Chapter 4: Pleasure Games(Of Truth) In Boys’ Schooling: Interrogating Gender and Sexuality Through a Pleasure Lens

Despite a policy environment in the U.S. K-12 Physical Education (PE) that calls for the “full inclusion of all students,” research that establish schools, PE and sport as sites of heteronormative and masculinizing practices continues to be reported. In this chapter, we adopt a Foucauldian pleasure lens to interrogate the particular games of truth/truth regimes that adolescent boys’ in two specific boys’ school sites in New Zealand and Australia negotiate in their experiences of PE, sport, and broader school cultures. We argue that pleasure is the glue that (re)produces heteronormative schooling cultures and existing (unequal) power relations between different identities/subjectivities. In conclusion, we suggest that interrogations of the interrelationship/s between masculinity, sexuality, and sport through a pleasure lens offers new theoretical perspectives to explore normalised cultural practices and offer potential to make visible spaces in which these can be productively disrupted.