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

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.Ph.D