‘You are just an idiot for not doing any physical activity right now’

Introduction

The body in general, and fatness in particular, are social constructions and as such their meanings are culturally and historically specific (Pieterman, 2007). In Western(ised) societies, fat has been termed a ‘master status’ (Degher and Hughes, 1999: 13). That is, obese people are fat ¹ first and are only secondarily seen as possessing other characteristics (Degher and Hughes, 1999) such as race, gender or occupation. Therefore, an obese general practitioner from China, for example, will always be referred to as ‘the fat Chinese doctor’, with their fatness presented as the primary identifying factor taking precedence over their ethnicity or occupation. Fatness is often the first aspect of the body that is noticed; it is, as Murray (2009: 78) states, ‘more seen’ than other aspects of bodies. Different meanings are attached to the state of being fat, such as laziness (Bordo, 1993; Rich and Evans, 2008), lack of self-control (Bordo, 1993; Evans et al., 2008; Gard, 2001; Gard and Wright, 2005; Macdonald et al., 2008; Sobal, 1995) and moral failure (Rich and Evans, 2008). The fat body is perceived as ‘indicative of laziness, lack of discipline, unwillingness to conform’ (Bordo, 1993: 195). People in general often consider fatness as an indication of a disequilibrium and inefficiency of the body (Burns and Gavey, 2008). According to Brink (1994), fat people are doubly stigmatised – both for their physical appearance as well as for their assumed moral weakness.

Previous research in this area has focused on pre-service primary teachers’ positions in relation to health and body discourses (Welch and Wright, 2011) and children’s understandings of fitness lessons (Powell and Fitzpatrick, 2015). There is also research on fat phobia – defined as a pathological fear of fatness (Robinson et al., 1993) – in Physical Education (PE) contexts in Canada and the USA, as reported by adults according to memories of PE classes (Sykes, 2011; Sykes and McPhail, 2008). However, research that is focused on fat discourses among pre-service Health and Physical Education (HPE) specialist teachers remains limited. Studies in this area are of the utmost importance, as it has been argued that pre-service HPE teachers may transmit some of their beliefs and values about the body to their students through their teaching, resulting in students engaging in harmful practices (O’Dea and Abraham, 2001), such as dieting while lacking an adequate understanding of nutrition. This study explores fat discourses of second-year pre-service HPE specialist teachers at an Australian university, taking a Foucauldian perspective and using mainly the concepts of risk society, surveillance and normalisation.

Risk society, surveillance and normalisation

Beck (1992) first described risk society as an inescapable structural condition of advanced industrialisation involving hidden politics, ethics and morality. Risk society is a socially constructed phenomenon in which certain individuals are defined as more at risk of being considered unhealthy than others. Inequalities in the distribution of risk within society are related to power (Beck, 2006). Risk and uncertainty are characteristics of Western democracies (Rose, N 1999a) and risk has become a prevalent concept within Western(ised) societies. According to Giddens (1991), our anxieties with risk are not only concerned with immediate life-threatening events, but also, and possibly more often, with the use of surveillance and monitoring systems to measure potential risks. In this context, citizens are expected to understand risks and to engage in risk-management strategies through self-monitoring and self-transformation (Kelly, 2001).

In contemporary Western(ised) societies, one of the most significant manifestations of risk discourses is with regards to health and bodies. Public health professionals draw on biomedical knowledge of the body to identify and manage health risks (Burrows et al., 2002). Typically, biomedical discourses provide an unproblematic view of the healthy body, physical activity and diet (Webb et al., 2008) which informs individual body work practices. As Rose N (1999a) states, neoliberalism promotes a hyper-responsible self and a denial of imposed constraints and limitations. According to neoliberal discourses, individuals are often convinced that they are shaping their own life conditions. However, this is a covert technique used to govern individuals by persuading them to make meaning of their lives as if they were the result of their own individual choices. In so doing, individuals are supposedly governed through their own freedoms and choices. The irony, as Rose N (1999b) states, is that we are convinced that we are choosing our freedom. With regards to health, neoliberalism embodies risk discourses which reduce one’s health to the sum of individual choices. The healthy neoliberal citizen chooses good health by making choices informed by the unproblematic perspectives on the body, diet and health provided by biomedical science.

