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  • Beyond the Fishnets:Female Empowerment through Roller Derby
  • Ula Klein (bio)
Keywords

Roller derby, female empowerment, athleticism, female athletes, team sports

1. Introduction

As an adolescent and young adult who defined herself as a bookworm and aspiring scholar, I was hardly interested in sports growing up. Though outgoing and extroverted, I enjoyed creative pursuits such as writing fiction, playing the piano, and performing on stage in school theatricals and shied away from sports. As a child, I enjoyed riding my bike, roller skating, climbing trees, or sprinting short distances over the playground, but, at school, I was not adept at team sports. I was usually chosen last for teams, teams often captained by boys. Team sports on the playground and in gym class were dominated and controlled by boys, and they were usually the same boys who taunted and bullied me for running, throwing, talking, or acting “like a girl.” Later, after enduring three years of middle school gym classes, I came to loathe the element of judgment and competition in team sports and therefore did not participate in them at the high school level. Once or twice, I entertained the idea of trying out for field hockey, soccer, or swimming only to give up the idea as ludicrous. In college, I tried intramural sports, but I felt inadequate and out of my depth. My anxiety about being a disappointment to my team or even being laughed at stayed with me. [End Page 198]

Therefore, when I first heard about roller derby several years later, it was a revelation. Here was a sport dominated by women, played mostly and most prominently by women, and that encouraged all women, regardless of age, size, shape, or previous experience, to be athletic, tough, and aggressive. I first heard about the modern sport of derby through Whip It (2009), a roller derby themed film directed by Drew Barrymore. Some of the derby players I’ve met since then have faulted the film for its depiction of derby as a “catty” sport with lots of illegal hitting and fighting. For me, however, the film brought a previously unknown world to light, one in which female toughness and aggression are valued qualities, and where winning and losing are not nearly as important as sisterhood and giving it your best. I had never heard of roller derby before, did not see it on television in the 1980s, and had no conception of what it was. After watching the film, I attended a live bout and was immediately impressed by how hard the women could hit—and fall—and get right back up again. I hadn’t skated since I was a kid, but I wanted to learn everything I could about the sport.

Looking back now after more than four years of involvement in roller derby in various roles, I see that I have benefited in countless ways from the sport. From finding new initiative and encouragement to get fit, to meeting new people and seeing myself as involved in something larger than myself, derby has improved and changed me in many positive ways. As a woman, a feminist, a lesbian, and an academic who studies the representations of women’s bodies in literature and film, I see that roller derby has been especially meaningful to me in some very particular ways. First and foremost, derby has provided me with an empowering, welcoming space ungoverned by traditional gender norms that has improved my self-confidence and personal well-being. Second, and related to my newfound sense of empowerment, derby has shown me that I, a bookish, scholarly type, can indeed be an athlete, giving me a new sense of personal embodiment and fitness. Lastly, derby has provided me with fresh ways to understand and engage with notions of community involvement and leadership that have enhanced my personal and professional life.

2. Roller derby as an inclusive sport

When I first began researching the sport of roller derby, I realized rather quickly that just about anyone could join a team and participate. Roller derby [End Page 199] is an amateur sport often played by teams that are nonprofit organizations, and the members run all aspects of the teams...

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