ABSTRACT
We began this project with modest aspirations, simply wanting to understand better the lived experiences of children and young people. In particular we were concerned with relationships, if any, between their expressed ‘private troubles’ in relation to their bodies’ size, shape and weight and contemporary ‘public issues’. The latter has been noisily framed in popular discourse as a global rising tide of obesity, a primary antecedent of ill health. As parents, educationalists and researchers working in body-centred trades (PE, sport and health), we found ourselves increasingly in contact with students and children who seemed to be ever more dissatisfied with their bodies. Some were so deeply disaffected as to be taking drastic, even dangerous, action in relation to exercise and weight loss. We were concerned as to the potential saturation of popular culture by images celebrating slenderness and alarmed at the way in which contemporary discourse about obesity seemed to be normalising and making a virtue of the slender body morph. There seemed to be little investigation of, or dialogue between, medical discourses of ‘overweight’ and ‘underweight’ and little documented, critical reflection within the health community on prevailing orthodoxies. Given these circumstances, we set out to investigate currently dominant assertions of bioscience about health discourse and to explore their refractions in popular culture and school policies and pedagogies. If nothing more, we hoped to illuminate processes by which young people learned about their bodies and health and whether current health discourse had anything to do with their body disaffection or problematic relationships with exercise and food.
