Scraton [(1992). "Shaping up to womanhood: Gender and girls' physical education." Buckingham: Open University Press)] asserts in her conclusion to 'Shaping up to Womanhood' that feminist analysis of PE (and sport and leisure more broadly) needs to engage more directly with masculinity as a means to understanding the 'dynamics of gender'.…

Participation in sport and Physical Education (PE) has historically been heavily gendered, and the glorification of masculinity and sporting prowess is viewed as a potentially negative influence on participation for both males and females. This paper explores male and female experiences of sport and PE to grasp how the field of physical culture…

Despite clear messages from current physical education (PE) curricula about the importance of adopting socially critical perspectives, dominant discourses of gender relating to physical activity, bodies and health are being reproduced within this school subject. By drawing on interview data from a larger ethnographic account of boys' PE, this…

Everyday cultural resources that originate outside school offer possibilities for multimodal creativity and identity play, as children consume, transform and produce multimodal texts. In this study, Kyle, a boy in elementary school, fluidly performed social identities and engaged in playful and parodic rescripting of identities and resources from…

Scholars have sought to identify the complexity and multidimensionality of the phenomenon of sexual identity formation since the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 (Bayer, 1981). This article addresses the manner in which the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ]…

This autoethnography explores challenging and ethically sensitive issues around sexual orientation, sexual identity and masculinity in the context of school sport. Through storytelling, I aim to show how sometimes ambiguous encounters with heterosexism, homophobia and hegemonic masculinity through sport problematise identity development for young…

The purpose of this study was to analyse representations of hegemonic masculinity in physical education (PE) mixed classes, the only curricular discipline having sport as its contents in the Portuguese educational system. The analysed data come from semi-structured interviews with Portuguese secondary school teachers and students and from class…

Since 1980 the Swedish compulsory school curriculum has stipulated that Physical Education (PE) should be taught co-ed and schools are legally required to promote gender equality. The latest evaluation of PE in Sweden shows that more boys than girls ranked the subject highly and that they had a higher level of activity during the PE lessons.…

The community of sport is a powerful site for the construction of masculinity, male identities, and heterosexuality. Consequently, the increased entry of women into the sporting arena has been actively resisted, with women athletes either excluded or framed within traditional, sexualized discourses of femininity and heterosexuality. Yet Title IX…

One of the most dreaded insults in sports is, "You throw like a girl," because it epitomizes society's gender logic about physiological differences between men and women. Although physiological differences between the sexes exist, people label these abilities and behaviors as masculine or feminine as a result of social and cultural expectations.…

Among widening social anxieties about practices and performances of contemporary masculinity are questions about the place of hyper-masculine (contact) sports, such as games of football. Foremost are concerns about some of the values and attitudes that appear to circulate within such contexts. With their historical leaning towards character…

This paper explores the salience of sport in the lives of eight-year-old and nine-year-old South African primary school boys. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I argue that young boys' developing relationship with sport is inscribed within particular gendered, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Throughout the paper I show…

Background: Research on PE indicates that the subject is marked by rather stable gendered patterns of behaviour and perceptions of the subject. This paper marks an attempt to outline a theoretical approach that makes it possible to interpret what is going on in the gym in a way that might challenge the reproduction of gender. Purpose: To…