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- 1. ‘Fatkid Dodgeball’ From the PE Hall of Shame to the National Dodgeball League Heather Sykes Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Western Society for Physical Education of College Women November 2007
- 2. What is fat phobia in physical education?
- 3. How have we, as physical educators, understood problems associated with the game of Dodgeball?
- 4. How can we make sense of the reappearance of Dodgeball in popular culture?
- 5. Can understanding Dodgeball help reduce fat phobia in physical education?
- 6. Methodology • Heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, body-based discrimination in PE • 39 participants • 15 self-identified as fat/overweight • 5 interviewers
- 7. Participants self-identified as: Gender/Sex Male Female Intersex Butch Biofemme Gender queer Body Size Fat Overweight Heavy Racial/Ethnic White White European Canadian WASP White Jewish Jewish Sexuality Queer Lesbian Gay Bi Straight
- 8. Fat Theories • Corporeal feminism (Diprose, 1994, 2002; Gatens, 1996; Grosz, 1994, 1995; Weiss, 1999) • Queer theory (LeBesco, 2001; Kent, 2001; Moon & Sedgwick, 2001) • Psychoanalytic theory (Anzieu, 1989; Kristeva, 1982) • Feminist fat theory (Braziel& LeBesco, 2001;Colls, 2006; Norman, 1983; Longhurst, 2005; Lyons 1989, Freespirit & Alderbaran; 1983)
- 9. What is fat phobia in physical education?
- 10. Fat Phobia in Physical Education Hostile educational climate makes it extremely difficult to feel Fat & Athletic & Healthy
- 11. Fat Phobia • fat itself is not unhealthy, fat phobia is (Norman, 1983; Hubbard, 1983; Lyons, 1989; Freespirit & Alderban, 1983; Mayer, 1983) • maintains discursive & psychic boundary fat/not fat • underlying cultural anxieties • miscegenation (Gilman, 2006) • female reproduction (Kristeva, 1982) • pollution (Douglas, 1970) • Western mind/body dualism • Mind overdetermined as whiteness, rationality, patriarchy • Fatness hyper-represents the Body • Fatness conflated with woman, failed men, racialized bodies (Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998; Mosher, 2001; Shaw, 2005)
- 12. Alienation, Dread & Disembodiment • Alienation • Trauma at home, trauma in PE about weight loss (Temperance) • Dread • Dreading gym class, hating physical activity (Starburst) • Disembodiment • survival mechanism for teasing, dieting & PE lessons (Elizabeth) visibility motor control moral control
- 13. Disciplining Fat through Measurement • Publicly weighed in PE lessons 1950s (Starburst) • Skin fold measurements in Kinesiology undergraduate classes 1990s (Karyn) Measurement retains, as it seeks to remove, fatness (Kristeva, 1982)
- 14. Constructions of Sexuality/Gender in Fat Phobia Sporty boys vs. fat lazy girls (Sarah) • Fatness conflated with femininity & laziness A certain amount of baggage (Johnathon) • Men can ‘have’ fat without ‘being’ fat Fascist standards of Church Street (Moe) • Fatness decreases sexually desirability in gay male culture Men can take up more space (Karen, Sammy-Jo) • Butches & masculine women ‘have’ fat in queer women’s communities It was hard to negotiate my space (Scout) • Rigid standards of female beauty in gymnastics • Lack of knowledge and role models for intersex student
- 15. How have we, as physical educators, understood problems associated with the game of Dodgeball?
- 16. PE Hall of Shame ･ Absence of objectives ･ Potential to embarrass ･ Eliminating students ･ Lack of teaching about skills ･ Low participation time ･ Luck, aggressiveness, competitiveness ･ Danger, injury, and harm
- 17. PE Hall of Shame Fear Intimidation Humiliation Nausea Abject failure Angst Neurosis All that -- and showers, too! (McCallum, Sports Illustrated, 2000)
- 18. Seeing and Being Seen Becoming someone (a subject) by seeing and recognizing one’s body as separate requires visual and aggressive idealization of bodies
- 19. Body in Bits and Pieces • Disconnected limbs • Organs inside/out • Growing wings
- 20. Body in Bits and Pieces
- 21. Fortified Body • Sense of coherent, bodily wholeness • Structure of the stadium • Armor of alienating identity
- 22. Idealized bodies • When a subject’s image coincides with the idealized image … “joy” • Physical education develops culturally ideal bodies
- 23. De-ldealized Bodies Fat body is rarely the ideal in Western physical education Fat students are deprived of self- recognition …and “joy”
- 24. Illusion of An Ideal Body Idealized body is, for any body, impossible to fully achieve
- 25. Agressivity & Rivalry Rivalry between what we know and what we have repressed Difficulty in approaching the ideal I generates an “aggressive pull” towards idealization
- 26. “This is awful” “What’s the next unit in gym? What can I anticipate happening? Is it going to be horrible? Please don’t make us run laps today. Please don’t get lazy and simply have dodgeball.” Dodgeball was like all the time. All my classmates would yell “hurray”. They were so excited to go and do gym. And I thought, “this is awful.” (Temperance)
- 27. Awful! Horrible! … Fun! Excitement! • Complicated fun • Sadistic fun • Jouissance
- 28. Jouissance • Bliss, merging, arrival, coming, orgasmic • Pleasure mixed with pain • Coming closer to death, self-shattering • Approaching the limits of our selves, in a confrontation with our own lack or otherness Homme addiction par Chambre 419 Maury Perseval
- 29. How can we make sense of the reappearance of Dodgeball in popular culture?
- 30. Pleasures in the Hall of Shame National Dodgeball League X-treme Dodgeball
- 31. The Movie: Dodgeball: The True Underdog Story The Band: Fatkid Dodgeball
- 33. Ball of Shame Sheer joy of dodgeball in the park… Violence Humiliation Exclusion Degradation
- 34. Can understanding Dodgeball help reduce fat phobia in physical education?
