Many contemporary international school Physical Education (PE) curricula are underpinned by inclusive intentions that seek to provide personalised and meaningful psychomotor, cognitive and affective learning experiences (and gains) for students. Central here are beliefs that PE has a key role to play in students’ affective development (Kirk 2018) during formal/informal opportunities to develop interpersonal and social skills in team, sport-related activities and through a sense of personal achievement in physical pursuits and successes.  Such activities are often espoused as promoting social connectedness, belonging and wellbeing for their ‘team-building’ capacities. As such, educative practices that promote wellbeing and belonging in contemporary times, otherwise referred to as an era of ‘precarity’ in UK, Europe and beyond (Standing, 2016) where lifestyles and futures for young people are viewed as ‘uncertain, unstable, risky and hazardous’ (Kirk, 2018, p. 16), become important vehicles in realising more equitable, inclusive experiences and promising futures for students.

Despite recent calls for ‘physical educators to develop ‘pedagogies of affect’ (Kirk, 2018, p. 25) that promote wellbeing, connectedness and inclusion, research continues to establish PE as a site of heteronormative and masculinising practices that potentially “damage” participants (Atkinson & Kehler, 2010; Gerdin, 2018). Notwithstanding Jackson’s (1996) assertion over two decades ago that theorising about gender, sexuality and subjectivities has become more sophisticated, we still lack theoretical tools and nuanced accounts that provide answers to the fundamental question, “How did I/it get this way?”. This we argue holds the key to conceptualising experiences in PE, and schooling more broadly, beyond a heteronormative paradigm and has potential to reveal spaces and practices that can promote more agentic and desirable expressions of masculinity, important for youth wellbeing in precarious times. As such the key questions guiding this paper were: (i) In what ways do pedagogic practices in PE influence masculinities, wellbeing and belonging? and (ii) How might theorising the practices that boys’ construct as ‘pleasurable’ in PE shape identity, wellbeing and belonging? 

This paper draws on data from two ethnographic studies on boys, schooling and PE in New Zealand and Australia. The PE curricula in both these countries emphasize students’ interrogations of discourses and power relations that shape student subjectivities/identities. The New Zealand PE curriculum states that students will, “analyse the beliefs, attitudes, and practices that reinforce stereotypes and role expectations, identifying ways in which these shape people’s choices at individual, group, and societal levels” (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 17). In Australia, the Victorian PE curriculum requires students to “evaluate factors that shape identities and analyse how individuals impact the identities of others” (Victorian Curriculum & Assessment Authority, 2016, p. 73). In this paper, we employ a pleasure lens to interrogate the particular “games of truth” (Foucault, 1988) that boys negotiate in their experiences of PE, sport and broader school cultures. As Foucault (1997) argues, by playing a particular game of truth, that is, engaging with the socio-historical discourses and power relations that perpetuate some ways of being, “by showing its consequences, by pointing out that there are other reasonable options, by teaching people what they don’t know about their own situation, working conditions…” (pp. 295-296), we consider the role pleasure plays in preserving dominant embodied masculinities and power relations.

We argue that pleasure is the glue that (re)produces heteronormative schooling cultures and existing (unequal) power relations between different identities/subjectivities, wellbeing and belonging. We suggest interrogations of the interrelationship/s between masculinity, sexuality and sport through a pleasure lens, a (re)theorising of inclusive practice in boys’ PE offers new theoretical perspectives to explore normalised cultural practices and offer potential to make visible spaces in which these can be productively disrupted.

In this paper, we draw on data generated through (visual) ethnographies conducted in two all-boys’ schools in New Zealand and Australia to inform our discussion of the ways in which performances of gender and sexuality are interwoven with pleasure(s). Building on European contributions that draw on visual methodologies to interrogate identities and practice in education (Allan & Tinkler, 2015) and after obtaining ethics approvals, across both school sites at Kea College (New Zealand) and St. John’s College (Australia), 132 boys’ PE classes were observed, video-recorded and analyzed, with selected clips drawn on in subsequent focus groups with students (four to six students in each) or individual interviews with teachers and students involved with the lesson in focus. Collectively, across the two data-sets, 84 individuals (80 students and four teachers) participated and of those, 68 participants agreed to take part in the interviews. The ethnographic work commenced with both researchers observing the teacher’s PE classes (recorded in field notes) and the purpose of these observations was for the researchers to familiarize themselves with the context and participants. The focus groups and individual interviews attended to select themes and issues identified as a salient part of the observations and video recordings of the PE lessons. An interview guide containing open-ended prompts based on themes identified during observations and video recordings was used. Although the interviews did not progress in a linear fashion, they were typically initiated by asking the boys or teacher to talk about something that had been observed during class or recorded in the video clips. Once a topic had been introduced, the interviews then attempted to discuss/negotiate the boys’ and teacher’s views (in separate interview contexts), perceptions and experiences of these particular situations. Data was analysed using Foucault’s (1980, 1985) theoretical conceptualization of discourse/power/pleasure to understand students as gendered/sexualized subjects and to interrogate the discourse-power relations that perpetuate these subjectivities. Differing discourses produce variable forms of knowledge or truths about boys and their subjectivities. We followed Foucault’s assertion that our aim as researchers was not to discover truth/s, but to understand how discursive practices/formations bring forth various truths in particular ways. In this manner, we explored how the games of truth (Foucault, 1988) associated with boys, gender/sexuality and pleasures in boys’ schooling and PE are played out.

Our findings and analysis demonstrate how boys in these school settings are immersed in a power/discourse nexus (Markula & Pringle, 2006) which simultaneously enables/restricts performances of gender, sexuality and pleasures. In this sense, boys can be seen as both privileged and marginalised by certain pedagogical practices, belonging is thus not something you obtain and keep but rather something that is dynamic, changeable and happenstance, and that even in one lesson boys can experience moments of belonging and non-belonging. The games of truth (Foucault, 1988) in boys’ schooling highlights how pleasures derived from discursive practices/formations operating within these school cultures can be seen as linked to performing/conforming to dominant notions of being a boy at these schools. In an era or risk and precarity, we argue that re-theorising the intersections between boys, masculinity, wellbeing and belonging can more productively be thought about through a pleasure lens (Allen & Carmody, 2012). We contend boys enter these games of truth for the pleasures they derive from the activities and practices delivered through PE, and as such we argue a key implication is that teachers need to adopt ‘affective pedagogies’, where there is an explicit focus on teaching about emotions, interactions, feelings of belonging and wellbeing. This should, in particular, focus on how the ongoing normalization of privileged and marginalized bodies and identities in PE and the broader physical culture reproduces inequalities in terms of physical activity and health outcomes in precarious times. It is often the taken-for-granted practices of everyday PE, left unchallenged and uncritically adopted, that present the most significant barriers to achieving more inclusive pedagogies – this we argue, is a key imperative for teacher education and professional learning programs.

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