Here’s the abstract for my presentation at ECER (European Conference for Educational Research, Glasgow, 22nd August 2023. I wrote the abstract on behalf of the research team:
Joanne Hill, Gavin Ward, Alun Hardman, Ronnie Richards, David Scott, Lisa Edwards, Amanda Jones
Late in 2019 the edited volume Teaching About Social Justice in Physical Education was released (edited by Jennifer Walton-Fisette, Sue Sutherland and Joanne Hill) on IAP
The aim is that teachers and teacher educators can take the resources in the book and shape them for their own students to develop understanding of a range of social justice and equality issues, and create resources / lesson plans or respond to something that arises while in the classroom.
I already worked with colleagues at my own institution, Bedfordshire, to build a Critical Sport Pedagogy unit around some of the chapters, for instance building a workshop on self-identity, trust and understanding other people around the chapter ‘Accessing Pre-Service Teachers’ Self-Identity through Critical Reflection‘ and adapting the adventure-based activities in ‘Challenging Bullying: Lessons from Adventure-based Learning’ for a classroom setting.
I’d love to hear about how the book is being used so please contact me if you have got a copy!
Girls’ colouring books show girls being physically active in 26% of images. Boys’ colouring books show boys being physically active in 44% of images.
Word cloud of common words found in colouring books for boys (left) and for girls (right)
Books and other curricular materials are vehicles of knowledge, ideas and values that may contain messages that teach children normative ways to be a boy or a girl. Children take seriously the messages they receive from books, toys, marketing and the adults around them.
Despite some publishers recognising the importance of ensuring equal representation of all people in curricular materials, it is still common to find stereotypically gendered books.
In this post I report on some qualitative and quantitative research on children’s colouring books series where there is a book for girls and a book for boys. It was carried out by Vladimir Martínez-Bello (Universitat de València) and Joanne Hill (University of Bedfordshire).
As physical activity and sport researchers, we felt that it was particularly important to avoid gendered representation of physical activity. In the last 12 years, a couple of studies of American children’s books have found them to portray boys more often in active or outdoor play and girls in indoor or static positions (Fitzpatrick and McPherson, 2010; Hamilton, Anderson, Broaddus and Young, 2006). Gender representation in sports media has been investigated extensively, including presenting some sports as male-appropriate and some as female-appropriate, supporting assumptions of female frailty and male strength, and presenting female athletes in a sexualised manner, although some research points to the latter diminishing somewhat over the last 25 years. Assumptions that girls and boys are simply different also restrict girls’ and boys’ opportunities to play sports together (Cooky, Messner & Musto, 2015; Koivula, 1999; Messner, 2000; Messner, Duncan & Jensen, 1993).
The aim of this study was to investigate the representation of female and male characters in the illustrations of six colouring books published by well-known publishing houses in the UK that were entitled “Book for Girls” or “Book for Boys”. We took a sample of 136 illustrations of human characters and analysed the gender and age of the human characters in the pictures, the place (indoors or outdoors), and the type of activity (including physical activity, sedentary activity and active transport).
1: Representation of gender
In the books for girls 75% were depicted as female, 13% as male and 12% as unclear.
In the books for boys, 60% were depicted as male, 18% as female and 22% as unclear.
In one of the books for girls, there was only one male character present in all the sampled images, represented as a bridegroom at a wedding.
It appears that publishing houses may assume that boys are not interested in seeing female characters and likewise, that girls are not interested in seeing male characters. I agree with Let Books Be Book’s (2018) concern that gender segregation in itself is an artificial and damaging divide. Their social media sites highlight the stories of a number of parents and children frustrated by implicit messages that a certain toy or book is not for them, claiming that it restricts children’s opportunities and dreams. This labelling of books and toys may also lead to bullying of any children who make the so-called ‘wrong choice’.
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2: Gender and physical activity
Of the female characters represented in the books for girls, 26% were doing physical activity, 67% were sedentary, and 7% doing other activities.
Of the male characters represented in the books for boys, 44% were doing physical activity, 42% were sedentary, and 14% doing other activities.
So, there was a trend towards boys being represented as more active, but it was not statistically significant. Other activities means active transport, household work, or occupational work.
