Becoming Beiruthless : studying sensations and subjectivities with Beirut’s first roller derby team -

Abstract

This thesis project explores the lives of young, female roller derby players in Beirut. It does so through the lens of feelings and sensations. It discusses the opportunities that derby players seek out through the sport: players experiment with sensations and inter-player relations during derby practices, i.e. altered time-spaces, which ultimately leads to transformations of their subjectivities. Derby-based sensations present themselves to players in qualitatively manifold ways. Sensations on the track mix, overlap, multiply, and overwhelm one another. They are shared, not solitary. They continuously form the sports setting from which they arose and are, in turn, formed by this sports setting. Meanwhile, the media attention facing the team distorts the opportunities sought out by players, as journalists interrupt the practice setting and impose narratives of the players in which they do not recognize themselves. Players seek to counter these narratives by critically selecting which journalists to engage with and through their use of social media, where they present themselves as they experience themselves. Bodies, including material and immaterial bodies, affect other bodies and are affected by other bodies during derby practices. Each encounter between bodies forms a qualitative corporeal, material, and emotional transformation. This makes patiency and agency interchangeable on the derby track. Affect is key to understanding the stakes of playing roller derby, as variations in bodies’ capacities to act, to affect, and to be affected, transform players and foster changes in their off-track lives. Transformations of players do not have clear endpoints: Being a derby player is living in the processes of becoming a derby player, a becoming that is real in itself. Seeing the derby track as a Turnerian antistructure, I show that this becoming is a stage players go through which allows for them to behave in new ways and experiment with social and material elements. It prompts rediscoveries of gendered, aged, a