The “Missing Discourses of Desire”: Young Women’s Health and Physical Education Experiences in Toronto and Porto Alegre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a feminist poststructural lens, this dissertation explores: (a) the range of understandings about gendered and racialized bodies held by young women in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; (b) a comparison of the discourses embedded in health and physical education (HPE) policy with respect to gender, sexuality, and fitness in two urban high schools in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and two urban high schools in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; and (c) the effects that gendered and racialized narratives mediating HPE policy and media consumption have on young women in these cities. This study involved a policy analysis of HPE documents and 40 semi-structured interviews with young women 14-17 years of age (n=20 in Canada; and n=20 in Brazil) in order to investigate the myriad of ways in which the body is gendered, sexualized and racialized in HPE and media. Interviews in Toronto and Porto Alegre reveal that students who took part in this study embody a form of healthism promoted in school and throughout the wide range of media platforms the young women consume. In Toronto, the consequence is what Michelle Fine (1988) calls a “missing discourse of desire” that tends to negate pleasure for students. Porto Alegre students taking part in this study also exhibit healthist biopedagogies, although self-acceptance and pleasure emerged as dominant themes. These latter themes emerging from the Porto Alegre responses, diverge from the Toronto youth responses; as the Porto Alegre youth celebrate more diverse visions of the female body, whereas Toronto students discuss a discourse of ‘moderation.’ This moderation discourse narrows positive embodied practices. Utilizing Fine’s argument about “missing discourses of desire” in education, Ontario HPE is then examined and questioned in relation to embodied pleasures made possible for young people in HPE. Policy recommendations include: addressing the social determinants of health in policy, adding opportunities for joyful experiences in physical education, and including critical health literacy and social media literacy in future policy. Young women are encouraged to find embodied pleasure in their physical education experiences and to critically question media representations of the female form.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".