Physical Education and Regimes of the Body

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.