Individuals are now expected to work on their bodies routinely and relentlessly in order to achieve prescribed ideals in relation to health, body shape and size (Coffey, 2015). A wealth of knowledge and expertise is available to help individuals avoid the apparent risks of modern-day living and to succeed in becoming independent, successful and healthy (Evans et al., 2008). As Evans et al. (2008: 389) observe, ‘we are bombarded daily with information and advice on what to eat, how to exercise, where to live, what clothes to wear and what weight we should be’. Howson (2004) claims that when populations grow, governments become more concerned about the management of life, particularly in relation to health, diseases, sexuality and welfare. In so doing, populations come under increased surveillance and analysis across time and space (Howson, 2004). According to McWhorter (1999), normalisation processes use surveillance as a mechanism to try to achieve an arbitrary norm (e.g. a normal body). Normalisation is a form of disciplinary power and ‘a mode of observation, ordering, intervention, and control that simultaneously homogenizes and individualizes its target population’ (McWhorter, 1999: 156). Foucault’s notion of ‘norm’ does not refer to a tradition but rather routinised behaviours that are so deeply inscribed on the body by disciplinary modes of power that they seem natural or normal (McNay, 1994). As a result, normalisation is a potent instrument of power (Foucault, 1979) that together with surveillance – another technique for power – work to perpetuate, create or prescribe behaviour according to some norm of social life. The effects of surveillance have shifted from corporeal punishment for escaping physical confinement, to public warning for transgressing normalcy (Webb et al., 2004). The most powerful form of surveillance is self-surveillance, which often continues after the actual surveillance has finished, for fear that the surveilling gaze could return later. The investigation of how the concepts of risk, normalisation and surveillance manifest in pre-service HPE specialist teachers has remained limited.

Methods

In order to understand how fat discourses are constructed by pre-service HPE specialist teachers and how they manifest, a qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews was conducted with 14 students who volunteered for the study (11 females and three males) and were aged between 18 and 26 at the time of the first interview. Photo elicitation was also used as a method to collect data. Photo elicitation is considered an enabling methodology, which assumes that people have something relevant to communicate and that they can do so creatively (Gauntlett and Holzwarth, 2006). This method was used for this study as it can reveal insights otherwise not found using other methodological approaches. Photo elicitation has the potential for the participants to show dimensions of their social world that have been ignored or taken for granted (Clark-Ibáñez, 2007) and is a useful tool to investigate the complex ways that people think about and make sense of their social worlds (Rose, G 2007). It uses images or photographs during the interview process, bringing to light personal dimensions of people’s embodied experiences and facilitating the exploration of the self, society, culture and history links (Harper, 2002).

Participants for this study were recruited during a lecture in a compulsory second year course in the HPE stream, and were asked to indicate their willingness to participate by adding their name to a list. The pseudonyms and ages of participants are as follows: Lily (23), Ella (19), Sarah (20), Jack (21), Mary (19), Craig (20), Anna (21), Samantha (19), Carlos (22), Tiffani (18), Margaret (20), Judith (19), Katrina (26) and Rose (19). Students were told that they would be required to participate in one-on-one interviews and that they could provide an essay reflecting on the main points and perceptions of the interviews as an alternative piece of assessment in the course. That is, if they chose to participate, students could use the information from the interviews as reflective material for their assessment. Students participating in this study still had to conform to the same criteria applied to all other students, it was just the topic that was different and the fact that they collected their data during the interview instead of through other means. The resulting essays were still judged on their academic quality, and assigned a grade on this basis. Those who agreed to participate indicated their agreement by signing a consent form. All participants were Australians, with the exception of one international student from Singapore. Ethical clearance was gained through the university and pseudonyms have been used throughout when reporting data to ensure anonymity.

The first author conducted three interviews with each participant. By interviewing participants, we were able to explore how they constructed discourses related to the body and health, and more specifically, discourses related to fatness. The interviews were in-depth and organised with a standardised open-ended interview protocol (Macdonald and Kirk, 1996). In this way, the questions were used to guide the dialogue but the interviews were largely conversational in style. Questions were organised in the way that the most general and ‘easy’ to answer questions were at the beginning, so this allowed the first author more time to build rapport and develop empathy with participants. The most personal and specific questions were left close to the end of the interview. Questions relevant to this paper that were asked in the interviews included: ‘What do you think an ideal body looks like?’, ‘How do you feel when you see a fat person?’, ‘What do you think about your students’ bodies?’ and ‘What do you think about your own body?’.

