Türkiye'deki beden eğitimi sisteminde bedenin tanımlanması (1969-1983)

This thesis focuses on the physical education classes during the initial Ministry of Youth and Sport period (1969-1983) in Turkey from a sociology of the body point of view. Based on a discourse analysis of primary sources and in-depth interviews with physical education teachers and students, this study argues that the founding of the Ministry reflected not only an organizational, but also a discursive shift in the way the body and physical education were defined. As physical education and the body are dynamic, malleable, and ambiguous concepts, this thesis historicizes them and investigates the meanings attached to them by different sites of meaning production. With a theoretical framework that combines social constructionism and existential phenomenology it also uncovers how the bodies in physical education classes experienced, sensed and felt themselves and their surroundings. At least six different ways the body was defined in this period are identified, which are the mindful, mechanistic, nationalist, militarized, gendered, and disabled bodies. Although some of these bodies contrast each other, they existed simultaneously. This was made possible in relation to the needs of power centers, as how physical education and the body were defined enabled these centers to control, mold, and survey the bodies according to their social, political, and economic needs.