Sport, Gender and Power

The Rise of Roller Derby

Adele Pavlidis, Simone Fullagar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317051060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As a new breed of lifestyle sport enthusiasts 'derby grrrls' are pushing the boundaries of gender as they negotiate the nexus of pleasure, pain and power relations. Offering a socio-cultural analysis of the rise and reinvention of roller derby as both a new, globalized women's sport and an everyday creative leisure space, this book explores the manner in which roller derby has emerged as a gendered space for self-transformation, belonging and embodied contest, in which women are invited to experience their emotions differently, embrace pain and overcome limits. Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby presents detailed interview, ethnographic and autoethnographic material, together with a range of media texts to shed new light on the complex relationships of power experienced by women in derby as a sport culture, whilst also examining the darker relationships that characterise the sport, including those of inclusion and exclusion, difference and identity, and competition and participation. A contemporary feminist study of empowerment, sexual difference, gender and affect, this book will appeal to scholars of gender and sexuality, embodiment, feminist thought and the sociology of sport and leisure.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315610429-1

The whistle blows. The blockers push off their skates together, manoeuvring slowly round the track as they hustle, edging in front of the opposing team. The second whistle blows. The solo jammers¹burst out of the pack skating faster and faster. BANG. A blocker shifts directly into the path of a jammer at full speed. In a split second she dodges the hit and rebalances while skating along on one foot. I am in awe. ‘How does she skate like that?’

¹ Jammers are the points scorers in a game of roller derby. They wear a cover on their helmet with a star to signify their status as the jammer. They are often the fastest skaters in a team.

Waiting for my turn. Waiting for the bench manager to call me on, wishing I was a better skater. Let me out there to play! But what if I let my team down? I want to impress my team, contribute my embodied effort, be needed. Butterflies flit from my stomach into my scattered thoughts. The risk of injury briefly crosses my mind. If it happens, it happens. It wouldn't be too bad to break a bone. I have discovered amazing capacities – what my body can do – so I push through the lingering fear. Derby bodies suffer, experience extreme pleasure, euphoric highs, deep lows, and closeness to death even. My body is scarred, marked by sporting desires. I inhabit a woman's body that is transforming through the movement and relations of sport. And it has so far served me well.

I can't seem to shake the stress of the sideline. It seems that I can't ever do enough. Research needs to be done. I have teaching to attend to. Family issues, personal issues, emotional, mental. Research! Interviews! Writing! And the ever present demands of skating and derby training. Will I ever get there?

Finally it's my turn. I can't stop smiling: I am so excited and nervous. My face is beaming. Some of my team-mates smile back, others don't. I wish there were more people here to watch me, to witness my ‘becoming’ a derby grrrl! My ankle aches and I breathe through the pain. Quickly joining the pack, the hustle begins. I slowly skate in front of my opponent, getting down low with my arse up high, hoping to block her once the game starts. The whistle blows.

There is no more time for doubts. I skate, we merge into play and spectators witness my becoming as derby grrrl.²

² Throughout the book, Adele's auto/ethnographic writing is signified by the use of italics.

Introduction

Speaking (as) woman is not speaking of woman. It is not a matter of producing a discourse of which woman would be the object, or the subject. That said, by speaking (as) woman, one may attempt to provide a place for the ‘other’ as feminine. (Irigaray, 1993b, p. 135)

This book is a response to the contradictions, pleasures and tensions evoked through the narrative of becoming derby grrrl and the challenge of speaking (as) woman, even among women, in physical cultural spaces. Our challenge has been to articulate a place for the ‘other’ as feminine, specifically in sociological accounts of sport and leisure cultures. We seek to write through the complexity of women's gendered experiences on their own terms and to draw out the implications for managing, organising, and promoting sport differently. To do this, we refuse a representative account of the ‘true’ roller derby to instead write through the embodiment and multiplicity of derby as a ‘new’, ‘women only’ sport space.

Whether derby is positioned as a form of post-sport, lifestyle sport or post-feminist agency, the physical and digital cultural formation of the game offers a compelling site through which to understand the reinvention of women's sport and gender identity in contemporary culture. The question of how power relations play out among women is central to the dynamics on and off the track. The cultural landscape of derby is saturated with personal narratives, popular images and discourses of women's empowerment that celebrate what women's sporting bodies can do. As we look more closely, listen more intently and feel our way through the complexity of derby power relations the centrality of embodied affect becomes apparent: love, anger, aggression, fear, shame, pride, joy. We position our analysis within the ‘turn to affect’ that connects sociology, cultural studies and social psychology as we explore how the power of affect works upon the gendered subjectivities of derby players (Ahmed 2004; Blackman, 2012; Whetherell 2012).

