Seriousness and Women's Roller Derby

Gender, Organization, and Ambivalence

Maddie Breeze

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137504838
• eBook ISBN: 9781137504852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores seriousness in practice in the unique sports context of contemporary women's flat track roller derby. The author presents a stimulating argument for a sociology of seriousness as a productive contribution to understandings of gender, organization and the mid-ranges of agency between dichotomies of voluntarism and determinism.

1

A Sport for Women Who Don’t Like Sport?

What do you think your research will be about now that derby’s so different to when you first started?

Aladdin, December 2011

It’s early evening one Saturday, late in November 2011, and I am walking home with Aladdin after two hours of roller derby practice. We were cycling the seven-mile journey back into town, but Aladdin has a pain in her shoulder, worsened by training and by her heavy backpack full of kit, so with a few miles left to go we get off and walk, pushing our bikes through the outskirts of the city. Tomorrow will bring the first session of a new round of the ‘Fresh Meat’ program, in which new skaters are inducted into the league through 16 weeks of basic skills and ‘minimum standards’ training, eventually taking an assessment to become eligible for full membership, and potentially a place on a team. While these hopeful new recruits may be familiar with roller derby from spectating at a bout, watching video footage online, or from the 2010 UK release of the Hollywood film Whip It!, for the majority the initial two-hour Fresh Meat session will be their very first roller derby practice. It will be the first time they lace up a pair of quad skates, pull on a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards, slobber and lisp around a new mouth guard and take their first strides on roller skates, and learn how to play flat track roller derby.

Aladdin is scheduled to coach this initial practice, and as we walk home she plans how she will introduce derby to the new skaters. She has already achieved notoriety among a previous ‘batch’ of Fresh Meat, by telling them, ‘You will cry at least once during practice, and you will throw up’. The next day, in another sports center on the edge of the city and after the main league practice, I overhear as she instructs about 25 new skaters, who are sat around awkwardly and listening enthusiastically, ‘People used to say that roller derby was “like sport for women who don’t like sport”, but actually, it is for people who really, really like sport’.

Throughout 2008, the beginnings of my own roller derby involvement, ‘What is roller derby?’ was a tediously familiar question to hear, asked by sleazy men in bars, curious family and friends and cynical fellow academics alike. Another skater, Pauline Baynes, and I used to make a joke of this, repeatedly asking each other in a faux-naive voice, ‘What is a roller derby?’, the ‘a’ in our snarky intonation indicating the supposed ignorance of imagined interlocutors; we knew what roller derby was, they did not.

Writing this opening chapter means providing a definition of roller derby in a context where what roller derby is was apparently changing fast; for instance from being ‘a sport for women who don’t like sport’ to being ‘for people who really, really like sport’. Contemporary roller derby in the UK is self-organized on a do-it-yourself (DIY) not-for-profit model, developed outside established sports institutions, and was initially played almost entirely by women. Roller derby thus occupies an ambivalent, marginal position relative to the gender regimes of a broader cultural field of sport, where sportswomen’s struggles for legitimacy are well rehearsed. Existing research interprets roller derby as a unique context, particularly conducive to reconfigurations of both gender and sport. The skaters I researched with, however, were increasingly and overwhelmingly concerned with ‘getting taken seriously’, with demonstrating roller derby’s similarity to other sports practices, and with its recognition as a ‘real, legitimate, serious sport’. They grappled with roller derby’s shifting position, as when Aladdin (who chose her own pseudonym here) introduces roller derby to new skaters. Roller derby had a problem with sporting legitimacy, and particularly with getting taken seriously. This book is about how one group of skaters defined and negotiated this problem.

This opening chapter introduces roller derby by presenting an overview of the rules of the game, a short history of contemporary women’s flat track roller derby, and the case study league that provides the ethnographic basis for this book. Skaters’ concerns with getting taken seriously are contextualized by its position as a recently emergent, DIY, and non-professionalized sporting practice, but most of all by the gender dynamics of a broader field of sport. While existing theory and research contextualizes why serious recognition presents such a problem for skaters, and suggests that seriousness can be understood as an object of gender contestation, such literatures do not explore how seriousness is negotiated in practice. The chapter closes by departing from precedents in existing research to propose an analytical focus on seriousness itself, and the idea of non-/seriousness, as ways of understanding the dilemma that skaters face; how to pursue ‘serious’ recognition (as ‘a sport for people who really, really like sport’) without entirely becoming what they initially defined themselves in opposition to (as ‘a sport for women who don’t like sport’). Through attitudes and practices of non-/seriousness, skaters both make claims for roller derby’s serious recognition and refuse and rework the terms within which such claims can be made.