- 35. Participants’ Suggestions for Educational Change • Change unlikely - ineffective left-wing, privitization, educational budget cuts • Eliminate physical education as a subject • Aware of harm caused by initiatives to reduce obesity • Critique official views about fatness • Teach against fat bias in PE • Fat activists into schools
- 36. Ethics of Vision • Active Gift of Love (Lacan) • Learning to idealize one’s previously deidealized corporeal images (Bal)
- 37. Ethics of Vision • Learning to idealize one’s previously de- idealized corporeal images in physical education • Learning from fat bodies in fat-positive spaces
- 38. Interview Topics • Memories of physical education • Confidence in physical abilities • Feelings about their body • Impact of PE teacher • Adult movement culture • Insights for educators, professionals
- 39. Theoretical Framework • Embodied subjectivity • Social • Corporeal • Psychic • Fat subjectivity constructed within normalizing discourses • Heteronormative sex-gender binary (Benhabib, 1992; Prosser, 1998) • Racialization, white normativity (Ahmed, 2004; Shaw, 2003) • Thinness, able-bodiness (Bordo, 1993; Herndon,2002; McRuer, 2004)
- 40. Poststructural Fat Subjectivities • Fat identities are fluid rather than fixed • Fat subject positions are historically and spatially specific
- 41. Fat Motion in Games • Strong fat • Fast fat
- 42. Fat Motion in Dance • Waddling • Flowing • Free flowing • Over flowing
- 43. Fat Motion in Fitness Gyms • Curves • Fitness • Fatness
- 44. Theme #5 Fat-Positive Movement Spaces [My instructor] was very flab fat. She’s sweating and shaking all over the place (Sarah) Grey space between being allowed to be fat (Temperance) Curves was like a f**** party to me. Lots of fat women worked out there and remained fat. (Temperance)
- 45. Theme #3 Constructions of Sexuality/Gender in Fat Phobia Sporty boys vs. fat lazy girls (Sarah) • Fatness conflated with femininity & laziness A certain amount of baggage (Johnathon) • Men can ‘have’ fat without ‘being’ fat Fascist standards of Church Street (Moe) • Fatness decreases sexually desirability in gay male culture Men can take up more space (Karen, Sammy-Jo) • Butches & masculine women ‘have’ fat in queer women’s communities It was hard to negotiate my space (Scout) • Rigid standards of female beauty in gymnastics • Lack of knowledge and role models for intersex student
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for inviting me to talk. I’m very excited to be here. Thanks to Rita and the program committee for inviting me. Especially, I want to thank Terry Coblentz for being really great, driving me down here… I was thrilled to learn that the theme for the conference was “Weighing in on the Body” What a great title, but more importantly, this is just such an important issue right now as the discourses about a global obesity epidemic are spinning out of control, and millions of dollars being funneled through health initiatives around the world and physical education both in the US and Canada to cure this supposed health crisis. It is so urgent that we, as physical educators, talk about what is actually going on and figure out how to intervene in the fear mongering and moral panic about fatness that is all around us right now. I only started to think seriously about the lived realities and politics of fatness over the last 6 or so years, really because of some wonderful graduate students I’ve had the privilege to work with at OISE, my education department at the University of Toronto. So, the title of my talk is ‘Fatkid Dodgeball’From the PE Hall of Shameto theNational Dodgeball League.
- In this presentation I will share my thoughts about four questions. What is fat phobia in physical education?
- Secondly, How have we, as physical educators, understood problems associated with the game of Dodgeball?
- Third, How can we make sense of the reappearance of Dodgeball in popular culture? How many people have seen the Dodgeball movie? Hands up! Don’t be shy! Yeah, well, we’re going to go there!
- And then finally, I’m going to ask us to consider whether understanding the phenomenon of Dodgeball in new ways might help us reduce the effects of fat phobia on our students, and ourselves, in physical education.
- Most of my ideas have come out my current research project which examines heterosexism, transphobia, ableism and body-based discrimination in Canadian physical education. Alongwith an amazing team of graduate research assistants, I’ve interviewed 39 people for the project. Participants in the project were required to self-identify with one or more of the following marginalized social groups: sexual or gender minority; having a physical disability; having an undervalued body size/shape. The narratives and examples I will share are all based on interviews with 15 people in the project who self-identified as “fat” or “overweight”. Oh, I should also mention that we interviewed adults, not actual students, which allowed us to learn from participants’ retrospective sense-making about their experiences at school.
- The participants who identified as ‘fat’ or ‘overweight’ had diverse gender/sex identities - female, male, butch, intersex, biofemme and gender-queer. They described their sexual identities as straight, gay male, bi, lesbian, queer. Although the 39 participants in the larger project were racially and ethnically diverse, the 15 people who self-identified as fat or overweight identified primarily as white and/or Jewish. The examples can therefore only give a limited analysis of racialized experiences with fat phobia -- and I hope our discussions and the workshop tomorrow can help us to think about this more.
- Just quickly, for those who like to know what ideas lie beneath the surface, Theoretically, I draw upon the work of -corporeal feminists such as Rosalyn Diprose, Moira Gatnes, Liz Grosz and Gail Weiss -queer theorists who have engaged with fat politics such as Eve Sedgwick, Micheal Moon, Le’a Kent and Kathleen LeBesco. -Psychoanalytic theories of embodiment by Didier Anzieu and Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection. The analysis is particularly informed by Deborah’s insight into second and third wave feminist fat theory.
- Fat phobia, excessive fear and dislike of fat in oneself and in others, is a relatively new phenomenon, born during the 20th century (Lilka Areton, 2002). Here are a few simple facts and myths: Fact: 90 percent of all women overestimate their body size. Fact: By the age of 13, sixty percent of all North American girls have dieted. Fact: Female children as young as five expressed fears of getting fat. Myth: Diets work. 95-98% of people who diet gain back all or more of the weight they lost. Myth: Being overweight causes heart disease. Studies show that average to 30% above average body weights, have lower disease and mortality rates than those 20% under weight. Myth: Fat people eat more than thin people. People's body weights are not directly related to the amount of food intake. We all have "natural" body fat which our bodies attempt to maintain. Body fat determination is related to our genetics and early childhood nutrition. (Mullin, 2007) (Gretchen Mullin, University of Western Ontatio Health Watch, http://www.shs.uwo.ca/publications/mindbody/fphobia.htm) Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 5, Jan. 15, 2002www.ejhs.org FACTORS IN THE SEXUAL SATISFACTION OF OBESE WOMEN IN RELATIONSHIPSLilka Woodward Areton
- In my research I’m trying to find out how this fat phobia both constitutes, and is continually negotiated by, “fat” and “overweight” students during their physical education experiences. Generally speaking, fat people’s memories of physical education at school illustrate how fat phobia create extremely difficult situations that demand constant psychic/emotional work, provide pitiful opportunities for learning and numerous alienating, traumatic movement experiences. Thus, just as Susan Bordo (1993) argued that being fat in contemporary culture is an unbearable weight for women, we suggest that being fat makes physical education an unbearable lesson for many students. But within this hostile educational climate, our interviews reveal how students did, in fact, form fluid rather than fixed identifications as “fat”, “athletic” and “healthy”.
