are applicable to the moving body of physical education. I leave the reader with two thoughts for consideration. Since the projects of pouvoir require a level of stasis and stability for their constructions of body hierarchies and differences, I suggest that Pronger’s (2002) conceptualization of the moving body as a release from the fascism and stasis of physical fitness merits more attention than I have been able to provide. Lastly, in the field of intercultural education, Fred Dervin (2016) wrote that “instead of asking ‘who am I?’ the question ‘whom am we’ appears to be more suitable… because who I am is unstable, contextual, and has to be negotiated with others” (pp. 14-15). I ponder that their ideas might be productively applied to constructions of differently sized/shaped bodies and to ‘difficult’ movements in physical education.

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Appendices

APPENDIX A ORIGINAL PARTICIPANT RECRUITMENT POSTER

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APPENDIX B REVISED PARTICIPANT RECRUITMENT POSTER

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APPENDIX C PRESENTATION: MEDIA IMAGES OF IDEAL BODIES DESCRIPTION: For this presentation, I am asking the audience to consider that beauty is a social construct. I have created a PowerPoint to illustrate how notions of the ideal body have changed over time, and are different across cultures. The content further highlights how current media portrays of the ideal body are unrealistic and often computer enhanced. We will discuss the ways in which these images are harmful. At the end of the presentation, I will introduce my study, and ask if any boys who identify as larger bodied are interested in participating. Those that are interested will receive an information package outlining the study, and my contact information. RESOURCES: Laptop computer; desktop projector; projection screen; PowerPoint presentation with age appropriate and ethnoculturally mixed images. PARTICIPANTS: Mixed groups of boys and girls, and staff (school/ community centre). TIME: One hour RISK LEVEL: Low to Medium PROCEDURES: After introducing myself, I will explain that the presentation is on ideas of beauty and body image. The PowerPoint is meant to be interactive and allow room for discussion. I would like the audience to understand that our ideas of what is attractive and desirable are “made up” by other people depending on where we live, and place in history. We will consider why we are asked to consume these images, and the ways in which they can be harmful. Below are some sample questions for the slides: - Who is this? - When was s/he famous? - Describe her/ his body? - Is this considered a “good” or “hot” body? Why? Following the presentation I will transition into a description of my study, and ask for participants. CONSOLIDATION: As a group we will discuss ways we can feel good about our bodies, particularly in school settings (i.e., physical education).

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APPENDIX D

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION AND CONSENT/ASSENT FORM

Dear Participant,

As a participant in the Boys in Motion Program, you are invited to participate in a research study exploring issues related to boys, and particularly bigger boys, physical activity, and body image. The name of the researcher conducting the study is Roger Bernardes. Roger is currently a qualified teacher and a doctoral student at the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. The results of this study will contribute to a PhD thesis.

The purpose of this study is to explore your ideas regarding physical activity, health, and the body; also, an understanding of how physical education programs contribute to these ideas will be investigated. This research will help identify practices that encourage physical activity and positive body image. You are invited to participate in two interviews, and 12 movement-based physical activity and focus group sessions. The focus group sessions include a variety of activities including group discussions, visual arts and drama activities, and journaling. The specific requirements are listed below.

Participation Procedures

This study will require the participation of boys, ages 12-14 years old, wish to participate in activities that promote movement, positive body image, and healthy behaviours. Each boy will have previously participated in at least one year of physical education classes at their school. If you volunteer to participate in this study, we will ask you to:

• Participate in two interviews. One at the beginning and one at the end of the study. Each interview will be audio-recorded and should take about 30 minutes to complete. • The interview will be conducted at a location and time convenient to you, and you are encouraged to have your parent/guardian nearby. • Participate in movement-based physical activity sessions for approximately 50 minutes, twice a week, over a period of six weeks with the other participants. • Participate in group discussions, visual arts and drama activities, and journaling following the physical activity sessions. Each will take approximately 25 minutes to complete and will be audio-recorded.

