Roller-Play
Derby names also reflect the distinct personas and alter egos that many skaters adopt. Skaters describe "acting out" the personas suggested by their pseudonyms - "hamming it up" when announcers introduce them at the start of the bout, or interacting with the crowd after making a successful hit.
The skaters' derby personas shine through in a variety of ways, from how they customize their uniforms to how they act while on the rink. The "tough girls" have their over-the-top displays of aggression and bravada. The playful types might flirt with audience members or make fun of the referees.
For some skaters, this part of the sport is secondary to its athletic demands - just a way of expressing yourself during play. Booty Quake of the Bad Reputations (part of the Terminal City Roller Girls, or TCRG, league in Vancouver, British Columbia) says that many of the women with whom she skates emphasize camaraderie and playing on a team as things they appreciate more about roller derby than its roleplay or stylistic elements. But she also admits that "playing to the crowd" is a big part of what makes roller derby entertaining for its fans, as well as what makes it so exhilarating for the skaters.
Booty has also noticed that many of the women who join roller derby don't have a history of playing team sports. Some have a negative opinion of mainstream sports and their close associations with jocks and conformity. But roller derby is different. Booty suggests that the characters, humor and fishnets can act as a bridge in these cases, allowing women who may not typically think of themselves as "athletic" a way into team sports.
For others, however, developing a persona is a more integral part of the derby experience. For these skaters, roller derby has led to the development of full-blown "characters" with unique backstories, MySpace pages and signature moves. Suzy Shameless, a skater for the Faster Pussycats (another team in the TCRG league) uses her background in theater and burlesque to create her "shameless" derby persona - an overtly sexual, hyper-aggressive bully whose signature move is the "Feisty Pillows" and who likes to warn her opponents, "I'm going to rub my body all over you."
The amalgamation of violence and sexuality, hyper-femininity and hyper-aggression, pretense and athleticism, transforms roller derby into a space within which skaters and viewers alike can push the boundaries of the typical sporting experience. Although some of these combinations may seem contradictory, it's also part of what makes roller derby so liberating.
Skaters describe derby as a place where you can do things you could never do in daily life. As Toi Box (another member of the Bad Reputations) describes it, she never thought of herself as an intimidating person before taking up roller derby. Now, she's devising new ways to look and be more threatening on the rink.
As for the fishnets and corsets, Toi Box points out that many of the skaters who sport them during derby would be too shy to wear those types of clothing outside of roller derby. She also thinks that the hyper-feminine elements of roller derby provide balance in relation to the hyper-violence and physical demands of the sport.
This blurring of boundaries seems to offer something for everyone, a liminal space where the rules of the real world don't always apply. Where even malleable categories like "sport" and "roleplay" become muddled and beside the point. Whatever it is, or isn't, roller derby provides a venue for exploring identity and breaking down social assumptions about what women are capable of. A place where players will, as one skater described, "tear your head off on the track, and come over and bake you a pie after."
Sara M. Grimes is a doctoral student in communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She is also the author of Gamine Expedition, a blog about children's culture and technology.
