ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the role of the body in boys' performances of gender in physical education (PE). It explores how boys not only have bodies and learn about their bodies’ in particular gendered ways but how they are also productive and 'pleasurable' bodies—bodies as producers and the product of pleasure. The chapter shows that how boys' bodies become meaningful or start to matter through the discursive practices of PE. It describes the discursive practices, the disciplining, training, development, performance and examination of bodily skills and abilities, enable/produce masculine bodily pleasures in PE. Fitness testing, such as the commonly used 'beep-test' at Kea College, can be seen to provide the boys with a space and context in which knowledge and learning about bodies, fitness and health is constructed. The findings highlight how the materialisation of pleasurable bodies through the development and performance of sporting skills and abilities in PE is a complex process.