This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kirk, D. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Physical Education and Regimes of the Body

Deakin University

This paper illustrates the ways in which the practices of school physical education and sport have contributed to the construction and constitution of the body in modernity, a body which can be disciplined and energised through mass educational, medical, and other interventions to be economically productive and politically acquiescent. Various shifts in physical education's treatment of the body during this century are posited as indicative of shifts in regimes of the body more broadly, moving towards forms of corporeal power which are increasingly diffused, individualised and internalised, these regimes projecting a view of the body as the most intimate manifestation of social and self-identity. It is suggested that while there is evidence of a liberalisation of regimes of the body after the second world war, contemporary physical education and sport programs continue to school the modernist body. At the same time, it is noted that recent developments in the project of body management, pursued in exercise gyms and other sites, may have begun to signal the limits of the malleability of the modernist body.

Journal of Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 2, 165-177 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/144078339403000205


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?