- Fat phobia is all about trying to maintain a precarious boundary between being fat and not being fat. In the cultural imagination, fears about be/coming fat arise from underlying anxieties about female reproduction, miscegenation and pollution of bodily boundaries (Bordo, 1993; Gilman, 2006; Kristeva 1982). Fat phobia underpinning the “obesity epidemic” involves the abjection of supposedly “unhealthy”, “unathletic” and “unskilled” bodies from the imagined spaces of physical education and health education. I’ll talk a little bit more about this idea of abjection - since I think it is part of what is going on during dodgeball. Evans et al (2003) describe the contemporary biomedical discourse of the obesity epidemic as a “cultural toxin. Thus, healthy living comes to require the elimination of fatness from the psychic, social and national body. Symbolically speaking, fat people are excessively body, all body. Now, one way of understanding how we have come to think about fatness in such negative terms is to look at broader ideas about the relationship between the mind and body, good and bad, male and female. Within the Western Cartesian logic of mind/body dualism, women are defined as “the body,” and their reproductive capabilities are cited as the reason (Malson, 1998). Many feminists argue, fat is pathologized because fat is symbolically conflated with “woman”. So, as Carla Rice (2006) argues, the “war on fat” is a “war on women”. Moreover, these representations are racialized in ways that shore up unnamed, yet idealized, whiteness. Not only does Cartesian dualism overdetermine women as “the body”, but also people of colour and racialized people (Bordo, 1993). This conflation is due to racist and long-held understandings of people of colour and racialized people as closer to nature and animalistic (Hill Collins, 1997). In Cartesian logic, then, not only is fat feminine, but it is also racialized. For example, Shaw (2005) traces how iconic representations of the black female body in the United States overwhelmingly define the standards against which white femininity is constructed. Fatness and blackness, she argues “display an uncanny coincidence of boundaries” (Shaw, 2005: 152) such that the black female fat body signals a concentration of asexualized, maternal plenitude.
- Fat phobia makes physical education extremely difficult for many students. Many people we interviewed highlighted the continuous psychic work required to inhabit fatness as an “emotional size” (Colls, 2002: 219) in physical education. Most women, and some men, that we interviewed reported how their experiences fatness in physical education produced feelings of alienation, dread, and, at times, disembodiment. Temperance said: My experience of phys ed and school went hand-in-hand with trauma I had at home around weight loss, and trauma I had at school around fat phobia. It was all part of one package and alienated me from my body. When Deborah, one of the researchers very involved in fat activism asked Startbust What she tought she’s learned from physical education? Starburst replied: How to avoid it. [Both laughing]. I think that I learned that I didn’t like anything that had to do with moving... It harkens back to how much I dreaded gym class, how I came to hate all of that. Elizabeth recounted: I feel like walking through the gym doors every single time was an exercise in disembodiment. Disembodiment would be the norm for me…because your body’s on display and, so, I go somewhere else when that happens. Within what Hillel Scwartz calls the “lean meritocracy” (p. 331) of physical education, fat bodies are almost always regarded as not skilled, fit or fast because, in visual terms, fatness is a representation of non-control. In the current historical moment, as Brian Pronger (2002) explains, this is because fatness incites anxieties about the potential loss of motor and moral control, and threatens the boundaries upholding a sovereign self. Overall, people interviewed for this project testified how difficult it was to contest these negative discourses about fatness.
- Weighing and measuring students in physical education was one of the most explicit manifestations of fat phobia. Several people told extremely distressing narratives about being publicly weighed. Starburst recalled how devastating it felt for her to be publicly weighed when she attended school in northern Ontario during the late 1950s. Starburst: The most traumatic thing was that at the beginning of every year, they used to bring the scale in, and they would weigh everybody publicly….That was, like, public humiliation, Fifty years later Karyn, who identified as fat, straight and white European, experienced similar public humiliation when being measured with skin calipers in her undergraduate physical education program. Karyn: I thought I'd go into kinesiology. I started taking these classes and they were horrible. They were like, oh my God, I still have nightmares about them. We were doing all these fitness testing. Do you know those fat pinchers? Q: Calipers? Karyn: Yeah. Oh my God! In front of the class, get up and let's see how much fat is on your arm. I wanted to die! And all the super calculating we had to do. It was basically your body was the test subject, the test area. Endless refinement of weighing and measuring techniques, justified through supposedly non-ideological, bio-medical discourses of body composition and the body-mass index, strives to banish from fatness from the “child”. Yet these same disciplinary techniques also work to retain fatness through the ongoing the biomedical investment in calculation, prevention and measurement. In the Foucaultian sense, physical educators’ attempts to eradicate or reduce obesity through weighing and weight reduction simultaneously work to incite and sustain an abject fascination with fatness. The experiences of our participants testify to the harmful and enduring effects these disciplinary techniques have on fat students’ subjectivities within physical education.
- Fat bodies may be slightly more accepted within queer women’s communities, especially when associated with butchness and female masculinity. Sammy-Jo, who identifies as a queer dyke, feels she has more latitude to be overweight as a queer woman than when she identified as a straight woman: “I feel there is more room as a queer woman to fit a little outside the norm with my body”. Similarly Karen, who described herself as queer with a “complicated” gender identity told us how “exploring more of my butchness, my stereotypical masculine traits have helped me become more comfortable with my size because guys are allowed to take up space, right? but women are not supposed to” However, the claim that female fatness is more easily constructed in conjunction with female masculinity or queerness in physical education settings needs to be cautiously examined in relation to the intense transphobia and homophobia of those contexts. Karen wasn’t able to openly embrace her masculinity while she at school. Scout, who has been “thin” and “overweight” at different periods in her life, described changes in her body size in multi-faceted relations to her racial identity as “poor white trash” Q: Would you say physical education has influenced how you feel about your body? Scout: Dramatically... Dramatically It shaped a perspective of what bodies should look like - what desirable bodies should look like. They should be white, and they should be blonde, and they should have blue eyes, and they should have tits out to here, and a heart shaped ass, and you know legs that go on for miles. It [physical education] was formative because it was the precursor to regiment and denial. So, yeah, it played a major role but in a disciplinary way. Her narrative only provides a very partial sense of how Scout articulated the complexity of changes in her body size, from “thin” when she was involved in gymnastics and then later becoming “fat” in relation to her sexed identity. Scout recalled “growing up without knowing she was an intersexed girl” and was deeply frustrated by the lack of knowledge or recognition about being intersexed “because there was no mirror for me. Both Scout and Karen talked about how their bodies occupied space in relation to their marginalized sex/gender identities. Being intersex was unintelligible within Scout’s school context who said “it was really hard to negotiate my space” as a student. Being butch at school was transgressive and risky for Karen who, by “exploring more of my butchness”, has become more comfortable taking up space with her size as an adult. But, even as the underlying associations between fatness and femininity construct more potential to be fat and butch rather than gay and fat, intersex and gender minority students such as Scout and Karen face particular challenges when negotiating their fat subjectivities at school.
