Moving into derby
Putting on skates for the first time. Standing up, feeling wobbly. Practice, practice, practice. Getting stronger, more stable, faster. Buying gear: bags, pads, patches, helmets, stickers, merch. There is an expansion of possibility. I am becoming-derby as my skates, my pads, my team, the rules and regulations of derby, and the various spaces of training and skating become entangled with my everyday life.
Moving on
Yeah. I’ve kind of moved on now. It was like a really awesome part of my life. I even have tattoos about it. It was a hugely important part of my life. But it’s not a part of my life anymore. It was a hugely distinct chapter. Like I think, I used to do motorcycle riding. When I was 21 I got rid of a car and got a motorbike, and then I did roller derby, and I still had my motorbike. And I only recently sold my motorbike because I realised I’m just holding on to memories. Because my life isn’t like that anymore. My motorbike doesn’t mean I get to stay up to two o’clock in the morning drinking coffee with a really good group of mates anymore, because they’ve all also had babies. Like, so sometimes you just have to let shit go.
As a writer-scholar-skater-woman (and more!) who ended up doing a feminist ethnography about roller derby, I experienced the joys and thrill of the sport, as well as the tensions, risks and stresses of being part of a ‘new’, full contact sport that was organized completely by volunteers. So many people (mostly women, including trans women, and non-binary people, but also some men) have been attracted to roller derby (including myself) – it’s cool, it’s edgy, it looks fun and retro. We all bought skates and threw ourselves into training and the derby community. For many it was a place of belonging, transformation, ‘soul saving’. It helped women get through grief, break-ups, and domestic violence. It was transformative. This tough, rough and dangerous sporting space was troubling how we think about femininity, care, mental health, and recovery.
But not always. And not for everyone. For some people, even though it might have started out as a place of excitement and community, internal politics, conflict and frustration left them feeling dejected, annoyed, or even enraged and depressed.
How could something so good have turned out so bad?
As a high-risk activity (roller skating while trying to push another person down) roller derby embraces the tensions between multiple, and constant movements. Some of these movements are productive (getting fitter, bodies changing, making friends, feeling a sense of belonging), some destructive (injuries, pressures, bullying, organisational politics). I wanted to know more about these movements and to explore the antithetical (irrational?) relation between care, competitiveness and aggression, that seemed to emerge for women in roller derby.
During the COVID-19 pandemic I put out a call for participants on Facebook and Twitter, with the only criteria being that they used to play roller derby. The tweet gained traction and was shared around the world. Over 15 women and one non-binary person volunteered to participate. Those who came forward wanted their story heard.
The stories told to me were diverse and powerful. I heard of the ways derby provided a space unlike any other to these women. A space of proximity to other women, of risk and danger and fun and expression. A space to embrace parts of themselves that did not always have room for expression in other sports or other part of their lives. Yet for these particular women who had left roller derby, their time in the sport had ended. Whether they felt bullied or excluded, bored or just felt like their time was done, their experiences of movement – into, through, out of and away from – can tell us something about transformation and wellbeing in women’s lives.
Aggression, violence and competition together describe some of the worst aspects of social life. Yet their power, or force, is sometimes required to break through or free us from certain entanglements or situations. One does not simply ‘leave’ a domestic violent relationship; instead, a person must muster every ounce of their courage and tenacity and summon all their resources to make that ‘break’. For women in particular, being ‘nice’ has been hugely important, yet being nice is not simply being kind or compassionate, but being self-sacrificing, allowing people to treat one (us? them?) as secondary citizens, loading us with labour (physical, cultural, social and emotional labour) and wondering why we are not smiling more.
In the most general sense, the relation between care, competitiveness and aggression is antithetical. Yet what my current work has to a degree demonstrated is that the gendered aspects of competitiveness and aggression in relation to care for the self – and, by extension, others – have useful and productive affects on which the skaters drew for their own subjectivities.
About the author:
Dr Adele Pavlidis is author of Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby (with Simone Fullagar, Routldge, 2014) and Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery (with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She is currently working on her third book and works as a senior lecturer at Griffith University in Australia where she teaches sociology. She is interested in social, cultural and personal transformation and engages in poststructuralist, new materialist and feminist theories of affect to think and write about bodies, movement and change.
Find an article related to this blog on the F&P website at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09593535221104878