In order to encourage participants to direct the flow of the interviews, they were asked to bring prompts such as photos from the media and short stories they had written about a particular past event or incident that they remembered during their lives that was related somehow to their bodies. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, in their entirety, and were entered into QSR NVivo9 software in order to aid data analysis and retrieval. The pictures that participants took to the interviews were analysed in two different ways. What participants said about each picture was coded as part of the interview transcripts. However, all pictures per se were also analysed by the researchers. The photos were organised into a comprehensive, systematic photo inventory (Prosser, 2007) and were coded using QSR NVivo9. However, for the purposes of this paper, only what participants said about some pictures is included.

Transcripts were analysed three times using a content analysis approach (Saldaña, 2009). Content analysis describes a family of analytic approaches ranging from impressionistic, intuitive, interpretive analyses to systematic, strict textual analyses (Rosengren, 1981). Research using qualitative content analysis focuses on the characteristics of language as communication, with attention to the content or contextual meaning of the text (Budd et al., 1967; McTavish and Pirro, 1990). Therefore, a content analysis approach was used for this research in order to include meanings of the content. Two cycles of coding were conducted. An open coding was conducted in the first instance and the amount of data coded ranged from a few words to full sentences. Open coding involves an exploration of the data and experimenting with codes, while breaking down and categorising the data (Ezzy, 2002). For example, ‘body mass index’ (‘BMI’) was coded in the open coding process. For the second cycle of coding, an axial coding took place. Saldaña (2009) suggests that axial coding is appropriate for studies with a wide range of data forms, such as this one (interviews and pictures). Axial coding is ‘a set of procedures whereby data are put back together in new ways after open coding, by making connections between categories’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1990: 96). This stage involves the exploration of codes and the relationships between them (Ezzy, 2002). During axial coding we began to ask the question ‘what does this comment mean?’. For example, ‘BMI as indicator of health’ was coded during this second cycle. In this project, several core categories were selected, including ‘healthism’ (see Varea and Tinning, 2014) and ‘fat’. This paper focuses on the data linked under the core category ‘fat’. Specifically, the paper describes the themes that were constructed from the dominant discourses about ‘fat’ that were evident in the participants’ comments, such as ‘quantifying fat’, ‘achieved deviance’, ‘moral connotations’, ‘paternalism’ and ‘normalising agents’.

Results

Conclusion

As the sample for this paper was small and self-selected, it could be possible that those who volunteered for the study held particularly strong views about the issues, which caused them to volunteer. Further research is needed to see to what extent these views are evident among pre-service HPE teachers generally. This study provides some interesting insights into fat discourses of pre-service HPE specialist teachers. In particular, it demonstrated the preconceptions that this group of participants had about fat people. Participants constructed fat as an indicator of health through BMI, body size and weight. They also presented fat people as earning their status as deviants, as participants assumed that everyone has the time, motivation and resources to exercise and eat healthily.

Participants’ preconceptions (informed by healthism and its associated risk discourses) encouraged them to take a paternalistic attitude and to see themselves as saviours of fat people. They also showed little acceptance towards fat in their own bodies. While they implied that their fat discourses were about health and function, there is some suggestion that their notions of health and function were complicated by their uncritical perpetuation of the moral stigma attached to fatness.

The clinical/medical gaze is a cultural gaze infused by the moral discourse of fat (Murray, 2007). When people look at a fat person they usually make assumptions about them (Bordo, 1993; Evans et al., 2008). They may feel they know the history of all fat bodies, their desires (which must be out of control) and their will (which must be weak) (Murray, 2009). This type of moralising dominated participants’ perspectives and informed their attitudes towards fat people. The moral discourses of fat encouraged participants to want to intervene in people’s lives. HPE teachers’ adoption of moralistic discourses may act as barriers to the fostering of independence and critical thinking among students (Pringle and Pringle, 2012; Varea and Tinning, 2014). More importantly, it prevents teachers from having empathy for their students, something which we argue is a necessary prerequisite for successful teaching. It is imperative, therefore, that we interrogate these constructions of fatness and their potential impact on teaching, and make changes to the undergraduate curriculum of future HPE specialist teachers, so that we can ensure the health and well-being of their students.