- So now I’m going to return to how Sarah remembered dodgeball in her school, and how she talked about how the ‘sporty guys’ are going to pick off the ‘fat lazy girls. What is going on here, in educational terms? Obviously sexism is getting reproduced. And, perhaps, equally obviously fat students are getting labelled as being lazy. But why does this happen, why does it seem obvious? How has this type of stereotyping and discrimination been dealt with by physical educators -- who, let’s face it are an amazingly insightful and caring bunch of people who have been working against these harmful dynamics, often quietly and without recognition, since…well, since our profession started. But, as I put out some thoughts about how physical educators have tried to deal with educational problems in dodgeball, I’m also going to suggest some reasons why we haven’t quite understood everything that is going on in this little game, nor have we perhaps thought about fatness and dodgeball in as much detail as we might.
- How have we understood dodgeball as a problem in physical education Q&A: Shame Humiliation Embarrassment Physical harm Emotional harm As I’m sure many of you know Dodgeball was one of the first inductees into the Physical Education Hall of Shame in 1992, a move led by Neil Williams (1994). ･Absence of the purported objectives of the activity or game ･Potential to embarrass a student in front of the rest of the class ･Focus on eliminating students from participation ･Overemphasis on and concern about the students having "fun” ･Lack of emphasis on teaching motor skills and lifetime physical fitness skills ･Extremely low participation time factors ･Organizing into large groups where getting a "turn" is based on luck or individual aggressiveness or competitiveness ･Extremely high likelihood for danger, injury, and harm
- Accounts of dodgeball abound, and I’m sure we have a rich archive right here in Asilomar thisevening. Jack McCallum, writing in Sports Illustrated which is not known for it’s insightfull emotional depth, lists the following emotional learning outcomes associated with dodgeball: Fear Intimidation Humiliation Nausea Abject failure Angst Neurosis All that -- and showers, too! (McCallum, Sports Illustrated, 2000)
- Here I want to think about dodgeball in terms of what students are doing on emotional, psychic and physical levels. That is, how having fun, or for many, not having fun in dodgeball if actually a very central, almost unavoidable part, of becomging a person. To phrase it slightly differently, the aggressive processes that make dodgeball “fun” for some studnets are an integral part of forming a normal, able-bodied sense of oneself, or we could say, of forming a normal subjectivitiy in the physical education context. Visual images of bodies within physical education are always being looked at in physical education and this is an important part of becoming what Kaja Silverman calls “an idealized body”. Our pedagogies in physical education are permeated by the visual - demonstrations by both teachers and learners, observable bodily performance and assessment, public displays of motor skill or physical ability. Seeing and being seen in physical education is not merely a problem of personal dignity and privacy, but is also how students create a self-image, perhaps their body-image, by a constant visual and aggressive idealization of bodies. I’m suggesting this is a key process through which students as ‘subjects’ come to see and know themselves. Infants enter this world with a very fluid, non-differentiated and fragmented sense of their body. They can’t distinguish between inside and outside the womb, between the breast or bottle that feeds them and parts of their own bodies, about being touched and held by a parent, where their own body begins and ends. Somehow we all have to figure this out. We have to find a way to create a sense of ourselves as a separate being, an individual, that little person who is “me”.
- Jacques Lacan suggests that this infantile sense of having a “body in bits and pieces” reappears to us as adults in our dreams as “disconnected limbs”, “organs exoscopically represented” and “growing wings”. To illustrate this rather frightening idea of having a fragmented body image, Lacan refers to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
- Indeed, I recall a dream of my early childhood in which I held a smooth, grey femur bone. Each of my hands gently cupped the head and condyles of the smooth bone, always in the same diagonal position in front of my chest. The smoothness, position and length were similar and palpable in every dream.
- What the infant must do, and education tries to develop, is form a sense of coherent, bodily wholeness. In contrast to the notion of a body in bits and pieces, this is a sense of the body as a fortified, self-contained structure. Lacan actually uses the example of a stadium to illustrate what this feels like. He calls this a sense of “orthopedic” reality. Consider how we design and move in gymnasia - it is purposefully designed to develop the “armor of alienating identity” through motor control, health and fitness, hygiene and productive movement. The gymnasium is justified by, and at the same time fortifies, physical education’s aim of transforming disorganized, uncoordinated limbs and body parts into integrated, combined and productive movements, knowledge and skills. So, perhaps you will concede, for now at least, that these metaphors of fragmented body and fortified stadium capture the purpose and organization of physical education generally, and the fundamental dynamic that keeps us fascinated with dodgeball in particular.
- Silverman (1979) states that achieving one’s ideal image produces immense pleasure. She writes that immense jubilation arises when ‘we imaginarily coincide with the ideal imago which we usually worship languishingly from afar’ (p.39). This pleasure exceeds the satisfaction afforded by the even most intense ‘object-love’. Thus, if we consider the pedagogical demand to become physically educated is, at some level, always a demand to come closer to a personal, curricular, culturally ideal body then learning proceeds through the ‘narcissistic transport’ towards one’s body ideal. Consider the common technique of the ‘skill demonstration’ when the teacher, sometimes a proficient student, performs a skilled movement for the student to observe. This is an exemplary moment of spectacular teaching, when the eyes of the masses (students) are trained towards the exceptional few (skilled body). The visual demonstration provides an embodied ‘ideal’. “A demonstration by the teacher (or by a surrogate performer) has enormous impact on the observing learner. A demonstration has the following characteristics: It presents an image or model of the activity. This model establishes the performance standard for the learner. It is rapid (unless shown on video in slow motion) It can present the entire activity, parts of it, or any combination of the parts It saves time. A demonstration tells the whole story quickly, and the visual impact is very powerful” (Mosston & Ashworth, 1986: 165). In this crystallized yet emblematic teaching moment, the teacher’s body provides a model to be emulated. The model is more than a mere possibility, it is provided as an ideal. Such identifications provide opportunities for students to recognize themselves, to identify with something in the image of their teacher and thus sustain either a sense of themselves as learners or a social identity. These identifications seem to reinforce the process of role modeling in physical education. Indeed, when identifications support identity the process may appear similar to social constructionist explanations. However, if we think about this ‘best’ practice of the visual demonstration in physical education in psychoanalytic terms there is more going on than meets the eye. Each particular body generates a ‘constellation of meanings’ (ref), is intelligible only through always already cultural discourses that precede it (Butler), is codified through the pedagogical ‘gaze’ of the student body-mass and multiple articulations (Laclau?) or nodes with individual students’ psyches in their devouring role as spectators.
