"Stop Photoshopping!": A Visual Participatory Inquiry Into Students' Responses to a Body Curriculum

In today's school climate of accountability, researchers in Physical Education (PE) pedagogy have contested current fitness curricula that aim to manage, control, and normalize young people's bodies. This participatory visual research incorporated a Body Curriculum into a fitness unit in a secondary school (a) to assist young people critically deal with the media narratives of perfect bodies they consume in their daily lives, and (b) to examine how participants responded to a Body Curriculum. It was found that while participants rejected media fabrications of the "ideal body" and the "unhealthy" ideals they circulate in society, they recognized the difficulty of not being "caught up" in media storytelling. Participants' views of their own bodies, however, were not malleable, but rooted in narrow, fixed heteronormative white ideals of "looking a certain way" to "fit" society norms of physical appearance and attractiveness. The benefits and limitations of implementing a Body Curriculum are recognized.