We aim to illustrate how affects shape sociality for women in very particular ways, and what this tells us about sport as a transformational practice and the responsiveness of sport organisations. It is commonplace to hear sport described in affective terms as a site of passion, desire, pride and love. Yet, everyday sport talk often individualises and psychologises sport. Questions remain about how affects work through different registers of meaning that operate through individual and collective bodies in both physical and digital spaces. In relation to derby we ask, what do affects do? What do they enable or impede in the context of women's sport experiences? Our aim in this book is to demonstrate both the creative and destructive, the possibilities and the normalising ways affects work in roller derby. As noted by Leslie Heywood (2011), the debates in sport are often couched in terms of the macro versus micro, and competition versus participation (see also Hayhurst & Frisby, 2010). Through a focus on affects and emotion we demonstrate a way through some of the tensions created by these binaries. In particular we are interested in the ways love, pride, joy and belonging – all understood as ‘good’ affects most of the time – can lead to unexpected and sometimes disappointing outcomes, while shame, anger, aggression and even hatred can be productive of transformative, valuable changes for individual subjectivity and collective bodies, specifically in sport and physical cultures.

The situated, temporal, relational nature of affect is highlighted throughout this book. In this way, a range of encounters – between women, between women and men, between individual and collectives bodies – constitute the relational and gendered context of everyday sport cultures. For those bodies sexed as female in roller derby, power and its affects is productive of a range of intense meanings, decisions and actions. As Sara Ahmed writes, ‘Emotions in their very intensity involve miscommunication, such that even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don't necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling’ (Ahmed, 2004c, p. 10). One woman's experience of roller derby is different from another's, and these differences, in all their complexity, are made visible in this book.

For women, it has been a challenge to participate in competitive sport – whether recreationally, socially, professionally, ‘seriously’ or otherwise – in ways that do not constantly involve them being compared with men. Thinking through affect, we aim to question the gender binaries that inferiorise women's sport and embodiment, however, we do not seek to simply revalue derby as a celebration of ‘the feminine’. Our focus examines roller derby as a physical cultural practice that is gendered in a range of complex ways that shape sport performance, spaces for sport and beyond, as well as management dilemmas. We take up the perspectives of the women who participate in the creation of the ‘new’ sport of roller derby and investigate the repertoires through which everyday relations of power and affect are spoken. Our central questions are informed by a post-structural feminist trajectory (Braidotti, 2011; Irigaray, 1993a) that understands subjectivity not in static terms but rather through experiences of movement, relationality and multiplicity. We trace these ideas more specifically through recent debates concerning socio-cultural theories of affect that are beginning to permeate the sport and leisure literature (Ahmed, 2004a; Blackman, 2012; Heywood, 2011; Wetherell, 2012). Theorising roller derby as a physical cultural site through which certain affects are produced (pleasure, pain, excitement, anger, belonging, pride, shame) enables us to examine the significance of alternative sport cultures in women's lives and what this might mean for the ongoing governance and management of ‘new’ and emerging sports more broadly.

Physical Cultural Studies: Women's Bodies, Power and Society

We live in increasingly complex and uncertain times. In advanced capitalist countries, increasing ‘complexity’ and ‘uncertainty’ in the job market, education, the environment and international relations are evident (e.g. see Ang, 2011; Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994; Giddens, 1991). Local and global changes are shaping participation and provision in the sphere of leisure, sport and physical activity. For women in particular, these changes and complexities have given rise to hopeful possibilities as well as increased pressures (e.g. see Harris, 2004; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003; Markula, 2003; Wearing, 1998). Women have formal access to a range of leisure spaces and practices and in the West a more active and assertive version of female sexuality has become fashionable (Dobson, 2012). ‘Femininity’ is no longer dependant on the possession of traits such as demureness, service and passivity, but is now much more associated with ‘sexy’ and active body representations (Gill, R. 2007). How this connects with sport and leisure, and specifically roller derby, is what is of concern here.