- However, the story changes when identifications are considered in relation to the socio-cultural context, the normalizing gaze and the unconscious. The gaze and socio-cultural power relations imbue, but do not fully determine, the identifications made available to subjects, and in this context, to students immersed in the visual field of physical education. FAT BODY AS ABJECT BODY Within physical education the ‘fat’ body does not approximate the idealized body. The abjection of the fat body is both overdetermined and intensified within this area of schooling. Fat identified people we interviewed spoke (frequently? consistently? uniformly?) about learning that their bodies were not ideal. My experience of phys ed and school went hand-in-hand with trauma I had at home around weight loss, and trauma I had at school around fat phobia. It was all part of one package and alienated me from my body. (Temperance pseudonym) I think that a survival mechanism for fat people around taunting and mocking and dieting, which I was always doing throughout grade school, is to separate yourself from your body to a degree because your body is never perceived as something that’s okay. So in order for you to even mildly get a sense that you’re okay you need to distance yourself from it in some degree. So in terms of disembodiment, I feel like waking through the gym doors every single time was an exercise in disembodiment. Disembodiment would be the norm for me…because your body’s on display and, so, I go somewhere else when that happens. (Elizabeth pseudonym)
- However, Gail Weiss (1999) reminds us that any subject faces serious challenges in the process of constructing a coherent body image” (p.89). The desire to fully become or attain an idealized bodily image is, ultimately, unattainable for any of us. “The ideal image is impossible to approach except in moments of mania or delusion. For the most part, the subject who yearns to approximate it experiences not repletion, but insufficiency, not wholeness, but discordance and disarray (Silverman, 1979: 39). This search for or journey towards an idealized body is, Silverman points out, is not a matter of merely assimilating or becoming in any straightforward, developmental way. Complications in the identificatory process stem from, on the one hand, a fundamental skepticism towards the unitary, coherent body in psychoanalysis and, on the other, necessary engagements with a fragile, porous and fragmented bodily ego. “The claustral binarism,” writes Silverman “which leads relentlessly from the We are constantly oscillating between our desire for unity and an unconscious anxiety about the fragmented body, -- our body being, once again, in bits and pieces. Here I think about the dreams I have about my teeth falling out one by one, then faster and faster. I can’t spit them out, and my mouth becomes filled with them. When do I have this dream…yes, you guessed, just before the start of a new semester, before meeting a new group of students. How do we cope with this? How do our students cope with this? WE are all engaged in trying to create a ‘normal’ body develops that gives us a sense of homeyness and completeness of the body - but, and here’s the kicker, this is unavoidably based on a dynamic act of repression.
- We are always involved in a rivalry between what we know and what we have repressed. This gets played out in our relations between the subject and others" (Homer, 2005: 26) and how we play our games with others. So I hope we now arrive at an argument is that, in physical education, the process of looking at, devouring and trying to become a normalized, idealized body is, in fact, a rather complex dance of rivalry. That is to say, the expected project of becoming normal, athletic or fit is, rather than being a mundane, reasonable educational project is, psychoanalysis reveals, a highly aggressive process.
- Let’s catch our breath for a while, and return back to someone else’s memories of dodgeball as a fat student: Temperance: There was a lot of psychic energy that was spent trying to be a step ahead of the teacher. Like, “OK, so they said that the volley ball unit was in the last three weeks, and now it’s week four. What’s the next unit in gym? What can I anticipate happening? Is it going to be horrible? Please don’t make us run laps today. Please don’t get lazy and simply have dodgeball.” Dodgeball was like all the time. If we had a supply teacher and they didn’t have anything prepped we always had to go to the gym and do dodgeball. All my classmates would yell “hurray” they were so excited to go and do gym. And I thought, “this is awful.” And my experience of gym affected my experience in the rest of the courses. I became hyper-skilled in English, Math, Social Studies, everything. My whole class dynamic, my whole role in the community was totally different in gym class. I was hyper-aware of every next step. So, the controlling was about trying to stay a step ahead of the game in order to be perceived as normal. Temperance knew only too well how her body would be visual interpreted and literally targeted by other students during dodgeball, that hers would be the body which other students used for target practice literally and psychically. As is so often the case, a student who is fat serves as an easy target in the dodgeball game, in the physical education class and in culture more broadly.
- One way of describing this, is that the body of a fat student becomes the target, one might say, the repository for other students attempts at self-formation. For other students’ projected anxieties about their own unstable positions with social hierarchies and sporting meritocracy of the class and school. And the target through which they can attempt to build this fortified sense of self, this athletic mastery and a physically educated body. Let me spend a little time unpacking this, as it is, I think, a rather crucial dynamic in what is being taught and learned through games. EMOTIONS of HORROR & EXCITEMENT Let’s think again about the emotions and affects that dodgeball produces. Temperance anticipated dodgeball with horror whereas her classmates anticipated dodgeball with great excitement and yells of “hurrah”. This language of horror and excitement indicate the emotional and psychic intensity felt by students in relation to dodgeball. It also points to a complicated form of fun. For quite a while in my teacher education classes I would urge and plead with my students not to evaluate their teaching by wondering if the students were having “fun” during a lesson. I’d stress over and over that “fun” is, of course, nice but it is not enough; fun may even be necessary for students to learn but it is never sufficient. There has to be more going on in a PE lesson than just fun! But more recently I’ve come across ways of thinking about fun that are more complex and, I think, bring us closer to articulating what we have probably known in one way or another for a long time. So, bear with me, as I map out a rather complicated way of thinking about “fun”. SADISTIC FUN We can start by thinking about fun as having an element of sadistic pleasure. Finly de Monchy (1995) described childhood games is “domesticated sadism” where the rules and fair play intervene before the other is completely annihilated. What is easily recognized as horrific (we might think of children’s cruelty and capacity for bullying) is disguised and tempered within the framing as a game. However, the cruelty and sadism that gives pleasure in games is not far beneath the surface as “the correct sadist turns back before annihilating the partner in the game, and this moment of turning back is the moment of ‘jouissance’” (Finlay de Monchy, 1995:28).
