# Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby

Orlane Messey

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## To cite this version:

Orlane Messey. Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby. Punk & Post-Punk, 2024, 13 (1), pp.65-85. 10.1386/punk_00231_1. hal-05220932

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ORLANE MESSEY

University of Franche-Comté

# Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby

## ABSTRACT

Between 1935 and 1970, roller derby was a co-ed North American sport practised on roller skates and played on a banked track. The 2000s marked its revival when a group of women decided to give it a new lease of life: roller derby is now exclusively for women and takes place on a flat track. Teams assert their independence from established institutions and follow a model of 'do-it-yourself' organization. According to some critics, the roller derby revival is a continuation of the feminist Riot Grrrl movement. This article aims to understand how French roller derby players use the 'alternative' heritage of American women. By mobilizing the frameworks of Cultural Studies and Sport Subculture, the article reflects on the ways in which the legacy of Riot Grrrl, as a movement to challenge a dominant order, enables derby teams to create alternatives to mainstream sports models. Through 90 interviews and participant observation conducted between January 2020 and the present day, the study was able to show a use of the DIY ethos articulated between resourcefulness and a claim to independence. While Riot Grrrl radically defends the values of the punk movement, against the prevailing economic and gender order, French roller derby and its teams propose a hybrid sporting model, articulated between reflections on a different way of looking at sport and a move away from the DIY model of the early days.

## KEYWORDS

Riot Grrrl
sport subculture
institutionalization
LGBT
feminism
French sports system
resistance
## INTRODUCTION

Roller derby is a roller-skating race originally created in the 1930s in the United States during the Great Depression. Thanks to the ambitions of an entertainment entrepreneur, Leo Seltzer, roller derby was held in the large new entertainment arenas erected at the beginning of the century, such as Madison Square Garden or the Chicago Coliseum (Calabria 1993). Derby seduced hundreds of spectators who came to applaud this show where men and women shared the stage. This model of entertainment took shape between the 1940s and 1950s, until it became a codified, competitive activity that now included rules and contact. The televised broadcasting of the derby only reinforced its popularity, and it officially became a sport in the 1960s.

A new version of the game appeared at the turn of the millennium. In 2001, a group of female skaters (who will become the Texas Roller Girls [TRG]) decided to revive this old sport, which had been in decline since the late 1970s (Marino 2021). Like the old version of the sport, the revival roller derby takes place on an oval track, with jammers scoring points by overtaking their opponents and completing laps of the track. Body contact is maintained, and penalties are always applied for breaches of the rules. However, the TRG model breaks with the old game on several levels. Firstly, it takes place on a flat track (the previous versions were on a banked track). Then, while roller derby is one of the few sports to have been opened to women very early in its history, the revival is now exclusively feminine. Moreover, while Leo Seltzer shaped derby into a popular and lucrative show, the TRG are moving away from the codes of mainstream sports and its market:

> Unlike other alternative sport cultures that are male-dominated, such as surfing and boarding (both snow and skate), all-girl roller derby is more akin to riot girl [sic] and hardcore feminist punk culture than their underground sport colleagues. Here, derby girls do not have to prove themselves worthy to males already dominating the sport.

(Cohen 2008: 29)

American journalists and researchers quickly associated this confidential revival with the Riot Grrrl movement.

When it appeared in the 1990s, the Riot Grrrl movement perpetuated the political commitment of punk culture and seized on the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos as a means to democratize cultural creation (Duncombe [1997] 2008). As David Pearson argues, 'DIY as ideology and practice had constructed a means to control cultural production, dissemination, the integrity of the music's message, and even its reception' (2018: 47). In the DIY punk tradition, Riot Grrrl participants were keen to remain in the underground spheres from which they emerged (Labry 2011: 118) but they went further than their predecessors in this struggle:

> So it wasn't as if punk had always been a male-dominated domain; far from it. But as the '80s drew on, hardcore became the dominant sound of punk. Its simple musical conventions were easy for untrained teens to imitate; its penchant for louder-faster-harder performances and frenetic slam dancing were catnip for boys anxious to blow off adolescent steam. The concerts' mosh pits, flurries of flying elbows and wandering hands, drove most girls to the sidelines or out of the scene altogether.

(Marcus 2010: 48)
Created under the initiative of female musicians and authors who were aware of their relegation to the margins of musical production (Rosenberg and Garofalo 1998), Riot Grrrl denounced sexism both in the music world and in society at large: '[i]t's primarily a group of girls who meet every weekend to have consciousness-raising discussions about their lives, create art and music, and plan political action' (Marcus 2010: 17). While they encouraged women to become the protagonists of punk culture, Riot Grrrl activists did not limit their political commitment to musical creation. In addition to fanzines, through which they spread a new feminine anti-capitalist culture (Thompson 2004: 63), the movement's instigators initiated gatherings through which they denounced the oppression of girls and women.

A few years later, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile seem to have found worthy heirs in the derby girls. Like Riot Grrrl, roller derby players abandoned sportswear outfits in favour of provocative 'boutfits'. Twenty years after the 'She-Punks', these new sportswomen are once again seizing corsets, garter belts and fishnets, reminiscent of 'hookers on Hollywood Boulevard in 1940s films' (Goldman 2019: 118). Even more, they claim an organization model that belongs to its players rather than show promoters, 'a revolution'<fnref n="1" /> in the sport world through a DIY organization of the activity (Beaver 2012). The connection between Riot Grrrl and roller derby has already been documented in academic literature. In 2012, Adele Pavlidis focused on the relationship between sport and popular music. According to the Australian researcher, roller derby and its explicit link with music such as punk rock or rockabilly offers a space for experimentation of 'alternative subjectivities' and an 'alternative relation between women and leisure in general' (Pavlidis 2012: 168). Since their creation in 2009, the French roller derby teams have been following in the footsteps of the American teams. From anti-conformist clothing to references to Riot Grrrl, the circulation of roller derby is based on the preservation of these same imaginary and cultural roots.

