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This book brings together three areas of current public debate - sexuality, gender, and obesity - that will be of interest to curriculum workers, critical educators, physical educators, and professionals working in the areas of health, recreation, and sport. The book provides a critical examination of discrimination based on sexuality, gender, and body size in Canadian physical education. It illustrates how students with queer bodies - whether lesbian, gay, transgendered, or overweight or fat - cope with homophobia, transphobia, and fat phobia in physical education. Drawing from qualitative interviews with forty people, the book reveals how students are marginalized, in a variety of ways, because they do not conform to taken-for-granted ideas about healthy or athletic bodies. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories, the book calls for critical educators to work toward ethical encounters with queer bodies in order to address these forms of discrimination in schools, physical education, and sport settings.
About the author
Heather Sykes is Associate Professor of Physical Education in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research uses postmodern and queer theories to critically examine issues of sexuality, transgender, and fatness in physical education and sport sociology. Her work has been published in Body and Society, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and the Sociology of Sport Journal. She has also worked as co-editor of Curriculum Inquiry.
Summary
Provides a critical examination of discrimination based on sexuality, gender, and body size in Canadian physical education. This book illustrates how students with queer bodies - whether lesbian, gay, transgendered, or overweight or fat - cope with homophobia, transphobia, and fat phobia in physical education.
