Healthism and Physical Education

Abstract

Health has become a symbolic category of considerable importance, expressing a range of notions relating to well‐being, consumption and normality. A particular view of health as corporeal and individualistic has become pervasive within the new health consciousness, and school physical education represents one site among many where the ideology of healthism is produced. This paper draws on a study of an innovative programme in primary schools in Queensland, Australia. It explores how on the one hand the instructional discourse of ‘daily physical education’ varied across a number of sites of meaning production and how on the other hand this instructional discourse was embedded in the regulative discourse of healthism which set limits on the extent to which the people operating at these sites could make their own sense of daily physical education. We argue that a corporeal and individualistic concept of health, in which body shape and fatness play a central role, is being produced through health‐based physical education programmes like daily physical education. These programmes in turn represent an important site of the production of an individualistic and internalised mode of corporeal control.