Emma Rich

This chapter offers a critical exploration of contemporary forms of healthism within health and physical education, and girls’ subjectivities and bodies. I suggest that health and physical education is being reshaped by a complex assemblage of health and emerges as a pedagogical site through which new health imperatives circulate. Drawing on various feminist contributions to this research agenda, I explore two contemporary public health priorities that are the result of this assemblage and are shaping the policies and pedagogies of HPE in ways that have significant implications for girls’ subjectivities and embodiment. First, whilst healthism has long held a presence in the curriculum and practices of HPE, I outline how it has been intensified by an obesity discourse and its accompanying moral panic. Second, I examine the shift towards digitization within HPE whereby commercial digital health technologies are increasingly being used to track and monitor students’ bodies and health. Throughout, I indicate the numerous contributions of feminist research in helping to frame the critical analysis of healthism within HPE and its impact on girls’ experiences of their bodies and subjectivities. Reflecting on these contemporary features of HPE, I argue that feminist research might be at a critical juncture in responding to these challenges and addressing the complex gendered relationalities within these contexts. As such, this may warrant future discussions focused on the exploration of new conceptual, empirical and methodological approaches.

The disciplinary boundaries of social studies on the body, health and illness are widely dispersed and no less so when inquiring into the subject of media representations. So much research from a range of disciplines seeps into this area that it can be difficult to draw meaningful boundaries around it. Such issues as disability, eating disorders, sexually transmitted diseases, mental disorder, cosmetic surgery, drug cultures and much more, all fall within this area of concern. Moreover, debates in other areas of media inquiry are often explained through a health-related lens. For instance, discussions about computer games are repeatedly subjected to health-related discourses over whether their use leads to an increasingly sedentary, young population – a claim that is not borne out in the literature. The breadth of this subject prompts us to consider how to limit the study of media representations of health, illness and the body, when each and every action we undertake can be interpreted through this conceptual lens