Drawing on academic literature relating to Riot Grrrl, this article analyses the relationship between the feminist movement and French roller derby. The aim is to identify the way in which Riot Grrrl and its legacy (Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983] 2006) have helped to define the contours of a singular sporting environment: 'Riot Grrrl not only have reconfigured punk's energy and rebelliousness in specifically female and feminist terms, but have also drawn upon punk's DIY tradition to blur the boundaries between musical production and consumption' (Gottlieb and Wald 1994: 263). When they set out to create roller derby in their living spaces, did the French pioneers also seize principles to create an alternative sports organization, understood as shaped by norms and values different from those promoted by mainstream sporting institutions (Messey and Demésy 2022)? Like alternative music circles, does sport appear to be a means of disseminating and thinking about an ideology that rejects capitalist oppressions? In what way does DIY appear to be a means of resisting the standardization of roller derby, understood as a form of naturalization of the dominant values and social relations of capitalist consumer culture that mainstream sport embodies (Donnelly 1988)? Moreover, unlike sociologist Maddie Breeze (2015) who placed Scottish roller derby in the continuity of DIY culture as spaces through which forms of resistance to hegemonic power relations operate (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Downes et al. 2013), French teams maintain more complex relations with alternative milieus. At first, DIY does not appear to be entirely a reflexive positioning aimed at rejecting mainstream culture (Jones 2021: 34) and the institutions attached to it (such as, for

<footnote n="1">1. With its slogan 'Real. Strong. Athletic. Revolutionary', the national and international roller derby federation (WFTDA) defends the sport's attachment to the Riot Grrrl revolutionary movement: https://wftda.com/. Accessed 7 March 2024.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Lyon Team logo between 2011 and 2018. Courtesy of Ophélie Bernaud.</figcaption></figure>

example, national sports federations). It is only later, as roller derby becomes more normalized, that we see an appropriation of the ideals that run through DIY cultures. More generally, the question I will try to answer in this article is as follows: How does the DIY ethos of the American derby, as a legacy of Riot Grrrl, accompany the establishment of the French derby, between reproduction of the legitimized sporting model and a desire to resolve certain aspects considered to be conservative?

From a diachronic perspective, I will show how DIY has allowed the installation of teams in the French territory. I will show that the self-organized logic through which roller derby appears in France had constantly alternated between 'necessity' and 'alternativity'. I will then focus on the articulation of this incentive model within the established sports institutions that roller derby has gradually joined – an institutionalization experienced in a positive way by many of the players. In a perspective that is both diachronic and synchronic, I will explain how the difficulties in claiming a DIY operation on a daily basis has led most of the teams to tend towards a reproduction of the traditional, associative and voluntary sports model. In addition, the decrease in the markers of counterculture also contributes to the expanding recruitment of this still-little-known sport to the mainstream public. Finally, I will try to temper the idea of a linear and homogeneous sportivization by showing that there are multiple forms of DIY today, ranging from forms of resistance
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: Screen-printed tote bag for the Voodoo Vixens team by artist Cerise la Castagne (2023). Photograph by the author.</figcaption></figure>

to the normalization of roller derby, to radical alternative commitments on the part of collectives that have emerged more recently.

## METHODOLOGY

Since November 2019 I have undertaken an immersive method in a French roller derby team that I will pseudonymously call the Glorious Bitchies. Created in 2011, this association is composed of about thirty adult players and a Juniors team (with children and adolescents). Among the adult members, there remains one who participated in the creation of the team, and three who started shortly afterward in 2012. One of them is a referee recognized at a European level. Between 2014 and 2019, the Glorious Bitchies had a competitive team who participated in the national championship organized by the
2. Almost all the players of European teams that I have met have also been members of French teams.

National Federation. It is as an outsider that I began my investigation, which started ten years after the first skate gatherings of the French pioneers. The data in this study is based on ethnographic research and interviews mainly with French roller derby players. I have chosen this team because of its proximity to where I live. I first started my investigation with a non-participant observation, before being allowed to join the beginner training group (the Fresh Meat team) in January 2020.