These quantitative results for physical activity obscure some differences in the ways that active female and male characters were represented. In the books for girls, where leisure time physical activity was displayed, it was frequently dance, such as ballet or bharatanatyam (Indian dance). In one image of horse riding, a female character rides behind a male companion who holds the reins. This is one example of female characters being submissive to or relying on men, or having a lesser role.
Physical activities that only male characters were in engaged, in the books for boys, included football and fishing. One image of active transport showed a number of men dressed in suits, walking to work. The opportunity and encouragement of leadership in work and adventure settings was also clear in the books for boys.
The written language accompanying some images invited readers to imagine themselves as part of the story; in the boys’ books, readers see ‘you have discovered…’ or ‘you have created…’ that position readers (that is, boys) as the protagonists in science or adventure settings. In sedentary activity or static positions, female characters in the books for girls were represented in fashion or fantasy settings; written instructions encouraged girls to imagine her own appearance in the future, or to imagine herself kissing someone.
The subject positions available to girls in these books have a narrow scope and reproduce discourses that girls are less active. This could affect the participation of girls in a variety of physical activities.
***
We also had some results which did not support what we expected to find:
3: Representation of gender and age
In the books for girls 66% were depicted as adults, and 34% as children.
In the books for boys, 65% were depicted as adults, and 35% as children.
We had expected to find female characters more often represented as children but this was not supported. This is possibly a good thing, as it means there is some similarity in how female and male characters are presented, and female characters are not infantilised.
***
4: Gender and location
Of the characters in the books for girls, 48% were depicted outdoors, 18% indoors, and 34% in unclear locations.
Of the characters in the books for boys, 57% were outdoors, 8% indoors, and 35% in unclear locations.
We had expected to find boys represented more often outdoors. The main difficulty was the amount of images where the location was unclear.
However, qualitative analysis of the books for boys suggested it was common for male characters to be represented in workplace, discovery or adventure settings, depicting boys or men as scientists, astronauts, pirates, divers, strong men and superheroes. There was no space travel in any of the books for girls. Strong men and superheroes had muscular bodies or demonstrated strength through lifting heavy objects, for instance. In one image, one strong man was drawn with smaller muscles, unable to lift a heavy object – but this could be seen as providing an opportunity to laugh at a character unable to carry out his role.
Some images in the books for girls stand in contrast; there were superheroes featured, but they were girls rather than women; female characters sometimes had jobs, but were ‘closer to home’ or smaller in scope – such as pet shop owner – compared to the astronauts and pirates of the books for boys. Female characters were close to or part of nature, for instance drawn as the size of small animals and interacting with birds. This contrasts with male characters in the books for boys who conquered nature – explorers on safari or anglers catching large fish. Although one image in a book for boys depicted a female pilot, she was sat behind the male main character, perpetuating an idea that men lead.
***
Although the scope of this paper is only on gender, the analysis also highlighted a lack of representation of larger bodies, non-white bodies and people with disabilities.
What can we conclude? Despite decades of research into gendered books (and other children’s items) our results don’t show all that much is new or has changed. We argue that girls and boys do not need separate books. To separate children generates a feeling of difference and impassable boundaries around ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ (Messner, 2000).
A number of publishers of children’s colouring books have recently agreed to produce no more gendered titles, instead agreeing to gender-neutral books (Let Toys Be Toys, 2016). In the past there might have been an assumption that showing evidence of stereotyping would be enough to persuade publishers, writers and illustrators not to produce books which encourage gender stereotyped views, and as a result the next generation would be free of stereotypes. Today, consumer pressure meets some resistance from publishers and retailers who claim that consumers seek and appreciate security in gender-differentiated goods. This suggests education should continue. Parents and teachers might find ways to encourage critical reflection on gendered materials when they discuss books with children. Talking about gender in books is just one element in a difficult journey towards less prescribed gender roles and greater acceptance of gender diversity.
References
Cooky, C., Messner, M.A., & Musto, M. (2015). “It’s Dude Time!” A quarter century of excluding women’s sports in televised news and highlight shows. Communication & Sport, 3(3), 261-287.
Fitzpatrick, M., & McPherson, B. (2010). Coloring within the lines: Gender stereotypes in contemporary coloring books. Sex Roles, 62(1-2), 127-137.
