Queer Bodies

This book brings together three areas of current public debate – sexuality, gender, and obesity – that will be of interest to curriculum workers, critical educators, physical educators, and professionals working in the areas of health, recreation, and sport. The book provides a critical examination of discrimination based on sexuality, gender, and body size in Canadian physical education. It illustrates how students with queer bodies – whether lesbian, gay, transgendered, or overweight or fat – cope with homophobia, transphobia, and fat phobia in physical education. Drawing from qualitative interviews with forty people, the book reveals how students are marginalized, in a variety of ways, because they do not conform to taken-for-granted ideas about healthy or athletic bodies. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories, the book calls for critical educators to work toward ethical encounters with queer bodies in order to address these forms of discrimination in schools, physical education, and sport settings.