Downes et al. warn about the posture taken by outsiders when entering so-called DIY cultures: '[w]e concur [...] that “outsider” academics who do not meaningfully engage with the DIY worlds they are researching can risk producing limited theories of radical DIY cultural practices' (2013: 103). For my part, aware of the difficulties in investing in a marginal practice as an outsider, I am delighted and excited by the idea of experimenting with roller derby as a designated DIY practice. Indeed, as a fresh meat, I am undergoing technical shaping to enable me to master the rules of this game, but I am also joining a community of critical knowledge vis-à-vis mainstream culture. However, in March 2020, four months after the beginning of my ethnographic work, the pandemic situation related to COVID-19 interrupted my immersion, as sports groups' gatherings were prohibited for several months. I was forced to redefine my method of investigation. Without any field to investigate, I chose to compensate for the absence of ethnographic data with sociological data. I e-mailed all the French teams, not hiding from them the subject of my research, and presenting myself as a novice who needed information. Many players responded favourably to my request. In all, 87 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of 29 French teams and ten other European teams.² Among these representatives, 39 players started roller derby between 2009 and 2014, a period during which roller derby did not yet belong to the federal system. Their playing experience and knowledge of the derby world ranged from twelve years of practice (I will call them 'pioneers') to a few weeks ('fresh meats'). I met players, coaches, referees but also people who had stopped their sports career, as well as people who stopped after only a few roller derby practices. The majority of them (75) were women. Among these women, two told me about their social and/or identity transition. Ten men also agreed to answer my questions. Two players consider themselves as non-binary. The age of the participants ranges between 21 and 52 years. Finally, the respondents are generally from the upper middle classes and beyond. These interviews were semi-directed, and they lasted on average 1.5 hours (several exceeded three hours). All the interviews were recorded and were entirely transcribed. The in-depth analysis of interviews was part of a contextualization process which consists in 'a work of relating a phenomenon with selected elements of its global environment' (Paillé and Mucchielli 2021: 51). The methods of grounded theory 'according to which theory is generated and developed through the very process of data collection' (Blanchet and Gotman 2015: 15) have largely conditioned the elaboration of my analysis.

From September 2020, practices restarted gradually, and the resumption of the ethnographic field allowed me to confront the sociological data with the field. In addition to regular training in the Glorious Bitches team, I made many trips in France to participate several times in 'boot camps' (training camps) and also in 'Unnamed Bitches', friendly scrimmage with players who are not part of the Glorious Bitches. Besides my progression as a player, I was able to take on the position of non-skating official. In May 2022, I was selected for a regional championship with my team. My growing knowledge of the
derby world, both from cultural (the codes, rules, the language of the envi-
ronment that I appropriated) and corporeal perspectives (learning the game,
the incorporation of a sports ethos specific to this practice), gradually opened
doors for me which in turn allowed me to reflect upon different forms and
expressions of DIY. The evolution of my position as an outsider, towards that
of a semi-insider, has therefore facilitated my observation of multiple forms of
the DIY ethos.

From the stages to the gymnasiums: The DIY ethos to carve out
social space

Emerging in a carnivalesque form where women parody the codes of sports
and appropriate the stigmas attributed to women, American roller derby takes
up the punk aesthetic of breaking the naturalization of cultural phenomena
(Hebdige 1979). Besides the punk rock and feminist music links that surround
the diffusion of the sport, the TRG leaned on the Riot Grrrl's DIY ethos to
create 'female space rather than attempting to enter pre-existing male insti-
tutions in its non-hierarchical philosophy and DIY "do-it-yourself" ethics'
(Storms 2009: 80). As a reply to masculinity on sports grounds, the TRG found
in the DIY ethos the means of fully retaking possession of a space that was
denied to them, the world of sport:

Forget the league owners and promoters of the past who traded skat-
ers like collectible dolls. The new leagues are DIY – do it yourself – and
skater-owned. We answer to ourselves, and skate or die by the credo ‘by
the skaters for the skaters’. All the jobs required to manage our leagues
– from athletic training to even production, finance to marketing – are
done by skaters. We work and skate for the fun and the glory, not a
profit.

(Joulwan 2007: 2)

With the DIY ethos, the world of roller derby is offering a response to the
vertical sports management imposed on roller derby skaters in the previous
versions of the game, and, more broadly, to women in the sports world until
now. From Texas where it was reborn, up until the national regulation of the
sport in 2014, the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), revival
roller derby enabled female players, along with all gender minorities to retain
power over traditional sports institutions. The question of capitalism, however,
has not been as much relieved by the academic literature. While the Riot Grrrl
movement avoided mass distribution and media networks and opposed the
means and frameworks of capitalist society, American roller derby teams seem
to benefit from economic spin-offs through their events and sponsorship
contracts.

The year 2009 marks a turning point in the history of this revival. The
production company owned by the Hollywood star Drew Barrymore adapted
the fictional story of former roller derby player Shauna Cross (2007) for the
big screen. From its beginnings on the margins of the North American sports
system, roller derby is now making a name for itself on a large scale:

Thanks in part to the movie *Whip It* (Mendel, et. al., 2010) roller derby
has become more than just a subcultural phenomenon. It is praised as
a space for the representation of a 'new' feminism. Whether it is called
'girl power', 'lipstick feminism', or 'free-market feminism', it is sold to young girls and young women as a way to assert individuality and empowerment.

(Toews 2012: 3–4, original emphasis)

Between 2009 and 2014, over sixty teams appeared throughout the French territory, but also in Belgium and Switzerland, with whom the border teams created links. After watching *Whip It*, many women consider this sport on wheels as a 'true revelation'. For some, roller derby offers them the opportunity to use again their old roller skates that had long ago been abandoned. For others, this practice is a chance to experience a new female sport. With no previous experience in roller derby, the players say they got involved 'instinctively'. From the United States to France, the history of roller derby remains inseparable from a form of DIY ethos in that it expresses first and foremost a solution to practical problems (Hein 2012: 47). In France, especially during the 2009–14 period during which 'everything had to be done, everything had to be built' (Chou'Keket, 35 years old, player since 2011), being able to practice roller derby and organize a match went through a set of necessary steps to help this game evolve. The teams often call the first years of roller derby's life a 'home-made period', during which they had to 'do with what they had' in order to progress. Roller derby then only existed through the energy of these groups which were scattered all over France, and who invested in the foundations of this game.

