Suchergebnisse

1. Defining a "Problem": Girls' Participation in Sport and Physical Education -- 2. Embodying Sporty Girlhood: Exploring Perspectives on Girls' Sporting Participation Through Postfeminism -- 3. Becoming a Sporty Researcher: Gender, Legitimacy and Bodies That Move -- 4. A Good Education: School Achievement, Sport and Becoming a Successful Girl -- 5. Being "Good at Sport": Constituting Bodies Through Competition and Selection Processes -- 6. Responsible Body Projects, Health and Moral Hierarchies -- 7. Gendered and Racialised Bodies in Postfeminist Athletics: Embodied Capacities and Feminist Rage -- 8. Conclusion: Sporting Girlhoods and Feminist Possibilities.

This article looks at the construction of active young femininities within the context of girls' participation in sport. It draws on findings from longitudinal, qualitative research carried out in the UK. The research revealed the importance of 'ability' discourses as particularly salient for girls' ongoing sports participation at secondary school. This was exemplified in the idea of 'being good at sport'. Throughout the article I consider some of the difficulties for girls in holding onto notions of themselves as 'good at sport' and look at the ways in which this identity was both shifting and relational in the context of their peer and schooling interactions. The findings suggest that processes of team selection, emphases on performance outputs and ongoing expectations of fixed athletic development were all particularly relevant to girls' sporting identities and participation both in and out of school.

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of 'private good.' Our analysis situates their 'risk' responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out 'value for money' in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.