Sport Gender and Power

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.