Civilising recalcitrant boys' bodies: pursuing social fitness through the anti-obesity offensive

AbstractObesity discourse provides a commonly recycled rationale for multiple, ostensibly well-intended, interventions. Formal educational settings sometimes operate as sites for these biopedagogies which putatively promote ‘good health’ among young people as they transition to ‘responsible’ adulthood. Yet, regulation and control, or the pursuit of social fitness, may be more pressing concerns. Drawing from an ethnography of a ‘Health and Youth’ college initiative in Northeast England, directed at recalcitrant boys who risked school exclusion, this article considers how the war on obesity provided a rationale for middle-class efforts to instil civility. Despite educators' best intentions, the initiative also provided a stage and props for cruder forms of bullying among the boys. This article critiques (un)civilised fat oppression in this setting as part of a larger interrogation of the state sponsored anti-obesity offensive. Connections are made with literature on the civilising process, obesity discourse, boys' bodies, health and education.Keywords: Obesity discourseBoys' bodiesRegulationOppressionCivilising processElias AcknowledgementsThis research was funded by the ESRC (grant number: RES-000-22-0784). An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 17 April 2012. I am grateful to Michael Kehler for his invitation, hospitality and for securing funding for that trip. My gratitude also extends to my ethnographic contacts, who will remain anonymous, and the two anonymous reviewers.Notes1. All names are pseudonyms. Field observations, alongside informal ethnographic interviews with staff, were jotted in a notepad and were immediately expanded upon after the field trip using a word processor. These data were analysed using an inductive approach that informed subsequent field trips (e.g. prompting me to ask certain questions in order to obtain clarification or accounts regarding what, at least to me, appeared to be context-specific contradictions). This approach is referred to as analytical induction, and is commonly employed by qualitative researcher working within interpretivist grounded theory traditions.2. Martha received limited funding for her input, though there was a larger financial context to consider. Martha obtained a European grant to develop the fitness centre several years previously. Given an uncertain financial future at the college (there was talk of redundancies) she was concerned about and was highly protective of this facility. In her view, collaborating with various agencies and the community was a defensive move in a context of risk and uncertainty. Such collaborations, she claimed, would render the fitness facility indispensible so that if college management ever deemed it unviable from a financial point of view she felt the local community would become outraged and collectively oppose any managerial decision to close it.3. The two year NHS PCT post was in partnership with the local council. Julie, who was also studying for a Masters degree in Public Health, was subsequently successful in her application, along with five other people.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.