What is a roller derby? Rules of the game

At its simplest, roller derby is a full-contact, simultaneous offense/defense team race. In practice of course, it is almost always much more complicated than that. Roller derby is played between two teams with up to 14 skaters apiece, on a flat oval track, commonly marked out in gaffer tape on the floor of an indoor sports court. Matches – ‘bouts’ – last one hour, split into two 30-minute halves, which in turn are subdivided into ‘jams’ that last a maximum of two minutes each. Both teams field five skaters per jam; the remaining players wait on the team’s bench and are organized by their line-up manager in anticipation of when, at the end of each jam, there is a 30-second pause in gameplay and each team sends a fresh set of five skaters to the track.

One skater from each five is the jammer, identifiable by the star on her helmet cover. The jammer is the point scorer and achieves one point for every opposition skater she passes without fouling and within track boundaries. At the start of each jam, both jammers line up slightly behind the other skaters – the ‘blockers’ – four for each team. At the whistles signaling for the jam to begin, both teams jostle strategically for position; skaters plant themselves in the way of opponents, skate full force into members of the opposite team, form defensive ‘walls’ with their teammates, and begin to move in roughly the same direction, anticlockwise, around the track. Both jammers must pass through, and overtake, the ‘pack’ made up of blockers from both teams. Blockers are simultaneously engaged in assisting their jammer and impeding the passage of the opposing jammer, and use hip checks, shoulder checks, and full-body checks to knock their opponents down or off the track, as well as tactical variations in speed, direction of travel, and pack formation.

The first jammer to make her way through the pack without picking up any penalties is awarded ‘lead jammer’ status, which brings the strategic advantage of being able to ‘call off the jam’ and end gameplay before the full two minutes have elapsed – often used deliberately to prevent the opposing jammer from scoring. Speed is important for jammers; once they break through the pack on their initial pass, they need to sprint around the track to fully catch up with the pack, in order to make their way through the pack again. It is only on this second pass through the pack that jammers can start to accumulate one point for every opposing blocker that they pass.

As well as speed, jammers need high levels of stamina and fitness to recover from the hits they receive and to keep sprinting for up to two minutes at a time. Agility is essential, in order to rapidly adjust speed and direction in response to blockers trying to hit them down or out of bounds, to dodge around positional formations of blockers designed to get in their way and slow them down, and to jump over fallen skaters in their path. In turn, the four blockers from each team will be slowing down the pace of the pack to ease their own jammer’s passage, pushing opponents out of bounds or trapping them behind a defensive wall, trying to dominate or control the opposing blockers and distract them from their jammer’s approach, or conversely speeding up the pack to make it harder for the opposition jammer to pass and collect points.

The rules of contemporary roller derby are devised, maintained, and updated by the international governing body for women’s flat track roller derby, the Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Association, which is based in the USA and began as the United League’s Coalition in 2004 (WFTDA, 2013a). In 2013, a five-member volunteer board of directors, all skaters or retired skaters, oversaw the WFTDA. In 2009, the WFTDA hired its first employees, an Executive Director, and an Insurance Administrator (WFTDA, 2009). In 2013, the WFTDA rule set filled a 68-page document (WFTDA, 2013b: n/p).

Penalties include blocking to or with the head, blocking another skater in the back, tripping, and/or elbowing, as well as ‘cutting track’ (skating outside the track boundaries and then reentering to gain tactical advantage), ‘blocking out of bounds’ (initiating contact outside the track boundaries), and ‘blocking out of play’ (initiating contact beyond the defined ‘pack’ of skaters), and can earn the responsible skater a trip to the penalty box, during which time her team must skate short. ‘Insubordination’ (including ‘the repeated use of obscene, profane, or abusive language or gestures directed at an official’) and ‘misconduct’ (for instance ‘executing a block on an opponent who is down’) are also punishable offenses, as is ‘gross misconduct’, for which a skater can be expelled from the bout (WFTDA, 2013b: n/p).

During bouts, a crew of on-skates referees and non-skating officials (NSOs), usually affiliated to leagues, are responsible for enforcing the rules, keeping the score, and calling and tracking penalties. In roller derby, ‘league’ has a slightly different meaning to what readers might expect. Leagues are stand-alone organizations, geographically located and comprising anything from just ten to more than a hundred members, that field between one and three ‘travel teams’ to compete against teams from other leagues around the UK and increasingly from mainland Europe and North America. Especially in the earliest days of contemporary roller derby in the UK (2006–2010), referee positions were filled predominantly, but not exclusively, by men. Refereeing was generally seen as an acceptable and supportive way for men to get involved in women’s roller derby, and many skaters successfully persuaded their husbands, boyfriends, friends, and brothers to join a league and train to become referees.

