ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on a project in Canada that draws on the model of the Life Activity Project to investigate how young people residing in Canada2 discursively construct fitness and health. We focus on the ways youth from diverse social and cultural locations make sense of bodily discourses and negotiate practices associated with fitness, nutrition and health. This postcolonial feminist analysis will address how young people appropriate or resist bodily discourses and constitute themselves as subjects within them. Our analysis prompts a consideration of assumptions made by health researchers, curriculum and policy makers, teachers, and youth camp leaders about the manner in which ideas about fitness and health are taken up by young Canadians, and proposes alternative ways of theorizing young people’s engagement with these cultural ideas.