- JOUISSANCE Such feelings of horror and excitement point toward the ‘jouissance’ offered by dodgeball. This jouissance is a complicated form of pleasure which some students anticipated with excitement. Jouissance is a French word which can mean, according to literary theorist Robert Clarke (2004): Extreme or deep pleasure Sexual orgasm Having the right to use something. However, Jacques Lacan has a more emotional, or psychic, description in which jouissance is a feeling of bliss, arrival or merging with another. Here we might think of playing in the zone, or experiencing flow in movement. But Lacan points out how this depth of fun is not merely pleasurable but happens at the very limits of pleasure, at the point of discomfort and pain. And here we might think of the blissful pain of running a marathon, of being tackling and being tackled so hard in rugby, of taking that pain while being in a place of pleasure. Freud described this experience of going beyond pleasure as coming closer to death. Lacan, however, describes this mixing of pleasure with pain as an attempt to abolish, avoid, deny, escape an underlying, inescapable, beyond any words or meanings human condition of lack. (Clarke, 2004). The lack is, in one sense, the rather awful prospect of feeling your body is, once again, just bits and pieces. For students, such as Temperance, the threat of annihilation was quite literal and all too predictable. Temperance developed extremely sophisticated responses to the immanent threat posed by physical education, explaining how she became “hyper-aware” and “controlling” in order to protect herself from the predictable humiliation and damage caused by fat phobia. Clarke, R. U of East Anglia. “Jouissance.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 1 Jan 2004. The library dictionary company. 7 November 2007. http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=602
- Let’s return then to thisfamiliar mise en scène– the game of dodgeball. Despite being one of the first inductees into the Physical Education Hall of Shame in 1992 or, indeed, because of this, dodgeball is recreating its iconic status in popular culture. There is a professional NDL National Dodgeball League (four teams with one being the aptly named Wisconsin Icons), recreational X-treme Dodgeball leagues, a dodgeball TV show and, ironically, now a Dodgeball Hall of Fame.
- Twentieth Century Fox recently released ‘Dodgeball: A TRUE underdog Story’ and ‘Fatkid Dodgeball’ are the official band of the National Dodgeball League. These are fascinating irruptions in popular culture of precisely that which produced shame within, and therefore needed to be expunged from, physical education.At the symbolic level, these are fascinating displacments. But there is also something fascinating happening within the imaginary register. In his seminar on The Imaginary Dissolution, Lacan talks about the pleasures of collision, destruction, engagement, tracking, targeting or dodging an other as “something fundamental to the human being” (p.96) which, if not mediated in some way, threatens to reduces all bodies to pulp. Here he is illustrating what might happen if subjects related to one another merely at the imaginary level. Without the intervention of the symbolic i.e. culture, language, codes and rules: Think of these little automobiles that you see at fairs going round at full tilt out in an open space, where the principal amusement is to bump into the others. If these dodg’em cars give so much pleasure, it is because bumping into one another must be something fundamental in the human being. What would happen if a certain number of little machines like those I describe were put onto the track? Each one being unified and regulated by the sight of another, it is not mathematically impossible to imagine that we would end up with all the little machines accumulated in the center of the track, blocked in a conglomeration the size of which would only be limited by the external resistance on the panelwork. A collision, everything smashed to a pulp. (Lacan, 1981/1997: 96). It is the ludic licence to hurl an object at an Other that gives dodgeball its nefarious thrill. Modern incarnations of Dodgeball within popular culture represent, in part and within the visual economy of bodies, aggressive attempts to achieve an idealized body. Identifying with the ‘underdog’ is a partial acknowledgment of this difficulty yet it coexist with simultaneously projecting other more abject aspects such as femininity, disability and fatness. Lacan used dodg’em cars to point out implications arising from the imaginary register of human subjectivity, inaugurated at the mirror stage. “The aggressive tensions,” he claims “of this either me or the other is entirely integrated into every kind of imaginary functioning in man” (p. 95) such that, without some sort of regulation, the imaginary relations between dodg’em car drivers, dodgeball players, students in physical education and subjects within the social could collide, merge, pile up into an undifferentiated mass of bodies or fall apart into the body “in bits and pieces”. Something is needed to maintain “the gap in the imaginary relation” (p. 96) between the subject and an other. For Lacan, this is the symbolic order of language and narrative, specifically the Name of the Father whose laws control one’s desire and rules of communication. Dino Felluga (2003:2) put it simply: “once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others”. While the symbolic is not the focus of this paper, it is probably the most accessible and familiar of Lacan’s three registers. However, the imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult (Felluga, 2003) which is why I want to consider some intractable difficulties facing students which, at first glance, give the impression of merely being problems of looking at bodies and having one’s body looked at in physical education.
- The teams lurch across the grass to grab the familiar balls waiting in the center and let them fly."It stings!" bawls a member in mock anguish."You're out!" shouts an opponent.Two players dash from their home court to the back line of the opposing team."Watch your back!" shouts Morgan Frank, who has admitted to pants-ing a fellow student on the dodgeball court once upon a time. (The opposing team, of course, took advantage of the entanglement, striking said student with a ball at full force.) Twenty-two-year-old Logan Gilbert, a powerful player with a lower-back tattoo and a spiked leather belt, catches an opponent's ball with a resounding thwack and holds on."You're out!" shouts Speer to the thrower.While there are countless variations of dodgeball, the SFBS concentrates on three basic games: Prison Rules, in which a circle of throwers surrounds a group of dodgers; Fortress or Four Square, in which every person hit joins the team that hit him; and Trench Ball or Roman, the most common game, in which the court has two sides and two back lines. In all, a caught ball eliminates the thrower; and one ball may be used as a deflection of another ball, as might the skull, since a hit on the head is considered a miss except in the case of a dive. According to the International Dodge Ball Federation rule book, the head-to-ball immunity does not apply if a player is diving to catch an opponent's ball."You've got to love a game that considers head shots fair play but still uses 'bouncies,' 'dropsies,' and 'returnies' as official jargon," observes 34-year-old Justin Drenttel, who has stopped by the field to find out when the next game will be held.We watch as Paul Madrinan does the splits in midair and catches a ball, only to be hit by another as he lands. A short time later, Kevin Lewis catches a ball in one hand while wielding another ball in the other hand, eliciting the nickname "Spartacus" from a fellow teammate. In one round, Madrinan finds himself the last man standing in a court before he is bombarded with three balls in rapid order. Early on, Shashi Kara, aka Sixo, is hit in the head, and, as his sunglasses go flying into the warm yellow afternoon, I notice Andrew Flurry's face, which shows a mixture of horror and surreptitious delight at having beaned someone. Players are swapped, laughter shared. The games come fast and furious between beer breaks, too fast for anyone to really care about skill levels. Feats of physical prowess and ineptitude blend in the summer sun. Laughter and alcohol run together, as do the rules."None of my cheers will work for this game," pouts Wesley Kingsbury, a one-time cheerleader who looks more comfortable these days behind a cigarette than a pom-pom. Her prayers are answered with the arrival of Roky Roulette, who decides to strip off another article of clothing every time he finishes playing a game.Whether in spite of childhood trauma, which included being strung up by his underpants to the cold-water faucet of a shower when he was 9, or because of it, Roulette is a dodgeball star, successfully catching and evading balls while holding his blond wig in place.Wearing nothing but tennis shoes and a pink G-string studded with rhinestones."R-O-K-Y!" shouts Kingsbury while Roulette's wife, Margot Montmartre, and daughter, Liberty, also cheer from the sidelines.Roulette's opponents express a suitable amount of dodgeball-fueled fury, pummeling him with balls, but there are no injuries, even of feelings, and by the end of the day, the SFBS cheerleading squad has gained a member, and so has the team."Man, that was fun!" says Flurry with an unfamiliar glint in his eye.
