Maddie Breeze

Analysing 'Seriousness' in Roller Derby: Speaking Critically with the Serious Leisure Perspective

This article draws on original ethnographic research in the context of roller derby to argue for a sociological analysis of seriousness. Galvanized by the notable divergence between participants’ practices of ‘seriousness’ and the use of this concept in the Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP), the article develops three constructively critical points. Firstly, contra to assumptions at the core of the SLP, ‘seriousness’ in leisure is differently accessible according to familiar intersectional patterns of inequality. Moreover, roller derby occupies a position of gendered alterity in relation to a broader cultural field of sport; ‘getting taken seriously’ in this context is an issue of gender contestation. Secondly, while the normative assumption that seriousness in leisure is individually and socially ‘good’ pervades the SLP, I argue that seriousness is more accurately understood as a generative ‘mode of ordering’ (Law 1994). I analyse seriousness as one discursive resource drawn upon and enacted in participants’ organizational and representational practice. Thirdly seriousness cannot be defined, as the SLP does, predominantly in terms of commitment; commitment is an interactional achievement. Participants’ enactments of seriousness include tactics of ridicule and satire and do not necessarily cohere. This paper thus responds to the question of what a more sociological approach to seriousness might look like and argues that seriousness-in-practice, in leisure and elsewhere, is generative of multiple and ambivalent effects and is thus amenable to, and requires, sociological analysis.

Becoming independent: political participation and youth transitions in the Scottish referendum

Sociological debates on youth engagement with electoral politics play out against a backdrop of supposed decline in civic participation (e.g. Putnam , Norris, ), in turn contextualized by theories of individualization in late or reflexive modernity (Beck, Giddens). However, the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum catalysed remarkably high levels of voter turnout among this youngest group, and was accompanied by apparently ongoing political engagement. We explored this engagement among a strategic sample of young Yes voters, in the immediate aftermath of this exceptional political event. Analysis of qualitative interview data generated an unanticipated finding; that interviewees narrated their political engagement biographically, articulated their referendum participation reflexively, and located their new political ideas, allegiances and actions in the context of their own transitions to independent adulthood. This inspired us to rethink young peoples political engagement in relation to youth transitions. Doing so enables a synthesis of divergent strands in the sociology of youth, and offers new insights into the combinations of personal agentic and political structural factors involved in young peoples politicization.

Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling

What happens when we re-think ‘imposter syndrome’ in academic labor as a public feeling? What can imposter syndrome tell us about who gets to know what, about what, and how? In this chapter, I present a short piece of auto-ethnographic fiction, about the feelings associated with imposter syndrome in the particular context of feminist academia and early career academic work. Imposter syndrome—sensations of not belonging; feeling that one’s competence and success are fundamentally fraudulent and inauthentic; the conviction of having somehow ‘tricked’ students, colleagues, peer reviewers, and publishers; and the fear that it is only a matter of time before this is discovered—is popularly understood as an individual—private—problem of faulty self-esteem. However, this chapter draws on Cvetkovich (SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3), 459–468, 2007; Cvetkovich, Depression: A public feeling. London: Duke University Press, 2012) to argue instead that imposter syndrome is a ‘public feeling’ in higher education (HE). Building upon precedents in feminist sociologies of emotion, and queer affect studies, re-thinking imposter syndrome as a public feeling has three elements: (1) situating the affective landscape of imposterism in socio-political context; how is feeling like an imposter marked by intersections of class, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and factors including caring responsibilities, being of the first familial generation to enter HE? (2) analyzing feelings of imposterism as something like a ‘diagnostic of power’ (Abu-Lughod, 1990) and asking what such feelings can tell us about the structure and governance of increasingly neo-liberal, marketised HEIs, and about power relationships in knowledge production; (3) understanding imposter syndrome not as an individual problem to be overcome, but rather as a resource for political action and site of agency, as early career academics transition to employment in a sector increasingly characterized by casualization, precarity, and ‘entrepreneurial’ competition.

Feminist collaborations in higher education: stretched across career stages

ABSTRACT Categorical career stages offer an institutional framework through which mobilities can be claimed and contested by feminists in academia. Inhabiting career stages uncritically can serve to reproduce neoliberal academic structures that feminists may seek to resist. Collaboration across career stages is a significant empirical case for understanding how feminists occupy academic space. We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other, analysing the authors’ cross-career collaborations and mentoring relationship in a Scottish University. We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and disrupt the neoliberal temporal logics of competitively achieving individuals on upward career trajectories, where academic arrival can feel permanently deferred. As such we argue for more pluralised and fragmented understandings of ‘career stages’, which as fixed categories work to position academics as either precarious or privileged, and for a messier imaginary of academic work and careers.

