We drew on Foucault's notion of 'practices of the self' to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/ fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an 'appropriate' body shape.

Physical performance discourses are concerned with improving fitness and competing to win or achieve a personal best. Older people are commonly not recognized as acceptable or normal subjects of performance discourses because they are traditionally positioned as weak and less able. Yet the number of older people participating in physically demanding competitive sports is increasing. The purpose of this paper is to use a poststructural framework to explore how Masters athletes use performance discourses to define their participation. Interviews and observations were conducted with 138 participants (ages 55–94) of the 8th Australian Masters Games. The findings indicate that performance discourses work both as a medium for redefining what it means to be an older athlete and for re-inscribing normalized constructs of the acceptable older athlete.

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts-a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self-narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of 'worthwhile' or 'good' lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work-life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.

The hegemony of neoliberalism as an economic and Governmental rationality on a global scale is well documented. How it has come to be that way, and how its relevance is upheld is a complex theoretical and historical-empirical question. This article contributes to the discussion by examining the ways in which neoliberal discourse enters into the production of subjectivity and comes to operate at the level of desire. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways, and within and across a multiplicity of social sites, the article focuses on the popular Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme as a technology of neoliberal subjectification. The article analyses how neoliberal discourse manifests itself in the Award's promotional material and programme and, drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews, how the Award scheme is taken up by students in a prestigious Australian private girls' school.

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