The ‘Old Gym’ and the ‘Boys’ Changing Rooms’

Abstract

This article examines how space and pleasure are discursively interlinked in boys’ performances of gender in school physical education (PE). Although previous research has implicated spaces in the production of gendered identities and unequal power relations, there exists a gap in the current literature focusing on how space also contributes to pleasure in PE. This article draws on an ethnographic account of boys’ PE, and Gregson and Rose’s (2000) concept of ‘performative space’, an extension of Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity, to illustrate how the pre-existing spaces of PE come to matter or become meaningful through the boys’ performances with/in those spaces. I argue that the boys derive pleasures as the productive effect of the power (Foucault, 1985) articulated in and through the spaces of PE. This article accordingly contributes to understandings of the complex nature of how PE is constituted and constitutive of gendered performances, spaces and pleasures.