Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au From Riot Grrrls to roller derby? Exploring the relations between gender, music and sport The current revival of the sport of roller derby was initiated in 2001 by members of the Riot Grrrl movement in Austin, Texas. Since then, the sport has grown rapidly across the globe. In roller derby, style, costume and attitude are integrated with skills, embodied competencies and fitness, providing an example of the tensions between creativity and constraint that are possible within sport. From its direct links to DIY punk and the Riot Grrrl movement through to the more implicit links to improvisation and competence, roller derby provides a space to explore some under-acknowledged connections that exist between sport and music. This article argues that roller derby enables women to experience a creative, gendered leisure space in which music, play and competitive sport come together, with women placed at its centre. Using my own experiences as a new roller derby participant, as well as observations of popular discourses about roller derby, this article outlines the ways in which sport and music are related, allowing women to shift between multiple subject positions not previously available to them, as well as highlighting directions for future research.
As with other illicit drugs, such as heroin or cocaine, illicit steroids and other performance and image enhancing drugs (PIED) have for some time been assumed to involve an inherent degree of danger and risk. This is due to the unknown and potentially dangerous substances present in them; fakes and counterfeits are of particular concern. Many of these 'risks' are unknown and unproven. In addition, a tendency to abstract these risks by reference to forensic data tends to negate the specific risks related to local PIED markets, and this in turn has led to much being missed regarding the broader nature of those markets and how buyers and suppliers interact and are situated within them. This article reports on research that sought to explore each of these issues in one mid-sized city in South West England. A snapshot image is provided of what the steroids and other image or performance enhancing drugs market 'looked like' in this particular city in 2013: how it operated; how different users sought out and purchased their PIED; the beliefs they held about the PIED they sourced; and the methods they employed to feel confident in the authenticity of their purchases. A forensic analysis was undertaken of a sample of user-sourced PIED as a complementary approach. The results showed almost all of these drugs to be poor-quality fakes and/or counterfeits. The level of risk cannot be 'read off' from forensic findings, and poor-quality fakes/counterfeits cannot simply be considered an attempt to defraud. Users believed they had received genuine PIED that were efficacious, and employed a range of basic approaches to try to ensure genuine purchases. Many, if not most, transactions at the 'street' level were akin to 'social supply' rather than commercial in nature.
Given the rising global use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by professional sport organisations, this paper acts to consolidate the state of scholarly research using a systematic quantitative literature review. Our aim was to critically analyse the literature on CSR and professional sport organisations and in doing so ask, how is the global research at the nexus of sport and CSR poised to deliver social good? Our findings indicate the presence of variability in approaches to investigating CSR in professional sport, and the lack of discrete reporting of target audiences and initiatives evidenced across our sample. We suggest there is potential to learn from other disciplinary approaches to CSR research and to push towards conceptual clarity. Finally, sport organisations can lever sports' unique qualities to deliver, engage and unite people across a range of boundaries, and to promote and create social value which is even more important as we navigate the post-COVID-19 environment of uncertainty and resource constraints.
This article explores how the global revival of roller derby as an alternative sport for women has been mobilised through on-line social networks, league promotion and fan sites that create imagined communities of 'roller grrrls'. In the creation of sport culture we argue that the virtual performance of 'derby' identities is as significant as the embodiment of play. Like other sports derby sites mobilise affect (passion, pleasure, pain, desire to play) through a discourse of 'empowerment' that urges women to overcome limits and reinvent gendered subjectivity. However, within the virtual space of roller derby complex affects are produced and circulated within power relations that can include or exclude. Through an analysis of the way affect is mobilized in selected roller derby sites we identify how virtual sport identities are connected through the movement of 'affects' across bodies and leagues. These affects both circumscribe and undermine the notion of a single derby community.
Driven by an ethos of self-organization and empowerment women involved in the revived version of roller derby have created an embodied and virtual leisure practice that challenges gender norms and invites different identities. However, tensions exist in the way different women negotiate the space of roller derby and the meaning of playing, belonging and becoming "derby grrrls". This article presents findings from a qualitative study of roller derby in Australia to make connections between feminist theories of affect and the growing body of work on intersectionality. We explore how identity categories intersect to shape the meaning of roller derby for different women. Narratives recount the complex affective relations (passion, frustration, pride, shame) that women negotiate in forming leisure identities in relation to the social context of their lives. The article aims to contribute to the development of feminist thinking about leisure as a negotiated space of transformation, creativity and difference. improved thanks to their suggestions and comments. Any errors are our own.
The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavirus "does" as a gendered phenomenon. We turn to this body of feminist scholarship as it enables us to attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to "the little things" that may be lost in a big crisis. Writing through the complexity of embodied affects (fear, loss, hope), we focus on the challenge to humanist notions of "agency" posed by these shifting timespace relations of home confinement, restricted movement and altered work-leisure routines. We explore the tensions arising from "home" as an historical site of gendered inequality and a new site of enhanced capacity.
Writing about pain in roller derby challenges us to rethink old dichotomies that separate mind and body, 'real' and virtual, feminine and masculine. The 'tough' roller derby 'girl', willing and able to endure pain for the pleasure of the game, has become a powerful figure in contemporary western popular culture. Our analysis of roller derby reveals women's complex relation to pain and pleasure, as part of a feminist reimagining of sport. Through an analysis of derby texts we explore how painful affects are mobilized in particular ways: to imagine collective belonging, to invent alternative feminine subjectivities, and to mark out the limits of self and other. In this way we endeavor to think through the affective experience of derby and how sport might become more gender inclusive as a transformational cultural site. The embodiment of pain is not simply one of 'overcoming', but a corporeal relation that is productive of multiple feminine subjectivities.
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