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Sports as a social institution reflects and reshapes social values and power relations in broader society, including gender relations. For instance, the ways in which bodies are used in sports produces gender; as such sport has been shown to reaffirm men's power over women and ritualize and embed aggression, strength, and violence into the male body. Roller derby, which is a full-contact, highly physical sport, offers women the opportunity to renegotiate these stereotypical gendered and embodied ideas of gender. Drawing on bodily theory, contact sport, and self-defense literatures this study explores how female roller derby players undergo such negotiations of femininity and womanhood and how one's body plays a role in this. This was done through the analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with female flat track roller derby players in the United States. Findings show similarities to self-defense where skaters' notions of womanhood and femininity are transformed through a variety of ways and these are related to experiencing bodies in new and transgressive ways. One key finding demonstrates how these transformations are complicated by biological narratives and understandings of violence. These results speak to larger implications of gender, embodiment, and women's physical liberation. / Master of Science

Thesis (M.A.) -- State University College at Buffalo, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-113).

Master of Arts / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / This thesis explores the development of Derby, Kansas, from the arrival of its first settlers in 1869 through the early 1970s. During its first seventy-five years, Derby never grew beyond its origins as a tiny trade center for local farmers, its economic growth constantly stymied and overshadowed by the often explosive growth of Wichita, twelve miles to the north. Derby might have met the fate of so many other Kansas farming communities that did not survive developments in industrialized agricultural and transportation in post-World War II America. With the beginning of the Cold War, however, the federal government began pouring money into the Midwest and West, building up existing, and constructing new, military installations. In addition, federal spending spurred massive new defense industries, creating growth around the cites of what some historians have called “Gunbelt America.” Wichita was one such city. Derby’s proximity to Wichita finally worked to its advantage, and the small town experienced its own boom as it became a residential community inhabited by affluent commuters to the job opportunities nearby. In addition, Derby’s racial homogeneity, its relative affluence, and the deliberate attempts of its boosters to portray it as a “family friendly,” that is, as a white, middle-class, community, further spurred its growth as Wichita went through the turmoil of school desegregation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Derby, Kansas, illustrates a distinct category in the development of the new Gunbelt West, a community that flourished both because of its proximity to a larger city as well as its distance from the perceived turmoil of that urban center.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Identity is not fixed but rather performed through interactions. The eminent philosopher and gender theorist, Judith Butler famously investigates performativity in her research on gender. Butler asserts that “gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express” (314, emphasis original). She believes that gender identity is performative because it constitutes itself though actions, gestures, and speech. This project seeks to investigate the performative nature of roller derby personas, highlighting the identities of the characters in the movie Whip It and the comic series “Slam!” to help students learn to perform an academic identity in writing. Reading roller derby texts through the lens of performativity can be a useful pedagogical tool because it helps students see that a writer’s identity can be carefully crafted into an academic persona. In this project, I examine these texts to discover how roller derby personas are constructed and performed. The texts introduce freshmeat skaters to roller derby and explore how their new derby persona is negotiated and informed by the derby community. By creating a new persona, the characters are able to constitute it through their performance. Students in First Year Composition are undergoing a similar process to the freshmeat skaters: they are learning to craft an academic identity when they enter the university. Ultimately, a performative academic identity can lead to greater agency both in and out of the classroom because it helps students take a stance and control their performance as writers.

Lacing Skates and Unlacing Corsets: Gender Play and Multiple Femininities in Roller Derby and Neo-Burlesque. Contemporary roller derby and neo-burlesque, as an athletic sport and a framed staged performance respectively, each provide a space that encourages gender play through interactions between participants and audience and the role of physical body. In this thesis, I discuss how each activity allows for a multiplicity of feminine identities and commentary by performers on the social and cultural expectations of women. Drawing on performance theory, ritual theory, and gender studies, along with fieldwork, I explore how this commentary comes from participants simultaneously critiquing and embracing those expectations in their performances through costuming, use of the body, and the presence of an audience who interpret the events.

Despite a long history of participation in sports, women have yet to gain equal access to this male-dominated realm. The national sports culture continues to regard them as marginal, if not invisible. For more than a century, women athletes have struggled against a subordinate status based on rigid definitions of female sexuality, an emphasis on white middle-class standards of beauty, and restrictive cultural expectations of motherhood. This dissertation, however, reveals a vital story of feminist women who have consistently stretched the boundaries of gender and have actively carved out their own identities as women, athletes, and mothers while playing an integral role in the development of sports. Drawing on oral history, archival materials, and a wide range of other sources, I provide a comparative analysis of women's experiences playing basketball and Roller Derby. These two sports have included women from their outset and at different times both challenged society's restrictions on women's femininity, sexuality, and physical abilities. One of my major objectives is to explore and explain the tension between women's representation and agency, between cultural constructs and women's lives, between images of women and their individual identities. Both women and men struggle for self-definition in the world they inhabit, and they often surmount formidable obstacles on the path to change not only themselves but also the ideals against which they measure themselves. In a culture that champions individualism, women "sweat" their identities because they want to be themselves, yet realize that self-definition is still shaped by a powerful set of cultural ideals and pressures about what it means to be male or female, man or woman, boy or girl. While these women sporting pioneers pushed their way into the public limelight, they worked to prove that athleticism could in fact be a part of the female identity, even while that identity was continually in flux. But until American society is ready to accept women as viable athletes, realize that athleticism can be a feminine and masculine quality, and allow women to play multiple roles, women will continue to sweat their femininity.

This paper presents a contextual analysis of Joseph Wright of Derby's “scientific series” which contains three paintings with science motifs. The purpose of the essay is to analyze how the contemporary context has been expressed in the paintings with regard to the relationship between religion and science. This is done with a theoretical starting point in the concepts of nomos and anomy. Together this starting point and method create a basis for a broader understanding of these three paintings with a focus on religion and science. My conclusion is that these three paintings express the tense relationship between religion and science that was current in England during the 18th century (and is still found today), and that each painting provides information about the changes that arose in the nomos in correlation to the progress of science. Much research has been made on these three paintings separately, studying these paintings together, however, opens up for many new interpretations.

Project report (D.Min.)--Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008. / Typescript. Description based on Print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-103).