The production of the sexual difference in physical education: Problematizing naturalizations

Abstract

Researches that describe the anatomy and physiology of human movement have aimed to produce knowledge comparing women’s and men’s physical capacities, concerned with specifying and describing “sex differences.” One of the consequences of this kind of research is that it influences teaching processes in human motion disciplines for physical educators, producing gender-marked bodies. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to question how the production of sex differences is present in scientific studies dedicated to studying athletic performance that propose comparisons between sexes in strength performance. Through this analysis, we aim to describe and analyse how the epistemologies of sex and gender involved in these productions reinforce naturalised ideas of what it means to be a man and a woman, as well as question the social intelligibility of body/gender/sexuality that regulates sex/ gender in our culture and in science.