- Ball of ShameThe violence, humiliation, exclusion, degradation, and sheer joy of dodgeball in the parkBy Silke TudorﾊPublished: June 30, 2004"It was called 'war ball' at my school," explains Andrew Flurry as we tool toward Golden Gate Park for the opening game of the San Francisco Bombardment Society. The flicker of long-buried, unwanted memory darkens his big blue eyes.･･James Sanders･The San Francisco Bombardment Society in action.･･James Sanders･Roky Roulette is a dodgeball star.･"We played on rainy days, when the whole school was stuck indoors. Seven classes all crammed together in one room. They brought out all the yellow balls -- it seemed like there were hundreds of them. Yellow balls are harder than red balls ...."Flurry trails off, taking a long, deep breath, as if to steel himself for what comes next."At first, the hooligans would completely ignore the little kids, until all the big guys in school were on the same side. Then they would choose one kid and they would all aim for him. ... It was absolutely terrifying."To see Flurry now -- tall, broad shoulders, square jaw, solid forearms, easy laugh -- it's difficult to imagine him as a scrawny little kid, cowering on the dodgeball court, but I remember his youth, engulfed by a voluminous leather jacket, topped by half a head of spiked baby down. He was skinny enough to get blown over by a sneeze. Is it any wonder then, in an urban landscape devoid of natural predators like hyenas and lions, that dodgeball left an impression on his still-developing cerebral cortex? No sir, not when a well-directed sphere of schoolyard misanthropy could have snapped his head off, or mine, for that matter. Which might be as good a reason as any to support the seemingly barbaric pastime of using a child's body as a moving target. Certainly, it's better to develop a preternatural fear of a fast-moving rubber ball than of, say, intimacy, failure, or solitude. But as we all know, dodgeball isn't limited to the glee of physical brutality. As "pro dodgeballer" Patches O'Houlihan explains in the latest misfit comedy, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, it is a sport of violence, humiliation, exclusion, and degradation."The statement is blatantly misleading. Dodgeball is so much more than that," says Sean Speer, founder and president of the SFBS. "Dodgeball is also about one-upmanship, domination, punishment, belittlement, coercion, schadenfreude, and the inherent beauty in a well-aimed crotch shot."Initially created just to make a fantastic T-shirt logo (which depicts the silhouette of a head getting hit hard enough by a dodgeball to cause globs of spit to fly from its slack mouth), the SFBS now meets in Bunny Meadow, just east of the Conservatory of Flowers, on most Sundays of the summer. And what started as a tightknit group of friends has grown to include any player with a like-minded approach to the sport."They're the most excellent group of human beings ever assembled," says Speer seriously. "They're the reason for the season."When the SFBS was formed two years ago, dodgeball was getting a bad rap. There was, in fact, a national movement to eliminate dodgeball from the physical education curriculum; it was spearheaded by Neil Williams, chairman of the health and physical education department at Eastern Connecticut State University and creator of the Physical Education Hall of Shame. "Dodgeball is one of those games that encourages aggression and the strong picking on the weak," said Williams during an interview with Education Week. Despite his position in the debate, which was waged in journals and newspapers from Maryland to California, even Williams publicly admitted a soft spot for the game."I have to say I enjoyed it," said Williams. "I was a skinny little runt of a guy, but I was incredibly sneaky and nasty in the game.""Oh, it's a love/hate relationship," admits 33-year-old Pilar DeGama, who wears a number seven on the back of her SFBS shirt corresponding to nothing much at all. "It's fun, but it's kind of like therapy, a chance to get over all that old dodgeball trauma, to reclaim the game. I still can't throw for shit, but I'm more coordinated and less attached to my ego. And I'm not picked last for every single team anymore."I watch as two team captains stand opposite a motley gaggle of dodgeball enthusiasts. One by one, names are called as grateful players happily bound over to their respective sides, until only an unfamiliar newcomer remains."Damn it!" says Flurry, good-naturedly kicking the sod. "Picked last again!"A few of the dodgeballers laugh in support, but there is painful recognition in their titters. It's only funny because it's true."Game on!" shouts 26-year-old Kevin Lewis, whose most embarrassing educational moment was throwing up in kindergarten.
- Silverman argues that idealization and this aggressive pull towards normalization is necessary but there is possibility to create a different relation to the normalized, idealized image. (She approaches this shift as an ethical move via Lacan’s active gift of love.) She calls for an ethical relation to the fantasy of bodily fragmentation. Her hope is this might provide some relief to the aggressive affect emanating from the over-determined project of achieving one’s idealized body. In a similar vien, the way out of this aggressivity is, in Gallop’s reading of Lacan, the subtle difference between the teacher’s body/role model as a mirror and as a mirror image (Gallop, 1985). Gallop explains how psychoanalysis creates an opportunity to recognize the subject’s imagos and, perhaps, figure out ‘the deforming effect’ (p. 61) of these imagos on the subject’s understanding of her relationships. Within the psychic-pedagogical space of physical education, the purpose of the teacher/analyst is to provide the student/analysand a mirror (image?) that can has the possibility of revealing, or rather hinting at, the student’s imagoes. The space of possibility, of resignification, of reimagining is crucial to this pedagogy within physical education.