Hamilton, M.C., Anderson, D., Broaddus, M. & Young, K. (2006). Gender stereotyping and under-representation of female characters in 200 popular children’s picture books: A twenty-first century update. Sex Roles, 55(11-12), 757-765.
Koivula, N. (1999). Gender stereotyping in televised media sport coverage. Sex Roles, 41 (7/8): 589–604.
Messner, M. A. (2000). Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children constructing gender. Gender & Society, 14(6), 765–784.
Messner, M. A., Duncan, M. C., & Jensen, K. (1993). Separating the men from the girls: The gendered language of televised sports. Gender & Society, 7(1), 121–137.
This post summarises my published work Hill, J. (2015) Girls’ active identities: navigating othering discourses of femininity, bodies and physical education, Gender and Education 27(6), 666-684. You can find the paper at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540253.2015.1078875.
While all of the research and writing I did from my PhD studies tried to challenge the accepted, to complexify what we think we know about young people and their physical activity experiences, one of my favourite things about what my participants told me has made its way into this paper. Here, I talk about girls who are physically active – although they might not think of themselves as active. Girls being physically active is a challenge to the accepted for two reasons: the field talks so much about girls being inactive and disengaged in PE; and what counts as sport and physical activity, as a physically active body, and especially as a feminine appropriate physically active body are narrowly constructed so that girls who don’t ‘fit’ cannot see themselves in the images of ideal fit bodies. Ideal bodies can marginalise and other some girls.
For the girls in this paper, the ideal was not enough to put them off being active (unlike some of their peers who I talked about in other paper). However, they couldn’t entirely get away from discourses of gender that regulated them and a system of penalties and rewards for reinforcing or deviating from gender norms.
For instance, one girl Lucy was highly active in a range of team and individual sports. But she was beginning to moderate the types of activities she did to concentrate on ones that would help her attain a slender body, rather than continuing to develop the muscular body she had. She did this because she claimed that boys at school called her fat. She was punished for gender inappropriate activity and physicality.
Other girls enthusiastically took part in physical activity as long as the environment was right and they were surrounded by similar people, that is, girly-girls. Ayesha liked single sex PE where she could be with ‘just girls’ who ‘understood each other’. She also claimed that they didn’t have to act like tomboys in this setting. While she felt included, the question remains about how excluded tomboys might have felt in a setting that still reproduced gender regulation. Neither single sex or mixed classes intrinsically have the answer.
Girls here were othered by discourses of fatness, whiteness and femininity and I discuss ways of listening to girls’ voices on the struggle to challenge gender norms, call for equality and avoid surveiling/regulating other girls’ bodies. Girls and boys can be supported to identify and make sense of gender boundaries, acceptable gendered and racialised performances, and create discussion out of instances of diversity or regulation.
Abstract
Within physical education and sport, girls must navigate discourses of valued athletic and gendered bodies that marginalise or ‘other’ non-normative performances through systems of surveillance and punishment. The purpose of this paper is to share girls’ perspectives on how these discourses affected their gender performances and activity engagement. Students aged 13–14 in one ethnically diverse UK secondary school were invited to create a photo diary of the physical activities they engaged in. Photo-elicitation interviews in small groups followed. The girls positioned themselves as physically active but had to carefully manage their activity choices and gender performances in a single-sex physical education environment that regulated deviation from the fit, slender, girly-girl. Although the girls demonstrate the difficulty of resisting, they indicate moments of positioning themselves against norms that suggest the possibilities of shifting gendering processes. The paper points out the importance of listening to ‘other’ girls’ narratives in building positive physical education engagements.
For World Ballet Day (1st October 2015), I talk about a recent research project carried out in London-based dance school Irreverent Dance, research that has been published as Hill, J., Sandford, R. and Enright, E. (2015). ‘It has really amazed me what my body can now do’: boundary work and the construction of a body-positive dance community. Sport in Society. You can find the paper at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17430437.2015.1073946.
As a scholar of physical education and sport pedagogy, I am often on the look out for good examples of physical activity sites that offer something new for (future) teachers and coaches to learn from. It’s what can help guide developments in the ways physical education, sport and dance are taught. This led me to get in touch with Irreverent Dance, when it was coming up to a year old and offering mainly ballet classes. For me and my co-researchers, Irreverent Dance seemed to offer the sort of positive experiences and environments in physical activity that we were looking to learn from, in its challenging and alternative approaches to dance teaching and practice.