What is a roller derby? A short history

US-based, skater-authored accounts trace contemporary roller derby’s emergence to Austin, Texas, and the years 2000–2001 (Barbee & Cohen, 2010; Joulwan, 2007; Mabe, 2007), but draw on a longer history of various incarnations of the sport. Barbee and Cohen (2010: 11–12) cite an ‘unprecedented six-day skating marathon’ held at Madison Square Gardens in 1885 and the roller skating races that took place there periodically for the next 50 years. In 1930s North America, Leo Seltzer, a former film distributor, was promoting ‘derbies’, or ‘Transcontinental Roller Derby’, marathon races played by mixed-sex couples trading laps on a banked track until they had skated 57,000 laps, or roughly the distance between New York and Los Angeles (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 11), New York and San Diego (Joulwan, 2007: 45), or just ‘across the United States’ (Mabe, 2007: 23). At that time, roller derby was essentially a feat of endurance, a cheap form of Depression-era entertainment (Mabe, 2007: 21).

According to popular narrative, Seltzer noticed that spectators responded most enthusiastically to collisions between skaters (Mabe, 2007: 31), ‘when bodies hit the floor’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 14), or to ‘bickering, brawls and bad blood’ (Joulwan, 2007: 46). Seltzer thus devised a set of rules that incorporated full body contact and the accumulation of points, with two co-ed teams ‘battling it out’ (Mabe, 2007: 32) and in which ‘feuds, fistfights, and a point system became standard parts of the action’ (Joulwan, 2007: 46). Seltzer promoted mixed-sex ‘roller derbies’ until the 1950s, with ‘dramatic fights’ and ‘pre-scripted antics’ (Murray, 2012: 68) continuing in games that were increasingly televised, so much so that audiences were soon ‘oversaturated’ (Mabe, 2007: 46). In the early 1950s, Seltzer attempted to minimize spectacularly contrived fights and feuds, so that roller derby might ‘restructure itself as a serious sport’ (Deford, 1971: 73). In 1958 however, amid waning audiences, and after brief trips to England, France, and Spain (Mabe, 2007: 43), Seltzer passed on his business to his son, Jerry, who emphasized ‘outrageous, and bigger-than-life personality skaters’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 21) and approached roller derby ‘like the money-making venture it was’ (Mabe, 2007: 43).

Jerry Seltzer’s roller derby folded in 1972 (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 24) with television coverage almost lost, and was followed by the even ‘more outlandish theatrics’ (Mabe, 2007: 47) of the televised RollerGames, which itself folded by the end of 1973 (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 24). In the United States various co-ed incarnations of roller derby continued through the 1970s and into the spandex years of the 1980s when the televised Rock-n-Roller-Games (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 25), or just RollerGames (Mabe, 2007: 48) incorporated a figure-eight track, wall-of-death, and alligator pits, around which skaters raced to break ties, pushing the losers into the pit for a bout of alligator wrestling – RollerGames lasted less than a year (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 26; Mabe, 2007: 48).

In 1998 Jerry Seltzer was back on the scene as ‘The Commissioner’ of Rollerjam and the new World Skating League – another novel, still mixed-sex, version of roller derby this time played on inline skates. Rollerjam was orchestrated for television right from the start, via the financial backing of The Nashville Network (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 27, Mabe, 2007: 51). While the alligator pits were gone, Rollerjam was resolutely ‘sports entertainment’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 27) striving to ‘straddle the fine line between pure athleticism and good old-fashioned entertainment’ (Mabe, 2007: 51). Rollerjam was essentially a ‘reality [TV] show mixed with sport’ with ‘concocted plots’, rivalries, love-affairs and friendships between teams invented and mobilized as marketing strategies’ (Mabe, 2007: 54). After two years and as ratings began to dwindle, Rollerjam’s producers ushered in a return to ‘catfights and hair-pulling’, increasingly ‘skimpy’ costumes (Barbee & Cohen, 2020: 31), and ‘evening gown battles’ (Mabe, 2007: 57) until eventually ‘the sport was overshadowed by storylines borrowed from pro wrestling’ (Joulwan, 2007: 51). The final episode of Rollerjam aired in January 2001.

Stories of roller derby’s twentieth-century origins and development, especially as told retrospectively by participants in twenty-first-century roller derby (Barbee & Cohen, Joulwan, Mabe [US], and Murray [UK] – all skaters or retired skaters), combine several key themes that are central to both the 2001 emergence of contemporary derby and to this book. Historical incarnations of roller derby involved men and women on the same teams, even though in practice gameplay was often segregated according to sex, with men and women rarely on the track together (Murray, 2012: 54), while in the twentieth century the ‘outlandish theatrics’ of much roller derby interrupted the straightforward classification of participants as professional athletes (many of these skaters were paid to skate). Similarly, twentieth-century roller derby was a ‘money-making venture’, managed, promoted, and mass-mediated with a view to making profit; ‘Leo [Seltzer] was determined that television took note of his sport’ (Mabe, 2007: 38). Managers and promoters performed the organizational work of roller derby.

