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This paper examines the linkages between physical education, sociology, and sociology of sport in North America. Physical education and sociology in North America have had numerous mutual ties since the beginnings of both fields. In the first section of the paper, I describe the rise of sociology and physical education in North America, emphasizing the linkages that initially existed between physical education and sociology, and then the separation that transpired between the disciplines. The second section examines the connections between social theory and physical education before the sociology of sport was formally developed. The final section details the rise of sociology of sport, with the main focus on the role of physical educators (a.k.a. sociocultural kinesiologists, sport studies scholars, human kinetics scholars) in the development of sociology of sport. This section concludes with a discussion of the linkages of social theory, critical pedagogy in physical education, and sport sociology in physical education.

In this article we examine how fat-phobic discourses in physical education both constitute, and are continually negotiated by, “fat” and “overweight” students. This claim is based on qualitative interviews about memories of physical education with 15 adults in Canada and the U.S. who identified as fat or overweight at some time during their lives. The research draws from feminist poststructuralism, queer theory, and feminist fat theory to examine how students negotiate fat subjectivities in fat-phobic educational contexts. The interviews reveal how fat phobia in physical education is oppressive and makes it extremely difficult for most students to develop positive fat subjectivities in physical education; how weighing and measuring practices work to humiliate and discipline fat bodies; and how fat phobia reinforces normalizing constructions of sex and gender. The interviews also illustrate how some students resisted fat phobia in physical education by avoiding, and sometimes excelling in, particular physical activities. Finally, interviewees talk about the importance of having access to fat-positive fitness spaces as adults and suggest ways to improve the teaching of physical education.

The structure of knowledge and its relation to social structure remain acute issues in the study of sport and physical education. This paper argues against common conceptions of knowledge that have resulted from positivist and rationalist tendencies in these fields. The position is set forth that knowledge is a constitutive human practice that tends to produce and reproduce the meanings, values, and structural realities of the social world in which it occurs. This theoretical standpoint sets the framework for the three papers that follow.

Specialized, theoretical knowledge is important to professions such as physical education as they attempt to gain and later maintain their status and control over the labor market. This knowledge must be monopolized and used in work by the profession’s members if they are to be granted this status and control by society’s members. Upon examination physical educationists do not enjoy a knowledge monopoly, nor do they appear to use their specialized, theoretical knowledge in work. Chief among the explanations offered are the limitations in the positivist conception of knowledge for the professions and the different frames of reference for researchers and practitioners. Analyses of the monopoly and use of knowledge in professions such as physical education yield insights about the ways in which knowledge is articulated and contested, the internal and external relationships of the profession, and the relationship among the structure of knowledge, the professions, and social theory.

This qualitative study of a British Islamic independent school explores the construction of religious masculinities within the lives of a cohort of Muslim adolescent males. An ethnographic analysis is presented whereby boys’ physical education is located as a strategic site for the development of Muslim masculine identities. Adopting a symbolic interactionist perspective, the article discusses the representation of pupil masculinities within the school and the specific role that Islam, sport, and physical education played in respondent lives. Findings highlight how religion provided a central mechanism through which pupils sought to construct and negotiate their masculine selves. In turn, physical education served as an avenue through which respondents could embrace and embody their sense of self and express a series of broader religious ideals.

One of the ways heterosexuality maintains its privileged status is through the discursive figure of “the closet,” where everyday speech normalizes heterosexuality while silencing lesbian sexuality. In this paper, feminist and queer theories are used to explain why the closet has featured so prominently in women’s physical education. The paper also contains a poststructural analysis of how the closet was constructed in the life histories of 6 lesbian and heterosexual physical educators. Excerpts from the life histories illustrate how silences inside the closet acquired meaning only in relation to everyday talk about heterosexuality. Finally, deconstruction is used to suggest how heterosexuality can sometimes find itself inside the closet, thereby undermining the boundaries between inside/outside, silence/speech, and lesbian/heterosexual.