- This is where the visual politics of differently queer spaces might, I hope, have something pedagogical to teach teacher, schooling and education. Kelly Oliver (2002) hopes that minority subjects might resist the “flattening” (p.62) or colonialization of psychic space through developing positive self-images and social support. Visual culture theorist Jose Esteban Munoz (1999) suggests that queers of color have survived, sometimes thrived, by generating visual cultures based on disidentifications, that is reappropriating and reworking colonial heteronormativity and colonial representation of white gayness. Increasingly the in-your-faceness of queer intersects with the in-your-wayness of crip (Mcruer, 2003) such that Gay Pride week and Special Education are recognized, most often by students, as isolating ventures that might address the liberal content but do little to re-structure of how schooling addresses fat, disabled, queer bodies. So my project looks for a way, learning from queer body cultures, to re-imagine the teachers body to be, in the Kleinian sense, a good enough teacher for students like author and activist Eli Clare (1999): …trembling with CP [cerebral palsy], with desire, with the last remnants of fear, trembling because this is how my body moves…I want to enter as a not-girl-not-boy transgendered butch…Enter with my pockets and heart half-full of stone. Enter knowing that the muscled grip of desire is a wild, half-grown horse, ready to bolt but too curious to stay away (pp.137-138).
- During the interviews, we asked people to talk about their memories of physical education; confidence in physical abilities and feeling about their body; the impact of physical education teacher; and how physical education might learn from participant’s experiences of marginalization.
- Fat subjectivity refers to the incorporation of fat subject position(s) into a person’s overall embodied subjectivity. Embodied subjectivity is a poststructural conceptualization of the self that refers to the intersections between the body, the social and the psyche. So, we start from the assumption that students’ fat subject positions are constructed within a heteronormative gender-sex system (Benhabib, 1992: Prosser, 1998) that is racialized (Ahmed, 2004; Shaw, 2003) and overvalues productive, thin bodies (Bordo, 1993; Herndon, 2002; McRuer, 2004).
- Older feminist literature on fat experiences, regarded the “fat kid” experience as given;. Later literature regards fat as more fluid, and the identity category as contingent upon other discursive interpolations of identities. By way of illustration, this comment from Elizabeth reflects the shifting and, often, belated nature of forming an identity as fat: Elizabeth: Often I went through phases where -- and this is in Judith Moore’s Fat Girl book where she said, “I didn’t realise I was fat until I was in situations where it was pointed out to me.” 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-esteem. Historically-specific understandings of fatness were articulated to different degrees by participants. We became ethnographic witnesses (Jacobs, 2004) to the Holocaust in our interview with Moe Moe: I was born in Germany in a displaced persons camp, a sort of a holding camp. My parents came to Canada with me in '48. I was about 18 months old. My father worked hard. My mother stayed at home. I think the fact that she went hungry during the war…food became a very important thing. She just cooked and baked constantly. So maybe that was some of my problem. I think I developed into a pretty big eater. This figure of the overfeeding M/other is historically contingent on memories of famine during the Holocaust across generations of the North American Jewish diaspora. Thus, histories of fat allow us to contextualize past and current understandings of fat in social structures like gender, diasporas and economies. Along with contextualization, histories also urge us to be specific about fatness and fat phobia; to always qualify any discussion of fat with a definitive nod to its historical fluidity.
- Two women talked about changes in their own perspectives about fatness as a result of being influenced by, or involved in, fat activist politics. Indeed, the main reason we decided to interview adults, rather than current schools students, was to find out how people’s experiences with fatness and physical activity changed after leaving school. Sarah explained how important it is has been to see positive representations of fat bodies involved in physical activity, such as her aerobics instructor: For me it depended on who the instructor was. [Laughing]. She had amazing lung capacity and was really muscular, but also just had a giant layer of fat on top of her muscles. It was very flabby fat. You know, those kinds of hard fat and flab fat? Q: Yeah.Sarah: She was very flab fat. And she’d wear a tank top and little shorts, so when she’d do aerobics, she’d just be shaking all over the place. And all… Q: [laughing] That’s awesome.Sarah: I know, I fucking loved it! She’s loving just sweating and being active and beingfit. Temperance proclaimed she would never “take gym” again after grade 10 due to her traumatic experiences as a fat student. As an adult, Temperance recounted how she gradually began to exercise and associated this activity with “my body feeling really healthy”. For some individuals, it was possible to temporarily negotiate a “fat” identity within physical education, This involved confronting and resisting fat-phobic assumptions and practices through emotionally draining and intricate social, psychic and kinesthetic maneuvers. These moments of fat survival and resistance by students within physical education spaces testify to their ethical responses in the face of contemporary unethical cultural and pedagogical investments in fat phobia. Being a fat kid in physical education is close to what Kelly Oliver (1998) describes as being a subject without subjectivity. It is important, then, to name the agency of our participants to negotiate and survive pervasive fat phobia in physical education. It is also important, however, to temper such discussions of agency with a pointed political recognition of the subjugation of fat people, and the social structures like patriarchy, capitalism and racism which facilitate and create that subjugation.
- The difficulties fat students experience in physical education are compounded for many people because fat subjectivities are, as Sara Ahmed (2004) explains, constantly negotiated in terms of multiple racialized, classed and sex/gender identities. In her recollections of dodgeball, Sarah described how: There was no effort on the part of the teacher instead of playing dodge ball - where obviously the couple of ‘sporty guys’ are going to pick off the ‘fat lazy girls’ - Here, normative masculinity is linked with athleticism, whereas fatness is correlated with femininity and laziness. This enduring association between fatness and laziness is a gendered and racialized construction, underpinned by the need to contain and vilify threatening, polluting fluids of female reproductivity. Johnathon recalled having fat on particular parts of his body, which he describes as being “not defined” rather than subscribing to the identity-category “fat”. He went on to articulate a gendered construction of fatness in which men can have fat without being fat whereas women cannot (Bordo, 1993). Johnathon: For men, men can have certain amounts of baggage in a kind of simplistic sense and not be viewed as being fat or whatever. Within mainstream gay male culture, however, it is generally more difficult for gay men to have fat in the same way. Gay men, such as Jean-Paul, are confronted with a far more limited range of acceptable and desirable body sizes due to the “cult of male beauty” arising from the aestheticization of fit male bodies in consumer and gay cultures (Monaghan, 2005). Here Jean-Paul describes the “fascist body standards of Church Street”, which is in the centre of Toronto’s gay men’s community: I think there is, increasingly, a defined body type that is very muscular and lean. It requires one to spend a great deal of time working at the gym, eating properly and taking steroids if necessary. In this pursuit in the perfect body, if you don't fit into this category, then you're not sexually desirable.