Just as Maddie Breeze found during her sociological survey (2015), the use of a DIY ethos is a response to the nascent and embryonic form of the collective. Roller derby offers pioneering women the opportunity to move beyond the role of spectator/consumer of the activity to become creators of the practice. Can we nevertheless associate their commitment with forms of resistance to hegemonic power relations? Team founders were more insistent on their spontaneous involvement in creating the teams themselves. Chou'Keket helped set up a team in 2011. Attracted by the opportunity to spearhead a sports association, she does not necessarily associate her commitment with feminist or any alternative ideals:'[t]here was this thing of yes, we get together as girls, and we set up a project as girls, and we do everything, and it's great' (Chou'Keket, 35 years old, player since 2011). Thus, far from the consultations that will later rally the community around the logic of independence of the discipline vis-à-vis the federal authorities, the French teams tinker with the means at hand with the main aim of playing a match and initiating the first sporting encounters.

Disaster Uppercut was, for her part, an activist in her city's punk scene when, following *Whip It*, she set about creating her own derby team. Socialized in alternative cultures, she does not hesitate, as Chou'Keket, to join forces with existing sports clubs to help them in their endeavours:

> We first got approached to a skating school. [...] Because frankly, we started from nothing, we did not know how to skate, we did not have a gym, we knew nothing about the sports associative environment in any case, and they gave us a hand with this.

(Disaster Uppercut, 35 years old, creator of a team in 2011)

Without knowledge or special skills in the management of a sports club, some collectives joined pre-existing online skating or rink hockey clubs to
help them in their efforts and facilitate their implementation. Whether they chose to sign up pre-existing sports structures or to operate independently, the first players saw in derby the embodiment of a practice carrying the seeds of a different way of join-in in sports leisure: '[a]nd, above all, the fact that somewhere along the line we created something that didn't exist, that we had to build from beginning' (DragiQueen, 33 years old, team creator in 2011).

The pioneers of roller derby saw this period of team creation as an opportunity to take a different approach to sporting practice. Overall, globally, the early years of French derby were not marked by a reflexive commitment to questioning the power relationships that exist within a sporting framework. Unlike Riot Grrrl, derby girls do not engage in reflexive positioning in favour of a 'transformation of traditionally masculinist cultural institutions' (Garrison 2000: 143). In fact, the women's entre-soi represented by the roller derby teams is more the result of *Whip It* reception by a female audience than of an asserted positioning. Boyfriends and relatives of players will thus occupy key positions in the sporting world, refereeing and coaching, perpetuating the traditional dominations of the mainstream sporting world (Perreau-Niel and Erard 2015).

## Carnival and DIY: Imaginary in common

During the very first years of the life of the collectives, the break with traditional sports models thus seems to be observed more on the side of the playful form of these new non-conformist sports teams, than in the social organization of the groups. Indeed, the discipline spread on French territory by an incentive form that can be associated with a DIY of 'necessity' (Roulley 2016) and, more than anything, the desire to bring derby to life. The roller derby players I met reflect their commitment to the creation of a team as part of the DIY ethos. However, it is probably not in vain to affirm that this call to action has been formalized under this term afterward. The terms 'bricolage', 'homemade', 'stammering' were sometimes preferred.

In 2009, the French pioneers appeared as laypersons, uninitiated players who did not know the rules of the game, nor the body techniques induced in the practice of roller derby. Beyond the game, rules of collective life also had to be invented. Nevertheless, this emerging sport allowed the meeting between experts from other social spaces, and who injected their expertise into the creation of derby teams. Widely disseminated through popular culture (*Whip It* and some TV shows), but also by the more confidential niche culture (the Franco-German alternative evening show *Track* broadcast a short documentary on roller derby in 2006)<fnref n="3" />, roller derby saw regrouping representatives of official sports institutions – figure skaters, swimmers, athletes – as well as women, sports or anti-sport, familiar with alternative environments such as local alternative scenes, squats, etc. Kiss was in her early 20s when she took up roller derby. A former swimmer, she sees roller derby as a community in which knowledge is shared.

DIY was already there at the start because we had chicks who were already immersed in the associative, punk, feminist scene. One of them lived in a big self-managed conference, so there were chicks who were already used to it, it was already their daily routine. One was a silkscreen printer, but at the time she was a teacher, but she was already involved

<footnote n="3">3. Directed by Gabrielle Culand.</footnote>
in feminist associations, so in the end there were 50% chicks who were
just discovering it, and the other half were chicks who already knew
about it, but in other associations in fact, so they were the ones who
explained it to us.

(Kiss, 31 years old, player since 2011)

In France, roller derby appears to be at the crossroads of networks, enabling young women who define themselves as 'broadly conformist' to meet and collaborate with personalities who refuse to compromise with the mainstream. In the game as it was gradually being structured, the teams injected into their practice playful and symbolic elements that contributed to inscribing the derby collective in sports networks but also as an 'alternative' practice. Kiss my Death discovered the existence of a roller derby team in her city through the alternative and activist networks she frequented at the time:

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3: A DIY recruitment poster for the Voodoo Vixens teams (2011).
Courtesy of Erin Sim.</figcaption></figure>
I think what's interesting in the context of creating the derby is also the whole punk/DIY spirit that it had behind it. In fact, the friend who set up the league is really someone who has been playing in bands of the punk milieu for a long time, the DIY circles, in this idea that we can do everything with not much and therefore be self-financing, to have militant values, feminism but also been anti-authoritarian.

