School PE and ‘fat’ kids: maintaining the rage and keeping a sense of perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is about ‘fat’ kids in HPE classes. The motivation for this paper comes as a personal response to my reading of Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Hunger is thoughtful, passionate, articulate, sad and overall troubling. It also raised questions for me about whether health and physical education (HPE) is a safe space for fat young people and whether or not there is any possibility that HPE might be a transformative space that some scholars suggest. It raises issues regarding curriculum choice and pedagogy, but also about dispositional change such that all HPE teachers become more sensitive to the needs, feelings and capacities of young fat kids.