Women Skating on the Edge: Marketplace Performances as Ideological Edgework

Abstract

Abstract This study analyzes the marketplace performances that are enacted in the field of women’s flat track roller derby using the theoretical lens of gender performativity. Rather than treating the roller derby field as an autonomous enclave of gender resistance, this study focuses on the interrelationships between derby grrrls’ resignifying performances of femininity and the gender constraints that have been naturalized in their everyday lives. The market-mediated nature of derby grrrls’ ideological edgework enables them to challenge orthodox gender boundaries, without losing sociocultural legitimacy. This analysis casts new theoretical light on the gendered habitus and reveals key differences to the outcomes that would follow from Bourdieusian assumptions about the deployment of cultural capital in zero-sum status competitions. The concept of ideological edgework also presents a theoretical alternative to critical arguments, such as the commodity feminism thesis, that assume an inherently paradoxical and, ultimately co-opting, relationship exists between practices of countercultural resistance and marketplace performances. We further argue that ideological edgework redresses some of the conceptual ambiguities that can lead gender researchers to conflate gender performativity with social performances.

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