(Kiss my Death, 31 years old, player since 2014)

From a DIY of necessity linked to the youth and marginality of roller derby, the signs of a DIY ethos 'chosen' (Roulley 2016), linked to a political, emancipatory consciousness (Donaghey, Boisseau, Kaltefleiter, 2024), find a place in the practice of French roller derby. It crystallizes a set of imaginaries, and cultural references directly from specific cultural movements, from which appear 'conventions' (Becker [1982] 2010) that have accompanied the structuring of French roller derby sports associations. Thus, if the success of the derby, roller skates and its playful dimension responds to weariness in the face of the sporting options on offer, it also allows some players to perpetuate a positioning that they have already initiated in reaction to mainstream culture.

Alongside the construction and understanding of the rules of the game (which, in 2010, also had to be translated from English to French), players appropriate the playful universe depicted in *Whip It*, which they have also observed in some videos of the American teams spotted on YouTube. Even before they knew how to line a track, French teams were inventing, tinkering with and shaping a sporting culture far removed from that which characterizes mainstream sport. Counterculture, punk and Riot Grrrl become resources with which the French imagine new conventions and shape other 'scripts of femininity' (Piano 2003: 257). Savage Burn is an illustrator who started roller derby in 2012. At the time, she associated DIY with the creative impetus with which the practice emerged.

So what I loved was the fact that you have to find yourself a 'derby name', it's like a kind of alias you know, an identity... like a character that you take on during the matches and that allows you to become a bit of a different person you know [...] and it's a bit 'do-it-yourself' it's like you do your war make-up, customize your whole outfit [...]. It's such a badass sport, it's everything I'd like to be, they give off such an image... well... I'm talking about girls here, as for boys it's true that if a guy does roller derby I think it's cool, but it's a more a feminine identity, [of] feminist, strong independent women, it's really a sport of skateboarders by skateboarders for skateboarders, and it's really a very rich little universe.

(Savage Burn, 30 years old, player since 2012)

Established outside the traditional sports circuits, derby even offers itself the freedom to parody them, and a set of playful rituals that we find repeatedly from one team to another structure sociability. Among these rituals, some are expressed by the body of sportswomen during playing time (derby names, the use of whimsical make-up and burlesque costumes, staging the carnivalesque rosters of matches).
4. Ladyfests are one of the legacies of the Riot Grrrl movement. Launched in 2000 in Olympia, these festivals are presented as 'non-profit, community-based event designed by and for women to showcase, celebrate and encourage the artistic, organizational and political work and talents of women' (Downes 2007: 44).

5. By 'sportivization', I am referring to the process of standardizing the discipline, along the lines of the most legitimized sporting practices (Brohm 1976).

## From local to global: The end of the DIY experience in French roller derby?

In France, the structuring of the American game was carried out through two intertwined processes which unfolded throughout its short history. The first process is a sports rationalization, focusing more and more on competition and relegating the elements of folklore outside the game. The second process concerns the institutionalization of roller derby. Very early, teams began to collaborate with the sports institution at the local (municipal sports offices) and national (federations) levels, before turning towards the international level, as Olympic dreams are never far away. However, until 2014, French roller derby was driven by the commitment of women and men who wished to give life to this sport. Roller derby was then the prerogative of collectives and their entourage, and initially had no social existence outside the circles that gave it life. Between 2012 and 2014, reflections concerning a national organization of the discipline animated the teams. Two models of sports management appeared.

On the one hand, teams defended the maintenance of roller derby as a completely self-managed organization. If it was, at first, a response to a necessity, the DIY ethos is clearly claimed here. Thus, since 2012, in line with the movement driven by American teams and instituted by the international league that is the WFTDA, some French teams refused to join the dominant sports system. In 2010, Monsterious initiated a Ladyfest⁴ in her hometown. One year later, she joined a roller derby team with a more militant than sporting outlook. Refusing to play the institutional game, the young woman demands the independence of the discipline at national level: '[t]he idea was to be independent and not to be attached to a big existing federation, institutionalized, managed by old white guys who would not understand the stakes of our sport' (Monsterious, 34 years old, player since 2011). Against a sports model perceived as archaic and conservative, the vision of a self-managed, progressive structure is seductive. Nevertheless, the commitment necessary for the success of such a project encouraged a large part of the players to want to join, paradoxically, the federal system: '[t]hey already had everything, it was much easier', some players explained to me.

Travis Beaver looks at the sportivization⁵ of three American teams, almost a decade after their creation. He shows that 'DIY is not simply motivated by necessity; rollergirls consider it an important value of the revival' (Beaver 2012: 26). In the context of American sport, dominated by men and economic interests, he shows that DIY enables female roller derby players to 'maintain control over their athletic activity, their organizations, and the sport of roller derby as a whole' (2012: 26). For him, the DIY ethos has accompanied the sporting structuring of these competitive teams, to the point of presenting itself as 'a tactic for producing non-alienated forms of sport by and for women' (2012: 46). If American derby girls find in the DIY model an alternative to the dominant, commercial model, as the players are not paid, French derby tends to adapt its contours to a well-known model of the French metropolitan territory. There, the amateur sports system is articulated between different poles which form a pyramidal structure: at the top, the representative bodies of the State; at its basis (as far as amateur sport is concerned): the associative mass, a 'world of volunteers' (Falcoz and Walter 2007), which organizes sports activity at the local level. The reproduction by roller derby collectives of a pyramidal associative organization brings them closer to 'traditional' sports models as
they evolved in France from the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Pierre Chifflet: '[t]he original idea of the French "sport system" was the creation of sport clubs and national organizations based on the value of physical effort and sport performance' (1995: 185-186). Articulated between federations and clubs, this French sports system has participated in creating a 'corporate culture' in which 'ideological unanimity was established on the basis of a high-performance sport model and its values' (1995: 186). This ideology has given rise to a devaluation of traditional games, which were also forced to sportivize to survive. Today, faced with this dominant sports ideology, it is the alternative sports models that seem to be called to order and forced to normalize.

