Green, Matthew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8065-0446 and Cock, Steven ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9355-8358 (2026) Shame, semi-nudity and civilising processes: Secondary school pupils’ perceptions and experiences of Physical Education changing rooms in England. In: Vanderheiden, Elisabeth and Mayer, Claude-Hélène, (eds.) Handbook of Shame in Education: Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame, Education and Transformation. Routledge (In Press)

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Abstract

This chapter examines how shame becomes attached to young people’s semi-naked bodies in secondary Physical Education (PE) changing rooms. The chapter draws on a seven-month ethnographic case study in a state-funded secondary school in northern England. Fieldwork combined participant observations of 120 single-sex PE lessons, 14 single-sex focus groups with 24 girls and 25 boys, and semi-structured interviews with nine PE teachers. The thematic analysis is grounded in figurational sociology to examine how contemporary sensitivities around nudity impact upon girls’ and boys’ feelings of shame and the fundamentally intertwined notion of embarrassment when changing attire for PE. Through a figurational lens, shame is a fear of social degradation which operates as part of the individual civilising process, whereas embarrassment is triggered by another person’s actions. Findings evidence how open-plan architectures and scarce privacy intensify peer-gaze, body comparison, and feelings of shame and embarrassment for many young people. How male and female PE teachers supervised, regulated, and accommodated boys’ and girls’ emotion-laden changing room preferences evidence gendered differences in processes in which shame operates within the changing room figuration. Viewing shame as a socially informed emotion, this chapter locates pupils’ changing room behaviours within longer-term Western civilising processes and contemporary sensitivities towards boys’ and girls’ semi-naked bodies.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	In Press
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15549

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