‘Are they just checking our obesity or what?’ The healthism discourse and rural young women

Abstract

This paper makes use of critical discourse analysis and Bourdieu's theoretical framework to explore rural young women's meanings of health and fitness and how the healthism discourse is perpetuated through their experiences in school physical education. The young women's own meanings are explored alongside interview data from their school physical education head of department. The healthism discourse was evident in the way that the young women spoke of physical activity, health, fitness and their bodies. They viewed health and fitness as being important to control body shape and adhered to a stereotypical feminine appearance as ideal. The data also illustrates how a school Health and Physical Education Head of Department's own engagements with the healthism discourse and the school's Health and Physical Education curriculum shaped the young women's understandings of health and fitness and their bodies. Data presented in this paper are drawn from an Australian longitudinal, qualitative project involving interview and visual collection methods. The longitudinal nature of the data adds to existing research by demonstrating the durability of the healthism discourse as it is perpetuated through physical education even up to two years postschool. Understanding how the healthism discourse is reproduced through social structures such as the school, and how it perpetuates traditional meanings and approaches to physical activity has important implications for the generation of physical activity and health promotion initiatives.

“If it’s not Iron it’s Iron f*cking biggest Ironman”: personal trainers’ views on health norms, orthorexia and deviant behaviours

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“…The data highlights the various ways in which the preservice teachers embodied experiences have permeated speech and practices up to 20 years after being first experienced. The durability (Lee & Macdonald, 2010) of pedagogy experienced by the lived body reveals the extent of corporeal internalization and the centrality of the lived body to the habitus [a set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions] (Lee & Macdonald, 2010).…”

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“…Specifically, her (re)enactment of the pedagogical experiences such as the games sense approach, the utilisation of small groups to work on micro-skills, her movement around the class and the dialogue that she engaged with. Huntly's current practice as a HPE tertiary educator illuminated her adolescent bodily experiences in HPE thus revealing the "durability" of pedagogy across time (Lee & Macdonald, 2010). What the data also revealed was how pedagogy became the active realisation of her embodied knowledge (adapted from Esland, 1971) existing and operating across and through multiple sites of practice, defining the significance and potential of the teaching body in time, place and space (Evans et al, 2008).…”