The DIY commitment induced in the daily experience of roller derby was articulated between 'trial and error' and spontaneous construction of the game (networks of mutual aid between geographically close teams structured the discipline) and attempts to overcome daily struggles (such as the refusal of municipalities to allocate time in gymnasiums, disappointing recruitments, etc.). The entry of the discipline into the federal system testifies to the difficulty of new sports to fully extricate themselves from such an omniscient institution. Roller derby illustrates the difficulty in considering an alternative sports structure in a context where the sport is, from the smallest level, under the guidance of the State and its representatives. In the gymnasiums that depend on the municipalities and the insurance systems provided by the federations, sport is an element 'under control' and getting rid of the system seems complex. In the long tradition of the sportivization of emerging, underground practices, French roller derby has been no exception to the rule and seems to be gradually giving in to the siren calls of existing structures. Moreover, as a competitive and collective sport that requires seventeen references and, at least, twenty players for a single match, operating in a countercultural space completely outside the established system is difficult. The survival of roller derby is at stake. The discipline seems to have no choice but to leave the margins to join 'the system' in order to also benefit from greater visibility.

## The ethnography of an outsider in search for the DIY ethos

Created in 2011, the Glorious Bitchies team now has about forty members, 90 per cent of whom are women. A competitive team has participated every year since 2014 in the regional championship organized by the French roller and skateboard federation. Like the majority of teams, the story of the Glorious Bitchies began thanks to the initiative of a young woman (by the way, a former ice skater figure) who, after seeing *Whip It*, managed to gather friends and others to 'play' roller derby (limited to skating at first). The first practices took place in the skate park or the car park of supermarkets. The collective then quickly joined an inline skating team from the city to benefit from insurance and time slots in the gymnasium that had been lent to them by the municipality. As a result of various conflicts, the club claimed its complete independence around 2013. The spirit of the DIY ethos runs through the story of this team. First in a practical dynamic and necessity, then in a logic of emancipation of the association vis-à-vis the structures in place; DIY is claimed in these choices. The desire of the Bitchies to completely manage their sports organization leads them to extract themselves from the already formed and ultimately binding sports associative fabric in economic terms, and opt for organizational freedom. By becoming an autonomous sports association, the Bitchies managed to obtain from the municipality the reservation of two time
slots in gyms in the city per week, and thus gradually organized the development of their sports club.

Eight years after the first meeting of the pioneers of this team, my immersion led me to observe a sports collective organized and structured more around the rudiments of sport than a political reflection. The players were divided into two groups of levels. The advanced group was coached by a player who has been practising roller derby since 2016, and the 'fresh meats group' also trained with a player, engaged in the team since 2012. The learning of roller derby and the transmission of knowledge is obviously based on the principles of 'self-organization' and 'self-training': the experienced participants pass on their skills to the new ones. However, this organization at the local level of the sport (experts passing on their knowledge to novices) is not a 'revolution' in the French sports world, which exists mainly thanks to the effort of its volunteers. The progressive structuring of the Bitchies, previously based on DIY and the spontaneous and collective distribution of tasks, is becoming clearer. French teams tend to reproduce the traditional associative model. A presidency and a bureau of elected members divide up the administrative tasks. This organization took up the foundations of a traditional associative model marked by a sports hierarchy between the laypersons and the experts of the game, in charge of the practice.

> The DIY thing is an ideology for getting out of the system, but it also involves little things you can do yourself. After that, in a club like ours, it's getting lost, because it's clear that there are fewer and fewer volunteers, and the derby is becoming more and more consumerist. After that, as long as you've got people who are driven by their energy and their desire to do things, you'll be fine. Then, little by little, when you're disappointed, you're tired, you don't feel like fighting all the time, well, you fall into the mould (laughs).

(Dragiqueen, 34 years old, creator of a team in 2011)

Today, roller derby occupies a dominant position in the mainstream sporting landscape. As this player explains, DIY is, today, ironically expressed through the necessity of still having to lay out the track manually: '[f]or the do-it-yourself, there's the side of putting your track on the ground that's offered to you. I think that's something a bit unusual [...] It's unusual to have to lay out your pitch before you play' (Zaza Dolittle, 36 years old, player since 2012). This situation also blurs the line between a claimed DIY ethos and a classic volunteer commitment. Both on the sports side and on the associative side, the collective commitment necessary for a DIY operation seems difficult to maintain. Some of the players still truly believe in the DIY approach and the emancipatory self-management dynamic (Labry 2011: 73). Driven by the values of independence and control of sport by women, the DIY ethos sometimes takes on the appearance of an organization that the players undergo, sometimes leading expert players to leave this practice they love. However, these ideals come up against the issues that run through the French derby scene: the institutionalization of the activity, the organization of a national championship and even the survival of the teams. Using sponsorship (although it is still anecdotal) sometimes appears as a more comfortable solution to support the sports community. From collaboration with local craftspeople to the subcontracting of the merchandising by
private companies, the rapprochement of teams with the spheres of capital-
ism leads them to reproduce on a small scale, the spectre of the dominant
sports system. Calling on external trainers or joining sports associations to
get rid of administrative work are all strategies to relieve oneself of the DIY
commitment, which can sometimes be cumbersome, restrictive and also
tiring. Under these conditions, DIY turns out to be undergone. It is no longer
necessarily thought of as the 'punk connection' (Rosenberg and Garofalo
1998: 811) but more as the expression of 'organizational constraints' (Roulley
2016: 158).