At the risk of starting on a negative point, traditional ballet teaching styles and spaces have often been considered a little exclusionary or marginalising of body sizes and shapes that don’t fit the expected in ballet. Amanda from Irreverent Dance writes here about her perspective on these aspects of ballet and why it is important to challenge them.
While there are many valuable things to say about the teaching styles found in Irreverent Dance, this piece (and the research behind it) concentrates on how the teachers and dancers worked to create a community – in and out of the studio and also online – that supported everyone in that space developing a greater sense of their own body capabilities: that is, how body positivity was encouraged. This idea, body positivity, is highlighted by Irreverent Dance in its promotional material as a central goal. Body positivity is becoming a popular idea that might counter the marginalising of anyone outside the norm. As a goal in sport and physical activity it could be useful alongside well-being, pleasure and other social or personal outcomes. So how does it work in practice? What do teachers or coaches need to do?
We sat in on some Irreverent Dance ballet classes and a showcase, and interviewed dancers and teachers, to find out what body positivity meant to them and how it was developed. Three things stood out to us:
1. Celebrating bodily capability
There was a high level of celebration of what bodies can do. This sense of achievement was expressed both in relation to specific ballet technique and in terms of general physical ability. Irreverent Dancers were able to develop their dancing ability at a pace they were comfortable with, progressing gradually through ballet grades and repeating terms if they wished. Even if the moves were not reproduced in a textbook fashion, the developments that learners had made were much more important. The learners’ reflections suggest that their understandings of the body as ‘not capable’ of doing something might have arisen in previous dance or movement experiences. Learners were instead actively encouraged to think ‘I can’ in Irreverent Dance. As a result, many felt that they could now own the identity of dancer. The community of Irreverent Dance worked hard to create a ‘freeing’ space, with a commitment to inclusion, respect and not judging others. From the first class, learners were asked to treat others and, importantly, themselves, in a positive manner.
2. Committing to gender neutrality
Alongside body positivity, another vital element of Irreverent Dance that appeared to have been built into the environment of the school was gender neutrality. Boundaries of gender in sport and physical activity are usually quite deep seated – separate competitions and classes for men and women, and distinct deals of masculine and feminine appearance or comportment. Irreverent Dance notes that traditional ballet expectations that men and women wear different outfits, different colours, do different dances and take on distinct roles can be quite limiting and normalising. Elements of dance that have typically gendered boundaries were addressed: for example, men were invited to learn to dance en pointe if they wished. Dancers commented that their perception of what their bodies could do developed positively, when heteronormative and cisnormative boundaries (in dance movement and performance) were eliminated.
3. Challenging ballet norms
A central element in the learning and community of ID was deconstructing ballet’s gender boundaries; challenging dominant notions about what gendered ballet bodies look like, what they should do and what progress must be made. Some learners reflected on how they had been looking for a dance class that would suit their ‘uncoordinated’, ‘geeky back of the class loner’ or ‘fat’ bodies. Ballet norms in the sense of technical requirements, language, music and dress styles were recognized but with gender norms being challenged or even removed, this meant that learners who would previously have not had access to ballet could find a space that was safe and positive for them.
Committing to these positions in a dance school might take a lot of work, as dancer habits can be difficult to shake off and the broader culture of ballet still promotes traditional and restrictive movements, clothing, and so on. By working together to ensure a respectful community, learning about having a positive attitude to your own and others’ bodies, identity and physical capabilities has become an integral part of Irreverent Dance, not just learning about ballet itself. In a way, this means that dancers can just learn about ballet, without worrying about how they fit in (or don’t).
My thanks again to the members of Irreverent Dance who shared their experiences.
Theoretically, this paper uses Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and field to explore how Irreverent Dance and Dancers crossed, transformed or shifted boundaries of physical capability, gender and dance. We developed a methodology based on appreciative inquiry, a strengths-based, as opposed to deficits-based, approach to creating change.
