Session: Physical Education & Social Justice

Gender and Sexual Politics in Sport-based Japanese Physical Education
There has been a considerable amount of research accumulated around the issues of homophobia, transphobia, and binary gender in school sport environments in North America. This issue, however, only began to receive small public and scholarly attention in Japan in recent years. This is one of the first studies to explore the experiences and expressions of discrimination, violence, and exclusion based on gender expression and sexual orientation in physical education in Japan. Through this research, we hope to gain insight into the gender and sexual politics of Japanese physical education, which is largely sport-based.
    Because little data exists about these issues in Japan, our research includes quantitative and qualitative surveys and semi-structured interviews. These were administered in three Japanese universities in 2017. Based on 953 survey responses and 15 in-depth interviews, we present a preliminary analysis of students reported experiences of discrimination and exclusion in sport-based physical education in Japan. Included in our presentation is a discussion on the gender and sexual politics of Japanese physical education which reproduces and reinforces binary gender and heterosexism often through silence and ignorance, rather than the explicit violence or verbal abuse frequently cited in North American studies.