However, this apparent standardization is far from being linear and
complete. The world of roller derby does not seem insensitive to the repro-
duction of traditional associative patterns marked by a hierarchy of prac-
titioners, and a saturation of members vis-à-vis associative work. If the
dominant sports ideology participates in erasing the specificity of roller
derby, forms of resistance and creative impulse lead to the creation of a
particular sports socialities within the sports institution and the forms of a
chosen DIY continue to be expressed. At the heart of this resistance is the
legacy of Riot Grrrl.

The DIY impulse and the sporting system: Between resistance and
the invention of new sports socialities

Emanating from a liberal sports context, the American DIY will only be able to
adapt to the contexts which it navigates in. Thus, in France, if the attenuation
of the DIY model can be seen as an ambivalence (the misdeeds of a sports
normalization), it can also be understood as an adaptation of the American
model to the reception context. As we have seen, the French sport system is
characterized by its hybrid model articulated between the State and the asso-
ciative system which, according to Peter, 'constitutes an organized space that
is coupled with an area of freedom and initiative' (2009: 30–31). Roller derby
appeared in a context where sports associations were seeing their model
disrupted: '[f]rom self-administration by the practitioners themselves to the
birth of the sports institution, the current organization [...] is gradually trans-
forming the contractual relations between the club [...] and structures close
to managerial and commercial logics' (2009: 33). Through its emerging model
in which pioneers were shaped by the DIY impulse, roller derby teams hold
the power to renew, at the local level, an organization where not only political
(state) but also economic constraints interfere.

The growth of roller derby and the arrival of more heterogeneous audi-
ences (with sporting qualities required for sport but not necessarily socialized
to the rudiments of alternative cultures) led to the rapid transformation of the
practice. While DIY allowed the invention of other ways of practising a sport,
outside the classical framework, its weakening resulted in the reproduction
of a more homogeneous and familiar sports framework. However, the repro-
duction of the traditional sports association by roller derby teams is not a
complete and homogeneous process. As they progress, the most competitive
teams seem to leave less-and-less room for DIY in their sports organization.
If in certain teams DIY no longer rhymes with amateurism, its expression and
values remain and can take multiple forms: as a specific action (the organi-
zation of sporting events for fun or meeting with an LGBT association) or
something more radical. On the sidelines of this sportivization (in progress)
6. Many French roller derby players use the American term 'league' to refer to the structure in which they play. In this way, they mark a symbolic break with the French traditional sports model organization: the 'club'.

7. If a critique of the dominant sports model is made, the claimed use of DIY contributes to producing an affinity economy between socialized individuals with labels of alternative cultures, 'limiting the broadening and mixing [...] of audiences as well as excluding visitors [...] perceived as social outsiders' (Zaytseva 2017: 104). Resisting the reproduction of the dominant sports model seems to be able to play out only within microcosms. If DIY makes it possible to rethink the sports model, it also seems to act as a social filter through which derby subcultures appear, trying again alternatives to the sports model.

8. The teams once again mobilize punk imaginaries, 'the "do-it-yourself" (DIY) production techniques of cut-n-paste letterforms, photocopied and collaged images, hand-scrawled and typewritten texts' (Triggs 2006: 69).

and in reaction to its organization, the creation of new small roller derby teams for which DIY and self-management become organizing principles appears again.

Death Rita, 29 years old, started roller derby in 2011 as part of a team that, since its inception, has trained a large part of the players of the France national team. She played there until 2017:

> It [this league]⁶ has grown a lot. First I felt like I was participating, that I could get involved, that I could participate in things, we go on trips, we do support evenings, we do a lot of stuff in the end. And when it grew, I felt like I was only in one sport, and another sport. I wasn't already too aware of what was happening [...] everything was happening in the upper spheres.

(Death Rita, 31 years old)

In 2018, she joined a small team. Noting that the association proposed a vertical associative model 'where all the decisions of the club were made by the president', she joined forces with two other players and created their own roller derby association. By seizing the DIY ideology as an organizing principle, they tried to find a balance between elements specific to competitive sport, while leading a reflective positioning '[re]confirming the shift from a culture of consumption to a culture of participation' (Hein 2012: 39). Once again, a DIY of necessity accompanied this group, now made up of laypersons and derby experts. But alongside this, a claimed DIY fits into the organization of this team which 'tried to return to the spirit of the starting derby [...] lost a little on the way' (Death Rita). A return to the roots animates the creation of this new derby collective with a stronger, militant DIY ethos.