Abstract
Boundaries around normative embodiments in physical cultures can be exclusionary if one’s embodied identity does not ‘fit’. Normative boundaries are particularly marked in codified forms of dance such as ballet. Moves towards body positivity aim to challenge these normative boundaries by redefining what dancers’ bodies can look like and how they should move. This paper stems from an appreciative inquiry undertaken with one such project, a gender-neutral, LGBTQ friendly adult ballet school in the UK; a subcultural context that marks itself as distinct from broader cultures of dance. Interviews with learners are analysed through a Bourdieuian lens to explore the construction and maintenance of a body-positive subculture. Findings suggest that boundaries of ability were crossed, with celebration of all bodies’ capabilities, and boundaries of normative gender expression were transformed through a commitment to gender-neutrality and LGBTQ-friendly behaviours. However, boundaries around technical and aesthetic norms, while shifted or challenged, ultimately remained in place.
I have just seen my final paper from my PhD project be accepted for publication, which offers me a chance to reflect back on the five publications that project prompted (all linked to at the end of this piece). It was a visual ethnography with secondary school students over one academic year, with students creating photo diaries of their engagement in physical activity (and also what they do when they are not active). The creative and participatory elements of this methodology gave me plenty to write about in these publications and I noted the additional insight into young people’s worlds that a photography project can provide – especially their lives outside of school or otherwise beyond the ethnographic site where we cannot physically go. I was also keen to share the participants’ photos as much as possible by reproducing representative pictures alongside the interview data we generated in talking about the photos and the participants’ experiences of physical activity. It felt important to share because this was something that the participants put time into making – and perhaps in some way it would work to deprivilege words in academic publication.
Participatory methods are often active or creative, and work to engage participants in the research process (Enright and O’Sullivan, 2012); they are a part of listening to and privileging student voice over doing research ‘on’ young people. For Gauntlett and Holzwarth (2006), visual creative methods are enabling, reflective, and a good starting point for examining identity and self.
What happens if participants engage with these methods but aren’t particularly … creative? What are we really looking for, something pretty or artistic or evocative?
There were indeed many wonderful photographs created by my participants, who wanted and were able to tell a story with or through their images. Examples include the boy I called Mitesh in Hill (2013 and 2015) who brought back more than 50 photos of his attempts in PE and out-of-school play to work on a body that would provide him with more status. It was really easy to decide to share some of these photos to add emotion to his verbal explanations. The visual was really powerful.
If this doesn’t happen, should we not bother reproducing the images in our publications?
In this project, of a total 539 photos created by the 25 participants, I received 78 photos of empty spaces, 75 photos of objects, and 112 self-portraits or snaps of friends. Many of them would not go in a photo album nor would they be chosen for an art exhibition. In short, they are not ‘great photography’.
Collectively, they contribute to telling stories about these young people’s engagement with and access to physical activity, its importance to them and how they try to fit it into their lives alongside school work, visiting family, relaxing with friends, worship and helping out at home. This side of the story showed that finding time for physical activity was difficult; it also showed that taking photos during physical activity is not always possible; and importantly the ‘storyless’ photos prompted some participants to explain that this was not all they did – they were able to talk about their other activities that the photos did not show. Photos in that sense provided elicitation, prompting further ‘feelings and memories’ as Douglas Harper has discussed (2002, p. 13).
I think the risk is that the ‘boring’ images that are not shared become the story not told, the hidden elements of the research project, and we might find ourselves at risk of not telling the whole story, simply because the data itself has little to ‘show’. This is obviously something that can happen with other forms of qualitative data, with mundane accounts or short answers possible in interviews. But I feel that there is still something to prove with creative methods, something that needs displaying to prove they are worthwhile forms of data generation, in the face of scepticism. I want to be proud of the project as a whole and that means reproducing elements of the data, not hiding it because my 13 year old participants had bad photography skills. In a journal publication where reproduction of four or five images might be possible, how do we make choices about what to show? If you claim to have used visual methods, but only reproduce the text or verbal data, that might render readers disappointed or confused as to what the visual data were for. In order not to privilege verbal accounts over visual, even if they are contradictory or less … instantly valuable? … the visual should, in my view, be shared.
Perhaps ultimately, this reflection contributes to calls for accessible datasets – provided we have ethically prepared for this – to let viewers see for themselves. Leonard and McKnight (2014, p. 2) highlight that the ‘seemingly mundane’ image is open to interpretation and might be seen differently by different viewers (citing Pink, 2007).