Within Australia and like some other OECD countries, traditional sports, such as football, tennis, netball, basketball and cricket are facing the challenge of declining or stablised participation (Hajkowicz, et al., 2013). At the same time various ‘new’ sport and physical cultures have emerged that are more loosely organised or otherwise considered ‘different’, such as surfing, crossfit, snowboarding, kite surfing, ultimate Frisbee, parkour and, more recently, the revived version of roller derby. These ‘post-sports’ have been celebrated as sites where women (and men) can renegotiate identity, resist gender norms and transform gender relations (e.g. see MacKay & Dallaire, 2012; Thorpe, 2005; Wheaton, 2013; Woodward, 2009; Young & Dallalre, 2008). Sport and physical activity have been examined and conceptualised from a range of perspectives that seek to classify or categorise their formation – for example, as ‘new’ sport, ‘lifestyle’ sport, ‘alternative’ sport, ‘subcultural’ sport and indeed ‘extreme’ sport, where risk and danger are central to the experience. These different analytical categories have mapped out the changing meaning and practice of ‘sport’ and physical cultures in the context of globalisation, commodification and individuation (Atkinson & Young, 2008; Beal, 1999; Breivik, 2010; Donnelly, 2006; Giardina & Donnelly, 2008; Heywood, 2008; Kellett & Russell, 2009; Rinehart & Sydnor, 2003; Wheaton, 2004). Rather than define roller derby as any one ‘type’ of ‘sport’, we acknowledge the women involved in this study and the various, sometimes ambiguous ways in which they describe this activity they love (and sometimes hate).

In this way we position our research broadly within the emerging field of physical cultural studies, with an explicit focus on interdisciplinarity and post-structural feminisms. As Andrews and Silk comment in their introduction to a special edition of the Sociology of Sport Journal, Physical Cultural Studies is ‘an over-arching sensibility or framework’ (2011, p. 3), rather than a particular theory or method for the study of physical cultures (Markula, 2011, p. 938). Physical cultural studies is a framework that enables the taken-for-granted notions of sport and physical activity to be questioned, undone and redone. This ‘undoing’ and ‘redoing’ – or, more precisely, ‘rewriting’ of sport and physical cultures – creates, as Andrews states, ‘potentially empowering forms of knowledge and understanding’ that can ‘illuminate, and intervene into, sites of physical cultural injustice and inequity’ (2008, p. 54). The gender inequities that affect women's opportunities to play sport is most certainly in need of illumination and sport itself as an historically masculine cultural practice is in need of reinvention, and this, broadly, is the task of this book.

One of our major aims is to contribute to feminist reconceptualisations of sport as a site of physical and digital culture where new possibilities exist for different desires, forms and embodied experiences. Some want to compete and win, while others desire opportunities for participation, expression and belonging (among other forms of sociality). Therefore, in situating our book within the field of physical cultural studies, we also emphasise its position as a feminist text aimed at transforming the social relations of affect in roller derby and the broader social, technological and organisational context within which it is embedded. Women's bodies in roller derby are shaped by and in turn shape many relations of affect. They compete through pleasure and pain, they win, and they lose. They manage, organise and negotiate tensions, complexities and ambiguities. Women's bodies blush, rage, love, bruise and break. Understanding the profoundly cultural formation of these affects, as women experience them, are what is at stake in this book. While we are concerned with ‘sport’ itself in a broad and inclusive way, it is also concerned with what happens ‘off the track’ in relation to women's lives at work, leisure and home. The intensity of relationships, friendships, tensions and organisational dynamics are significant in understanding sport practices as they exist within the broader cultural context of sportscapes where playing, watching, commenting, and consuming all intersect (Woermann, 2012).

Therefore, as a field of study that pays attention to that which ‘constitutes its object of analysis’ as much as it focuses on ‘illuminating the [physical] cultural operations and experiences of power and power relations’ (Silk & Andrews, 2011, p. 8), physical cultural studies aligns strongly with this current project. It could also be considered a ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9), as we draw upon the writings of Luce Irigaray, Rosi Bradotti, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault and others to write a specifically feminist physical cultural studies. At the beginning of this chapter, we quoted Luce Irigaray, who wrote, that ‘by speaking (as) woman, one may attempt to provide a place for the “other” as feminine’ (Irigaray, 1993b p. 135). As an examination of the affects of power in roller der...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theory, Practice and Affect: Feminist Approaches to Sport and Sport Management
• 3 Writing/Researching Roller Derby: Methods for Feminist Physical Cultural Studies
• 4 ‘Roller Derby Saved my Soul’: Belonging and Becoming
• 5 The ‘Dark Side’ of Belonging: Power and Exclusion in Roller Derby
• 6 Feminist Sport Management: Affects and Governance in Roller Derby
• 7 Conclusion: A ‘New’ Derby Ethos?
• Appendix: Table of Participants
• References
• Index