The emergence of contemporary, twenty-first-century roller derby can be partly credited to the work of Dan Policarpo, or ‘Devil Dan’, who recruited women from the alternative bar scene in Austin, Texas, 2001. Policarpo had a vision of a resurrected carnivalesque roller derby, with bears, unicycles, and fire (Murray, 2012: 11) as well as ‘midgets’ and ‘multimedia presentations’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2007: 33). According to Brick, Policarpo explicitly recruited women ‘with tattoos, Bettie Page haircuts and guts’ (2008: n/p) and formed them into four teams: Putas del Fuego, Hellcats, Holy Rollers, and the Rhinestone Cowgirls (Barbee & Cohen, 2007: 33). These skaters took on new pseudonyms – ‘derby names’ – such as Electra Blu, Lunatic, Bettie Rage, Sparkle Plenty, and La Muerta, and Policarpo chose four of them as team captains (Barbee & Cohen, 2007: 33). In the wake of a fundraiser held later that year, Policarpo disappeared from Austin. The team captains assumed leadership roles, dubbed themselves ‘The She-E-Os’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2007: 36), and inaugurated their league as ‘Bad Girl Good Woman Productions’ (Mabe, 2007: 61) skating on a banked track. The skaters trained themselves, adapted the rules, self-funded their teams, and held their first public bouts in the summer of 2002 (Mabe, 2007: 61). Mabe suggests that this new form of roller derby ‘added a new twist to the sport – no men allowed’ (2007: 61).

The She-E-Os remained in leadership positions and ‘began to take steps to transform the league into a for-profit, registered business’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 44). The majority of the skaters began to dispute their leadership, arguing instead for ‘communal ownership, where every skater had a voice’ (Barbee & Cohen, 2010: 44). These management disputes eventually resulted in a split. Fifteen skaters, the She-E-Os and their supporters, remained with BGGW and became TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls, continuing to skate on a banked track, while 65 skaters left to form a new group, Texas Rollergirls, skating on a flat track (ibid.: 44–45). Texas Rollergirls are widely recognized as the first example of women’s flat track roller derby, and thus of contemporary roller derby (Barbee & Cohen, 2010; Joulwan, 2007; Mabe, 2007).

Skating on a flat track eliminated the need for the expensive and time-consuming construction of a banked track; roller derby could now be played almost anywhere with a flat surface and soon spread to major cities across the US and Canada, and to the UK in 2006 with the inauguration of the London Roller Girls (LRG). This form of roller derby was not-for-profit and played by women, who skated and organized their own leagues as amateurs and volunteers on a DIY organizational model.

While retellings of roller derby’s colorful history often articulate its contemporary women-led, DIY, and not-for-profit organizational ethos in contrast to previous incarnations, a great deal of continuity resides in how skaters today are still struggling to strike a ‘delicate balance of sport and color’ (Mabe, 2007: 58) and wrestling with very similar issues to those that Leo Seltzer faced in the 1950s in trying to ‘restructure’ roller derby as a ‘serious sport’ (Deford, 1971: 73). While it is tempting to assert that roller derby petered out in the past because of contrived spectacle, managed in pursuit of profit, some of the more sensational elements continued well into its contemporary revival, as did perennial tensions between ‘pure athleticism and good old-fashioned entertainment’ (Mabe, 2007: 51). Defining roller derby as a ‘sport for women who don’t like sport’ and/or as ‘for people who really, really like sport’ takes place in this inherited context, as well as in relation to a broader field of sport in which gender is very much at stake; defining roller derby is part of its gendered struggle for sporting legitimacy.

Skaters taking on new derby names, wearing clothes more akin to themed costumes than sports uniforms, frequently including fishnet tights or other novelty hosiery, sparkly or stripy socks, makeup or ‘warpaint’, short skirts or ‘hot pants’, were all common practice at the founding of the case study league in 2008 and at the beginning of the research in 2010. Variously described in terms of a ‘feminine-punk’ aesthetic or a ‘violent, sexuall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Glossary
• 1. A Sport for Women Who Don’t Like Sport?
• 2. Beginnings: How Weird It Was Back in the Day
• 3. Becomings: More Structured and More of a Sport
• 4. Just a Big Sexy Joke?
• 5. Making It Up
• 6. Non-/Seriousness: Playing the Game and Changing the Rules
• Bibliography
• Index