All data reproduction, whether from qualitative or quantitative projects, is a manipulation of the whole that will always involve some level of subjective decision making on what and how to present snippets of data in publication. In analysing and sharing data, researchers distill, shorten, concentrate, categorise – however you would like to call it – meaning that even the bad photography should be chosen if it contributes to emphasising the story or the decisions you’ve made for that publication.
References
Enright, E., & O’Sullivan, M. (2012). “Producing different knowledge and producing knowledge differently”: rethinking physical education research and practice through participatory visual methods. Sport, Education and Society, 17(1), 35–55.
Gauntlett, D., & Holzwarth, P. (2006). Creative and visual methods for exploring identities. Visual Studies, 21(1), 82–91.
Harper, D. (2002). Talking about pictures: a case for photo elicitation. Visual Anthropology, 17(1), 13–26.
Leonard, M., & McKnight, M. (2014). Look and tell: using photo-elicitation methods with teenagers. Children’s Geographies, 1–14. doi:10.1080/14733285.2014.887812
Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography: Images, media and representation in research. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
Hill, J. (2013). Rejecting the weak Asian body: boys visualising strong masculinities. In L. Azzarito & D. Kirk (Eds.). Physical Culture, Pedagogies and Visual Methods, 76-91. Abingdon: Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415532778/
This post summarises my published paper Hill, J. (2015) If you miss the ball, you look like a total muppet! Boys investing in their bodies in physical education and sport, Sport, Education and Society 20(6), 762-779. It can be read in full at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13573322.2013.820695#.VHCLsPmsWSo
The title of this paper refers to a comment made by one of the boys who participated in this study of Year 9 (13-14 year olds) students in a secondary school (11-16 years old) in the UK. This boy, who has the pseudonym Harshul, was explaining why he likes to practice golf and tennis at home, away from school. He told me that the pressure to be competent in physical education, to be good at sports, was high, and he felt like he needed to practice lots in order to be good, or at least to not look like a “muppet” if he swung the club or racket and missed the ball. That is, to avoid looking uncoordinated and unskilled.
Harshul and other classmates suggested that there were pressures to demonstrate a supposedly natural ability or display a muscular and fit body. They showed, in a series of participant-created photographs, how they took part in out of school activities that would help to develop the right body that would provide status in PE.
The association between traditional or typical ways of doing PE and boys or masculinity can obscure the concerns some boys encounter in sports-based settings. Perhaps it is because sport is associated with masculinity that the pressures for boys to be competent are so large. Sports are supposed to provide status for boys, as well as popularity “off the pitch”. If we look at how gender intersects with ethnicity, body size and shape, we might note some of the reasons why boys can have less than positive experiences in PE. White, muscular, fit and competent bodies are most often high status as sporting bodies.
Although the boys in this study claimed to enjoy PE and sport, and were active in and out of school, their stories suggest that they encountered normative discourses about masculine sporting bodies that required them to put effort into reshaping their bodies to fit.
Abstract: Connections have been drawn between masculinity, muscularity and physical or social status in sport. Not only are sporting bodies often related to masculinity but also to whiteness, leading to the devaluing of Asian boys’ bodies and sporting experiences. This paper draws on three British Asian teenage boys’ visual and verbal narratives to enquire how they negotiate these connections in their physical education and recreational sport experiences. Bourdieu’s notion of capital is used to make sense of boys’ ways of investing in their bodies to manage their status in school. Drawing from focus-group interviews which used participant-driven photography and photo elicitation techniques, the research indicates how three boys invested in their bodies by doing particular types of physical activity that would enable them to develop muscularity, fitness and/or motor competence, to attain or retain physical and social capital in school. Along the way, they add pertinent comments on the intersections of masculinity and ethnicity in constructing and performing a sporting body.
Recently I wrote a review for Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly of Stidder and Hayes’ second edition of their text Equity and Inclusion in Physical Education and Youth Sport. You can read that review here if you have a subscription to the journal. Otherwise, here’s my tuppence-worth more briefly.
