Conference Agenda

Gender in physical education: teachers’ perspectives and experiences across diverse cultural contexts

Physical Education (PE) plays a vital role in promoting lifelong wellbeing, with gender equity being a key component of both individual and community health. Understanding how gender is perceived and addressed in PE settings is essential for developing inclusive and effective justice educational practices, aligning with the sustainable development goals outlined in Agenda 2030 (United Nations, 2018). Given the importance of PE both individually and collectively within society, innovative strategies are needed to motivate people of all ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds to become more active. According to the World Health Organization (2024), globally, women are more likely to be inactive than men. There has been a historical exclusion and marginalization of girls in PE (Evans, 1989; Hill, 2015; Lagestad, 2017; &Lamb et al., 2018), and research shows that girls have a lower activity level in PE than boys (Chen et al., 2014; Lagestad &Mikalsen, 2023; Viciana et al., 2016). Although numerous studies have explored gender and PE, no study has compared gender related aspect of PE in a Nordic country such as Finland, with those regions in the Middle Eastern such as the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), from teachers’ perspectives. Teachers are crucial in implementing PE, shaping students’ self-esteem, attitudes toward physical activity, and engagement (Granero-Gallegos et al., 2023; Krings, 2023; Guo et al., 2023). Little comparative research has examined how PE teachers understand and address gender in physical education in relation to curricula, pedagogy, and socio-cultural norms. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, this study examines how dominant forms of habitus within different cultural contexts shape teachers’ perceptions and experiences of physical education (PE), physical activity (PA), and gender. Focusing on fifth-grade primary school PE teachers’ experiences and perspectives in Finland and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), this study explores how cultural, social, curricular, and pedagogical factors shape the positioning and enactment of gender in PE. By examining the perspectives of PE teachers, this study explores the unique gender-related challenges and opportunities in physical education that they perceive, experience, and reflect upon.

Social arrangements of work, gender, and family have undergone profound transformations over recent decades. The traditional male breadwinner model has been replaced by adult worker and dual-career models as well as by dual-earner households, accompanied by a pluralization and diversification of life forms (Walby 1997). In this context, gender equality and diversity policies have contributed over the past decade to a rising share of women’s participation in paid employment. However, as numerous studies indicate, these transformations have not resulted in a sustainable resolution of work–care reconciliation problems (Hochschildt 1989; Fraser 2016). Instead, institutional incompatibilities have been displaced into neoliberal forms of individualization and self-responsibilization (Gill 2014).

Care work has increasingly emerged as a contested social field. Keeping the material, practical and power-related (such as neo-colonial) conditions of care work in mind (Lutz 2018; Hochschildt 2015), our paper approaches care work from the perspective of knowledge production and the politics of knowledge. In late modernity knowledge must be understood as a highly important, widely distributed resource that is produced, negotiated, and interpreted by a variety of actors (Stehr 1994). Not least with regard to such negotiation processes, feminist theories in particular emphasized that knowledge is always situated and embedded in powerful, gendered relations and organizations (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991; Acker 1990).

Building on the research project „Radical Domesticity“, this contribution examines the knowledge production of so-called TradWife influencers in the context of care work. TradWives (traditional wives) are influencers on image-based platforms such as Instagram and TikTok who present themselves by publicly displaying domestic practices such as raising children, cooking and cleaning. Several studies have examined the neo-traditional concept of womanhood, whose aesthetics and visual language often correspond to right-wing extremist, white supremacist, and conservative religious positions (Koca-Helvacı 2025). Less attention has been paid to the specific references to the care crisis although it plays an important role in TradWife content, sometimes as a biographical impetus for personal retraditionalization, sometimes as an anti-feminist argument (Stotzer & Nelson 2025).

Against the backdrop of the ‘care crisis’, which also raises questions about how a society should reproduce itself (Fraser 2017), it can be assumed that TradWife influencers exploit the issue to align it with conservative, sometimes far-right visions of ‚just‘ and ‚equal‘ futures. Accordingly, this paper addresses two central research questions: (1) What knowledge about care ist produced and negotiated by TradWife influencers? And (2) how is this knowledge mediated?

The paper thus draws on „critical perspectives on gender and the politics of knowledge production in education“ and examines how educational knowledge about care is taken up, selectively appropriated, and rearticulated in new discursive and aesthetic forms within digital publics. Using the example of TradWife influencers, the analysis explores how feminist and educational bodies of knowledge on care, family, and gender not only circulate but are reinterpreted, depoliticized, or re-politicized in popular media contexts. The article asks on the one hand under which conditions educational and feminist knowledge can unfold transformative potential and how, on the other hand, this potential is simultaneously constrained, appropriated, or embedded in counter-hegemonic as well as reactionary projects.