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• All data collected will be used only for the purposes of this research project and research papers/ publications associated with this project. Your interview responses and group discussion comments will not be used for future projects. • You and your parent/guardian will be encouraged to check the researcher’s data for accuracy and truthfulness. You can choose to have any parts removed and make suggestions for additions. • There are potential risks or discomforts associated with this research project. There is a small possibility of injury (e.g. ankle sprain) during physical activity sessions but not greater than normally associated with physical activity. • There is the possibility of embarrassment, shaming, and bullying incidents when discussing bodies and body image issues. Steps have been taken to prevent these possibilities but should they occur counseling help is available at Kids Help Phone: www.kidshelpphone.ca or 1-800- 668-6868. The help is free, confidential, anonymous, and available at all times. • Should there be any evidence of abuse or possible harm to yourself or others, it is the researcher’s legal responsibility to contact children’s Aid Society. The only information shared will relate specifically to your safety. • There is no compensation for your participation in this study. Public transport support will be provided if requested. • Research findings will be made available by Roger Bernardes.

Confidentiality Process

Any information obtained in connection with this study, and that can be identified with you will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission.

• Your identity will not be used in any of the research findings. Code numbers and/or aliases will be used instead of your name • All data (interview responses and discussion group comments) will be kept in a locked cabinet in the researcher’s office. Electronic data will be stored on a password protected computer. • Your first name only will be used during audio-taped interviews and for ease of subsequent transcription, and your name will be changed for publication purposes. Audio recordings and transcriptions will be secured in a locked cabinet within a locked office. • All data files (including consent forms, audio files containing real names, notes containing real names) will be physically destroyed or electronically deleted seven years after they have been collected. • You can ask to have your data deleted from the overall project at any time. Please note that it may not always be possible to withdraw all the data as it may have already been included into the wider data analysis. • Information about individual participants will not be shared with anyone else.

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You can choose to be in this study or not. If you volunteer to be in this study, you may withdraw at any time without consequences of any kind. You may also refuse to answer any questions you don’t want to answer and still remain in the study.

You may withdraw your consent at any time and discontinue participation without penalty.

If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please contact Roger Bernardes at [email protected] or (705) 474-3450 ext. 4485. You may also contact Roger’s thesis supervisor at the University of Toronto: Dr. Heather Sykes (416) 978-0073 or by email [email protected].

If you have any questions regarding your rights as a research subject, please contact the Ethics Review Office at [email protected] or (416)946-3273.

INFORMED PARENTAL CONSENT & PARTICIPANT ASSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN RESEARCH

I understand the information provided for the research study as described above. My questions have been answered to my satisfaction, and I agree to participate in this study. I have been given a copy of this information letter.

Participant’s Name ______Participant’s Signature______

Parent/Guardian’s Name ______Parent/Guardian’s Signature______

Date ______

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APPENDIX E PRE-STUDY INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Hello ______. Can you tell me what grade you are in and how old you are? When is your birthday? 2. What types of physical activities are your favourite? Least favourite? 3. What about in Phys Ed class? Favourite and least favourite? 4. What is your phys ed teacher like? Can you describe him/ her? 5. Is your time physical education teacher full-time? 6. What do you think physical education is trying to teach you? What is its purpose? 7. What is a healthy person? 8. What do you think you need to do to be healthy? 9. What do you think it means to be fit? 10. How do you feel about your physical abilities? Do you think you use them in class? 11. How do you feel about your body in physical education class? 12. What type of boys do really well in physical education class? 13. Does the teacher have any favourites in class? What does the teacher do to make you believe that? 14. Do you ever get called names or are made to feel bad? 15. Are you marked on things like how fast you can run, or the number of sit-ups you can do? How are you evaluated? 16. Do you have to wear mandatory uniforms? How do you feel about it? 17. Are there any problems in the change room? Describe the routine. 18. What do you think we can do to make physical education better? 19. Would you describe yourself as average weight, above average, or below average weight?

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APPENDIX F: POST-STUDY INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Overall, how do you think this program went? 2. What were your favourite/least favourite parts of this program? 3. I was very surprised all the boys wanted to play dodgeball. Why do you think everyone wanted to play dodgeball? 4. What are your favourite physical activities? Is it important for you to be good at something before you will do it? 5. What is a healthy person? 6. Is being healthy important to you? 7. What do you think you need to do to be healthy? Can other people help you to be healthy? 8. What do you think it means to be fit? Is being fit the same thing as being healthy 9. How would you describe our relationship throughout the program? Is having a good relationship with your instructor/ teacher important to you? 10. What things did I do that you liked? Things that did I do that you did not like? How did our relationship affect your participation in the program? What happens if you don’t like your instructor? 11. How do you feel about your physical abilities? What are your best moves? 12. Can you tell me how you see (or feel about) your own body? How do you think others see your body? 13. Do you think a man’s body should look a certain way? Is it supposed to be able to do certain things? Where do you think people get those ideas? 14. Are there things you hear or see (maybe things people say/ do or you see on tv/ internet) that affect how you feel about your body? How do you handle things if you feel you are being watched? 15. What do you think physical education is trying to teach you? What do you think its purpose should be? Do you agree with these ideas? How do you deal with them? 16. If you could create your own physical education program, what would it look like? Will athletes get most of the attention? 17. What have you learned during this program? Has it affected your attitude towards physical activity? Do you think it will affect the things you will do? 18. Is there anything else you would like to tell me? Something I may have missed?