By adopting management that we find on the side of alternative circles, articulated between the search for 'horizontality of the decision-making process', as well as an 'anti-commercial' ethos (Eleftheriadis 2018: 140), players respond to the popularization of roller derby, which is accompanied by an inevitable standardization of its model, and manage to create some forms of resistance within the roller derby environment but also within the sports institution.⁷ In their early days, French teams seized on Riot Grrrl imagery to shape a new sporting culture. Against a backdrop of normalization and a move away from alternative imaginaries of activity, the new collectives that have emerged recently, from 2017 onwards, are re-purposing the punk link to think about their conception of activity. While re-embracing the vanishing DIY⁸ aesthetic, the new small teams that emerged after 2017 are further politicizing their organization, articulated between DIY and feminism. Like Riot Grrrl before them, roller derby practitioners 'adopt punk DIY philosophy to encourage women and girls to take the initiative to create art and knowledge, to change their cultural and political landscape, rather than waiting for someone else to do it for them' (Garrison 2000: 154). In another part of France, Trobador's trajectory is similar to that of Rita. The young woman started roller derby in 2011. As a former competitive basketball player, she first became involved with the team as a sportswoman, before realizing the potential for protest that the sport offered.

For us, it's always the same problem: it's two or three guys who take advantage of their expertise, their ease, to impose themselves. For example, there's refereeing, but also the skills to measure a track and set it
up. We realized that out of the eight players, none of them knew how to do it. Well, I can pretty much do it, and there's another one who's been doing derby for a long time, but we've never really been the leaders to say: I'll tell you how to do it. It's always the guy who comes out on top. When you have a problem with your skates, there's always a guy who comes and fixes them for you, when in fact we could learn to do it ourselves.

(Trobador, player since 2011 and team founder in 2020)

In 2020, she created her own roller derby team and saw it as a way of appropriating, on an everyday scale, a set of techniques traditionally used by men. Tinkering with skates, building tools to trace a track, integrating referee crews, even going to the skate parks, etc. Through these commitments, female derby players are rethinking the gender order within the context of sporting practice. Like Riot Grrrl, they use sport to encourage women to challenge 'capitalist-patriarchal [...] and sexism, precisely through acts of individual transgression against the implicit or explicit norms of "ladylike" or "girlish"

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4: A DIY recruitment poster for the Pink Block teams (2021). Anon.</figcaption></figure>
behavior' (Gottlieb and Wald 1994: 267). Nearly fifteen years after roller derby teams first appeared in France, the spirit of Riot Grrrl has never seemed so alive.

**Conclusion. The French derby: Between liminality and multiple expressions of the DIY impulse**

Because of its youth, roller derby allows us to follow step by step the emergence of a sport, from its appropriation by a small group of women in the United States to its diffusion on both sides of the globe by the sole effort of the practitioners: roller derby is a complete DIY sport. Following Beaver and Breeze, the DIY ethos provides an opportunity to observe the relationships that the derby world has with governing institutions. In the case of my study conducted on French tracks, I sought to understand whether American DIY managed to initiate the creation of an alternative sports model.

Between 2009 and 2014 in France, a DIY out of necessity was associated with a creative DIY. If the DIY impulse is a response to the fledgling form of derby, it is also carried by the tradition of punk rock concerts of American teams. Then it allowed the inscription of the game within a playful space-time, structured by a set of rituals that also participated in diverting the framework of traditional sports practices. In the continuity of the punk heritage or imaginary, DIY induces a will to not restrict itself to the instituted frameworks, but rather to consider other forms of social organizations. The claim by certain teams of self-managed functioning, independent of the federal sporting institution, is one example. DIY thus nourishes a will for emancipation from the existing frameworks to explore other ways of investing in sporting leisure.

However, the constraints linked to the game itself (time, insurance, training, human resources and needs) and the difficulties in carrying out a total DIY approach encouraged the players to gradually adopt the traditional sports model to facilitate the development of their discipline. Their entry into the federal system has also been accompanied by a destruction of the festive and carnival dimension of the game, whose ideology does not correspond to that acclaimed by mainstream sport and its model of excellence. From then on, the aim was to make roller derby 'a real sport'. By opening its doors to the public and more players, roller derby saw DIY weaken, leading teams to reproduce the traditional decision-making structure of hierarchical and voluntary federal sports model.

From a macro-sociological perspective, roller derby occupies a liminal place within sports institutions. If by taking over DIY, roller derby players manage to make a place for themselves in the sports system, roller derby remains a practice unknown to the public and little recognized by French sports networks. But, at the heart of this system, a set of resistance and reflections influenced by American teams and the emancipating spirit of the beginnings are also apprehended. Thanks to the use of DIY, the world of roller derby can also take advantage of this liminal place to continue to explore a field of possibilities and try to renew a frozen institution from the inside. By joining the traditional sports model, roller derby (practised largely by young women) holds the power to renew an aging model in crisis. Then, the DIY impulse (or système-D in French) advocating resourcefulness and experimentation is a way to counteract the rising salaried model in the associative world, which tends to replace the values and ethics of traditional volunteering and reinvent new forms of sports sociability.
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SUGGESTED CITATION

Messey, Orlane (2024), 'Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby', *Punk & Post-Punk*, online first, https://doi.org/10.1386/punk_00231_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Orlane Messey is currently conducting a Ph.D. thesis on French roller derby.
She is attached to the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté and a member
of the C3S Laboratory (EA4660).

Contact: University of Franche-Comté, 31 chemin de l'Epitaphe, 25000 Besançon, France.

E-mail: orlane.messey@univ-fcomte.fr

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-1203-8564

Orlane Messey has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.