Sport, Gender and Power

Book excerpt: 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.