Sport and feminism in China: On the possibilities of conceiving roller derby as a feminist intervention

Abstract

The spread of contemporary roller derby presents an opportunity to examine the ways sport can act as a form of feminist intervention. This article draws on a qualitative case study of a roller derby league in China, made up predominately of expatriate workers, to explore some of the possibilities roller derby presents in activating glocal forms of feminist participatory action. The globalization of sport has often been associated with colonialism and the loss of local physical cultures, together with commercialization. Roller derby provides a very different case, where, together with the spread of the game, comes a focus on gender diversity, female strength, and a particular derby style of DIY (Do It Yourself) governance that may support forms of participatory action. As an exploratory study, this paper points towards the potential of roller derby, and possibly other sport cultures, to support human rights activism in the Asia Pacific.

“Parents, Me & X-Sports”: Mapping the BMX Culture in Contemporary China

“…There is an expanding and collective scholarship examining the socioeconomic aspects of X-sports as they move to increased institutionalization, commercialization, transnationalization, and professionalization (Edwards & Corte, 2010;Kusz, 2003;Olive, 2016;Rinehart, 2003;Rinehart & Sydnor, 2003;Thorpe, 2014;Thorpe & Dumont, 2018;Tomlinson et al, 2005;Wheaton, 2013Wheaton, , 2015. However, there is little literature covering these sports in Asia, including China (Thorpe, 2014), which addresses skateboarding (O'Connor, 2016; Thorpe, 2014), Roller derby (Pavlidis & O'Brien, 2017), and surfing (Doering, 2017;Evers, 2017). This article is original because this is the first study that maps the culture of freestyle BMX, while using it as a representative X-sport in China.…”

Sisterhood and affective politics: The CaiRollers mobilising change through roller derby in Egypt

“…'Writing against culture', sport and feminisms Sportswomen from the Global South are often represented through a deficit discourse wherein their 'inclusion' in sport is interpreted through Western constructions of sport participation (see Amara, 2012;Burnett, 2015;Dosekun, 2015;Pavlidis and O'Brien, 2017;Thorpe, 2020;Thorpe and Ahmad, 2015;Toffoletti and Palmer, 2017). This is particularly evident in Sport-for-Development initiatives which have failed to engage critically with the role of northern subjectivities and which continue to reproduce inequalities in localities in the Global South (see Burnett, 2015;Thorpe, 2020: 4).…”

“…Pavlidis' work on roller derby (alone and with Fullagar and others) has a similar goal of intervening in the structure/agency binary, primarily drawing on feminist theorisations of affect and emotion (e.g. Fullagar, 2014a, 2015;Pavlidis and O'Brien, 2017). Conceptualising affect and emotion as both cognitive and non-representational, she incorporates Deleuze and Guattari's writing along with that of feminist scholars such as Braidotti and Ahmed to reveal the gendered power relations between women, and between roller derby and the field of sport.…”

“…For example, there are limitations of our analysis as 'outsiders' to the debates of feminism in the Middle East, and as mostly white women (Pavlidis, Kennelly and Nichols) working from academies in Australia. In saying that, we have a political commitment to destabilise the focus on Western and white women in mainstream feminist and sport scholarship, and advance anti-racism actions within the spaces we do our work (see Pavlidis and O'Brien, 2017;. In order to move beyond a mere acknowledgement of our positionalities, we also engaged in a dialogue embedded in critical feminist reflexivity in various stages of the analysis process.…”

“Troubled” derby subjectivities: Wellbeing and feminist new materialist movements in sport

“…In previous work, I have written about the ways in which roller derby was said to 'save our souls', providing a saviour to those who 'discover' the sport. This notion of roller derby being a site of deep transformation for those who participate continued to emerge as I talked to women in different national contexts, including Egypt and China (Pavlidis, 2018;Pavlidis & O'Brien, 2017;Rodriguez Castro et al, 2021).…”