As the name suggests, Equity and Inclusion presents aspects of inclusion/exclusion that affect young people’s learning, engagement, participation and enjoyment within PE and sport. It takes lines of identity and difference in turn with one chapter each on gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, special educational needs, and also looks at health, sport for peace, policy, and competitive sport.
My favourite thing about this book is the opening of each chapter with a biographical piece from the author(s) that tells us something of their motivations for writing about the topic of the chapter, including their own experiences as a participant in PE in their own school days. Although I would not argue that any writer anywhere writes from a detached and unemotional position, the biographies of the authors in this book help to show readers how experience of issues of, say gender inequality, affect them (us, everyone?). It seems important in this book to personalise the stories that are created. Sometimes that means reflecting on unhappy stories and at times the book might be better called Inequity and Exclusion. However the editors in their introduction note that their aim is to share elements of good practice with teachers of PE to show how all children might be included. In order to do that, I think the book needs to be read as a whole, not dipped into for a relevant chapter, to avoid treating them as single issues. There are intersections between any of the concerns in the book.
Equity and Inclusion reminds us that we need to be aware of both external pressures such as policy or public discourse within which PE must legitimate itself, while knowing that the focus of PE and youth sport is the young people. It has been a key text on undergraduate modules I’ve taught on that address equality and/or critical pedagogy, and serves well as an introduction to equity issues for students.
This post summarises my book chapter Hill, J. (2013) Rejecting the weak Asian body: Boys visualising strong masculinities, in Pedagogies, physical culture and visual methods, edited by L. Azzarito and D. Kirk, Routledge.
This chapter explored how Asian boys negotiated dominant and local constructions of masculinities in relation to their own embodied experiences in PE.
PE is a key site where boys learn what a masculine body is and how it relates to ability and status in sporting bodies. The continuing predominance of multi activity sports technique based curricula in PE can be seen as centralising proficient sporting performance. Ability and status tends also to be awarded to particular body shapes and to strength or muscularity. There can be big consequences for boys who do not perform or embody these ideals, which can affect their learning and engagement in PE.
However, the work of Connell has shown that masculinity is not a singular set of characteristics. Boys give different meanings to masculinities on different places; it is a fluid concept. The masculinities that gain dominant status in any space might look different or be related to different body shapes. Not only has sporting status been associates with masculinity, but with whiteness, or at other times blackness, so that Asian and “other” bodies are marginalised. Asian boys might be considered frail and uninterested in PE unless it’s cricket. Among boys’ localised physical cultures, however, they may be able to find ways to construct valued masculinities that relate to their own experiences. As researchers, teacher educators and teachers, can we support alternative and diverse meanings for boys’ positive engagement in PE? How do Asian boys make sense of their own bodies among dominant valuing of strength, muscularity and whiteness?
This chapter uses visual and verbal narratives from four Asian boys, one black boy and one white-Asian boy to explore this. Creating photos in and out of school, the boys pictured valued masculinities as strong muscular bodies, more often than technical competence in sport. The pressure to be muscular or big was felt by some, who related this body shape to ability to scored in football, or to become team captain. The boys who achieved these were, at this school, black or Asian.
Some noted that it was hard for Asian boys to be successful in sports because of institutional racism among, for instance, scouts. They found spaces in which to be successful, spaces that were defined by Asian communities. Boxing was a notable example.
Although the boys said that developing a strong body was important, some were aware that bodies showing signs of fighting were difficult, at the intersections of race and class. It can be hard especially for Asian or black boys to gain employment if they are read as fighters.
There reminded pressure for these boys to embody valued masculinities, but they were able to relate valued masculinities to Asian and black bodies and sport engagement. This may have been because they were in a school with a predominant Asian population. Discourses about boys’ bodies might be recognised by most boys but deployed in different ways. Asian boys’ opportunities to be involved in sport are still mediated by their positions at the margins in broader social contexts. The boundaries of respectable or ideal masculinity intersect with race and class. Strength was still the marker of valued masculinity, but the boys made sense of it in relation to themselves. They resisted notions that Asian boys’ bodies are weak.
The paper tries to understand how British Asian girls make sense of constructions of bodies that have value (those that are considered norm or ideal) and how this affects their sense of self. What subject positions are available to girls as they negotiate or resist narratives of physical activity and girlhood?
