ABSTRACT
Bodies Out of Sight advocates for the need to implement a social justice agenda in school PE using a Body Curriculum to reconstruct PE as a culturally relevant, empowering, and just educational space for all young people’s bodies. By encouraging “storytelling,” both visually and pedagogically, the Body Curriculum motivates ethnic minoritized students to critically reflect about the self and critically engage with issues of difference, exclusion, and representation. In this chapter, first, I problematize corporate media’s control over the body culture to which young people have access and that they read and embody in their daily lives. Second, I conceptualize the theoretical assumptions and the pedagogical aims of a Body Curriculum implemented with, about, and for ethnic minoritized students in urban school PE to create a safe and empowering space where they can engage in the “reflexive project of the self.” (Giddens, 1991). Third, to dismantle barriers of gender/sex, race, and social class, I discuss how the Body Curriculum offers pedagogical practices of the self to assist ethnic minoritized young people in dealing with tensions, pressures, and anxieties of the body and thus, to help them understand and accept themselves in their culturally relevant context (outside of whiteness) as they really are and want to become in fitness and health.
