Issues of masculinity and femininity in British physical education

Abstract

The article examines issues of masculinity and femininity as they are culturally produced and reproduced in British physical education. A widely practised sex-segregated curriculum is seen as the result, both of traditional social views of masculine and feminine appropriate physical activities, and the traditionally separate training of physical education teachers. Interviews with two male physical education students enable an examination of conceptions of masculinity in physical education as not only associated with male, but also female behaviour. It is argued that the values of masculinity, capitalism, and sport have developed in close association in Britain and that values of physical education perpetuate the same. Masculinity is seen to be associated with dominance and power under capitalism and femininity with a particular image of womanhood. Physical education, it is argued, is an area where different expressions of masculinity are perpetuated by males and females, and where femininity is difficult. Socialist feminism offers a critique of capitalist values and a means of elucidating how masculinity and femininity are both accomodated and resisted in physical education. The contradictions for the female role are found to be bewildering, and physical educationalists are urged to examine consciously masculinity and femininity and their wider cultural determinants, to offer a physical education which does not imply that 'sport will make a man of you' whatever your sex. © 1987.