In this paper, two girls’ visual and verbal narratives illustrated how they saw themselves as active but not sporty, which potentially restrained their engagement in PE and physical activity.
Physical cultures that young people engage in place value on certain bodies in terms of strength, muscularity and ability. These also intersect with gender, race, class and age so that some young people are seen as deviant, at risk and “other” if they do not or cannot embody these ideals. At the same time, pressures for a feminine appearance remain strong for girls. Minority ethnic girls position themselves among these discourses of ideal sporting bodies, femininity and whiteness – this draws from a feminist poststructuralist framework. Positioning theorises that we create subjectivities (or identities) as we come into contact with different discourses; we might take up a little bit of all the identities that are available to us as we try to consider who we might be. This enables researchers to see identity as a lot more complex than just girl; white; 13 years old, for instance.
I use this theory to help consider how to localise understandings of how bodies are valued in physical cultures and school contexts.
The data for this project were created in one school, with Year 9 pupils (age 13-14) who were mainly from a British Asian background. The methods included observations in PE classes, participant photography, and photo elicitation interviews in groups. Participants were asked to create photos of, firstly, what they did when they were active, with whom and where; and secondly, people they considered to be valued or have admired bodies. The paper just uses data from the girl participants, although boys were also participants (see my other published work Hill 2013, a, b).
Only three of the 14 girls in the research were active in sport outside of school. Many created photographs in school, suggesting the centrality of school to their physically active lives. Additionally, many girls did not include pictures of themselves, or only photographed themselves in inactive situations. There could be a number of reasons for this. In observations in the PE department, I noted that there were a number of posters on the walls that promoted sport engagement to students, either with motivational messages or adverts for clubs. None of the pictures on these posters included Asian women. I wondered, maybe the girls didn’t see anyone like them as sporty, and therefore struggled to see themselves as sporty. While the girls were able to talk about sportstars as people who have tried hard to get to where they are, they couldn’t talk about themselves in the same way – it wasn’t something they could do. For them, sport was a highly competitive, high ability activity, and mainly for boys. These girls did not avoid participating in PE, but could not visualise themselves as valued sporting bodies.
Given the narrow discourses available to girls regarding sporting and feminine bodies, among which they could position themselves, the girls had few subjectivities available to them to combine being physically active with being a British Asian girl.
Young people are able to verbalise and visualise what valued bodies mean to them. If they are given potential to create alternative narratives and subjectivities within educational settings they may have more space to articulate and experience active identities.
Abstract:
Background: Status or value in sport and physical education (PE) contexts is often associated with performances of highly proficient sporting bodies, which produce hierarchies of privileged and marginalised gendered and racialised positions. This may be communicated through text and images shared within school, physical cultures and media that young people consume. Understanding how students make sense of constructions of valued bodies in PE, and how this affects their sense of self, can assist in creating spaces for young people to experience alternative narratives.
Focus: The paper’s aims are to explore varying ways British Asian girls visualise and make sense of themselves as active or sporting bodies, and what this means for their (dis)engagement in physical activity.
Theoretical framework: This study draws on a feminist poststructuralist approach concerning the ways in which young people create multiple subject positions through negotiating or rejecting verbal and visual narratives about physical activity and girlhood.
Methods: The data draws from a one-year collaborative visual ethnography conducted with 25 students aged 13–14 in a predominantly British Asian urban secondary school in the UK. In this research, student-participants were included in the data production through being asked to create photographs over a two-week period that represented their views of valued bodies in physical activity contexts in and out of school. Focus group interviews used participant-driven photo elicitation techniques to talk through the images.
Findings: In this paper, two British Asian girls’ photos enabled them to talk about, analyse, and reflect on valued or sporting bodies that they saw in visual media. The girls illustrated their performances of constrained or empowered physicalities, within a physical culture that values, among girls, racialised performances of active but
feminised bodies. Many girls placed their physical activity significantly in school, and saw sporting bodies as male and elite. Where students do not associate people like themselves as sporting bodies, there may be implications for their continued involvement in physical activity. At the same time, girls were physically activity
outside of school despite not seeing themselves as sporty. Reflecting on the invisibility of minority ethnic women in sports media, this research suggests that greater representation may enable young minority women to see themselves and people like them as valued bodies in sport and physical activity.
Dr Joanne Hill 