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APPENDIX G: OUTLINE OF PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION AND FOCUS GROUP SESSIONS At the YMCA we had access to a racquetball court, half a gymnasium, and, weather permitting, an outdoor grassy area that provided greater space.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION* FOCUS GROUP***

1. INTRODUCTIONS & ICE-BREAKERS 1. INTRODUCTIONS -Introductions -icebreaker exercise -setting ground rules for activities -setting ground rules -movement based ice-breakers, name games, -body image bingo fun games -review outline of sessions; choosing journal -debrief after each game** pseudonym -my own fat boy story -journal & check-out 2. DE-INHIBITIZER GAMES 2. MEDIA PORTRAYAL OF BODIES -check-in -discussion: media representation of males and -games involving movement and some body females contact (tag games, “fun” games) -activity: working with the media -debrief after each game -journal & check-out 3. MORE DE-INHIBITIZER GAMES 3. CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL -check-in CONSTRUCTIONS OF BODIES -more games involving movement and body -discussion: the ideal body across time and contact cultures -debrief after each game -journal & check-out 4. CO-OPERATION GAMES 4. PUBERTY -check-in -art activity: puberty -games involving group organization and -discussion: changes during puberty; peer and cohesion for successful completion societal reactions to those changes (team or group-building games) -journal & check-out -debrief after each game 5. TRUST GAMES 5. BODY-BASED PREJUDICE -check-in -defining prejudice – interactive -games involving a commitment from others -discussion: judgments about people based on for safe completion (e.g., blindfold games, looks depending on others for balance and/or -discussion: me and the ideal body support) -plan participant observation session -debrief after each game -journal & check-out 6. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 6. HEALTH -check-in -discussion: health behaviours affecting boys -participant led activities facilitated by (smoking, risk taking, violence); assumptions researcher regarding body size and health -debrief after each game -art collage: health and physical activity -plan participant observation session -journal & check-out 7. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 7. BODY IMAGE -check-in -defining body image – interactive -participant led activities facilitated by -discussion: body image and its sources researcher - art activity: mapping my body image -debrief after each game -plan participant observation session -journal & check-out

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8. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 8. PHYSICAL EDUCATION -check-in -discussion: favourite and least favourite -participant led activities facilitated by activities in physical education researcher -discussion: physical education and body -debrief after each game image; suggestions for physical education -plan participant observation session -journal and check-out 9. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 9. HEALTHY EATING -check-in -defining healthy eating: interactive -participant led activities facilitated by -discussion: meanings of food researcher -Art Activity: healthy eating and physical -debrief after each game activity -plan participant observation session -journal and check-out 10. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 10. HARASSMENT -check-in -defining size based harassment: interactive -participant led activities facilitated by -Interactive drama activity: my life as a drama researcher -plan participant observation session -journal and check-out 11. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 11. IDENTITY -check-in -defining identity: interactive -participant led activities facilitated by -discussion: identity and body image; identity researcher as social construct -debrief after each game -plan participant observation session -journal and check-out 12. PARTICIPANT LED ACTIVITIES 12. CELEBRATION & NEXT STEPS -check-in -interactive activity: finding mentor and/or -participant led activities facilitated by supportive peers researcher -interactive activity: school-based action plan -debrief after each game -pizza party Note: * The Participant observations sessions are based on the belief that activities have to be properly sequenced and implemented to support the physical and emotional safety of all participants (Cain & Jolliff, 1998). The activities are a compilation of activities/games that I have used throughout my teaching career. Each activity will be debriefed immediately after its completion. **Debriefing will explore elements for successful completion as well as group processes: How did the group plan? Were the contributions of each group member valued? Who took the lead and why? ***The outline and activities of the Focus Groups is based on the educational resource, Embodying Equity: Body Image as an Equity Issue, authored by Carla Rice and Vanessa Russell (2002).