ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how discourses of physical education (PE) articulate with boys' performances of gender and (dis)pleasures. It examines both the boys' and the teacher's overall understandings and experiences of PE, which, in the words of Mr Whyte, could be summed up as "a culture of everyone doing it" and "playing games". The chapter draws on M. Foucault's notion of resistance as inseparable from discourse and power relations, it also highlights some boys' problematisations of the impact of power-induced pleasures in PE. The strong emphasis on sport as inherently good and its close connection with PE can in this way be seen to restrict the ways in which boys find pleasure through participation in PE using their own bodies and performing masculine identities. The boys' performances of gender not only constitute and are constituted by this discursive formation but also produce and are a product of pleasure.