A Sport for Women Who Don’t Like Sport?

Throughout 2008, the beginnings of my own roller derby involvement, ‘What is roller derby?’ was a tediously familiar question to hear, asked by sleazy men in bars, curious family and friends and cynical fellow academics alike. Another skater, Pauline Baynes, and I used to make a joke of this, repeatedly asking each other in a faux-naive voice, ‘What is a roller derby’, the ‘a’ in our snarky intonation indicating the supposed ignorance of imagined interlocutors; we knew what roller derby was, they did not.

Becomings: More Structured and More of a Sport

This chapter is about how skatersmake sense of how roller derby became ‘a lot more structured, and a lot more of a sport’, as the research drew to a close in 2013. After deciding to ‘be competitive’ participants were faced with how to organize the league in pursuit of winning games — how to put the value of competition into practice. Given the shift from roller derby as ‘sport for women who don’t like sport’ to the prospect of ‘really athletic people’ being ‘interested in roller derby’, I discuss organizational shifts through an account of changes in who roller derby is for and in participants’ understandings of membership. As competition was instituted, participants’ organizational practice continually raised and responded to questions of who belonged to the league, and how.

Making It Up

The league is made in its members’ actions. Participants understood their DIY league, its organizational structures, and their selfrepresentations as contingent outcomes of their collective action; ‘you can control the direction that you’re going in … you can give everybody a say … if people aren’t happy you can look at if we could change the league in any way to try and make them happy … ’ (The Beefcake, individual interview, October 2010). There remains a sense among participants, to state it simply, that the league can be whatever we want it to be. However, in getting taken seriously participants’ understandings become tinged with inevitability; ‘we can’t keep everyone happy, that’s just the way it is’ (Tiny Chancer, field notes, November 2011). As participants put seriousness into practice, however, the league can’t be whatever they want it to be: nI was pleased when roller derby was recognized as a ‘sport’ because it legitimized the hard work it takes to be a skater to people that still ‘joke’ that it isn’t really a sport. Having said that I still resent the fact that some random governing body have the right to decide what we as a community must do to be ‘approved’. n nPauline Baynes, zine introduction, April 2013

Beginnings: How Weird It Was Back in the Day

Participants’ contemporary understandings of what roller derby was ‘now’, as the research took place, were very often compared to a ‘then’; the league’s recent past and roller derby’s short history. In her interview, Pauline Baynes referred to a league-wide meeting held in 2009, arranged specifically to debate whether to apply to join the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA). This question raised a second, whether or not to prioritize competitive play — whether to ‘try and win’. I can remember this meeting and, although it feels naive in hindsight, for me it was characterized by a sense of possibility. It felt like the league didn’t necessarily have to follow existing scripts about ‘sport’. At this point the value of competition was not taken for granted; it was an explicit object of discussion and collaborative decision-making. Enshrined sporting values, trying to win, were seemingly up for grabs. As it happened, over the course of that meeting, it was decided to apply to join the WFTDA and to play competitively — to try and win games.

Non-/Seriousness: Playing the Game and Changing the Rules

Like the simultaneous offensive and defensive strategy their sport demands, skaters seek serious recognition at the same time as troubling and somewhat refusing the terms of such recognition, and do so in practices that I have analyzed as non-/serious. Participants’ pursuit of serious recognition demonstrates that broader questions of gender and organization are at stake in a sociological approach to seriousness, as are understandings of the relations between voluntarism and determinism in the possibilities and limits of reflexive, deliberate collective action.

Just a Big Sexy Joke

In February 2011, after a year of lobbying, the UKRDA was admitted as a member of the British Roller Sports Federation (BRSF), which ‘officially recognized roller derby as a UK sport’ (UKRDA, 2011: n/p). When the UKRDA announced this news online, one participant remarked, ‘Now no one from any other sport can say roller derby isn’t a real sport’ (CeeCee, field notes, February 2011; see Breeze, 2013). While there was an emergent consensus among participants that roller derby was simply and self-evidently a real, serious, sport, preoccupations with getting taken seriously, and with how to achieve recognition from bodies like the BRSF, as well as those real and imagined others who might ‘say roller derby isn’t a real sport’, continued. Such a situation implies an ‘in-group’, which takes roller derby seriously, and a diffuse notion of ‘outsiders’ who skaters perceive as preemptively dismissing roller derby as ‘just a big sexy joke’. Getting taken seriously hinges on recognition as participants anticipate and reflect upon how they are perceived by both specific and generalized others (Goffman, 1959; Mead, 1967). Getting taken seriously means settling the question of whether or not roller derby is a ‘real sport’ and means becoming unequivocally intelligible as ‘real, legitimate, serious sport’.