Sisterhood and affective politics: The CaiRollers mobilising change through roller derby in Egypt

Abstract

This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller derby team in Egypt. Through visual affective discourse analysis of their Instagram account and interviews with team members, the article addresses the question: What do physical practices such as roller derby ‘do’ in e/affecting and mobilising change? In conversation with feminisms from the Middle East, our analysis highlights how the team’s ‘sisterhood’ is a site of affective politics that transcends the roller derby track. At the same time, a desire to be tough and to embrace risk permeated the CaiRollers discourses. Yet, while the team has established its legitimacy within the transnational roller derby community, we narrate the obstacles they face in Egypt. In sum, we found that the CaiRollers involvement in roller derby was entangled in mobilising change in political movements, gender politics, transnational mobilities and questions of legitimacy and sport.

Keywords

affect feminism gender politics Middle Eastern feminisms risk roller derby social media sport visual affective discourse analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abu-Lughod

(1991) Writing against culture. In: Fox

(ed.) Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–154

Abu-Lughod

(1998) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Abu-Lughod

(2008) Writing Women’s Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Abu-Lughod

(2013) Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Abu-Lughod

(2019) On teaching gender and Islam in the Middle East. JadMag: The Pedagogy Edition. Available at: https://tadweenpublishing.com/collections/jadmag/products/jadmag-issue-7-2-pedagogy-2019 (accessed 4 January 2020).

Ahmad

(2020) The digital lives of Muslim sportswomen: Navigating the spaces of sport, culture, and social media. Available at: http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/ (accessed 4 January 2020).

Ahmad

Thorpe

(2020) Muslim sportswomen as digital space invaders: Hashtag politics and everyday visibilities. Communication & Sport 8: 668–691.

Ahmed

(2004a) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ahmed

(2004b) Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society 21(2): 25–42.

10.

Altorki

El-Solh

(1988) Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

11.

Amara

(2012) Sport, Politics and Society in the Arab World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

12.

Beaver

(2012) ‘By the skaters, for the skaters’: The DIY ethos of the roller derby revival. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 36(1): 25–49.

13.

Biagini

(2020) Islamist women’s feminist subjectivities in (r)evolution: The Egyptian Muslim sisterhood in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. International Feminist Journal of Politics 22(3): 382–402.

14.

Breeze

(2013) Analysing ‘seriousness’ in roller derby: Speaking critically with the serious leisure perspective. Sociological Research Online 18: 1–13.

15.

Breeze

(2014) Just a Big Sexy Joke? Getting Taken Seriously in Women’s Roller Derby. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9845 (accessed 4 January 2020).

16.

Burnett

(2015) Assessing the sociology of sport: On sport for development and peace. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4–5): 385–390.

17.

CaiRollers (n.d.) ‘About’ (webpage). Available at: https://www.cairollers.com/about/ (accessed 4 January 2020).

18.

Cardoso Brown LEC (2018) Post-colonial feminism, Black feminism and sport. In: Mansfield

Caudwell

Wheaton

Watson

(eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 479–495.

19.

Carlson

(2010) The female signifiant in all-women’s amateur roller derby. Sociology of Sport Journal 27(4): 428–440.

20.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

21.

Dosekun

(2015) For Western girls only? Feminist Media Studies 15(6): 960–975.

22.

Egyptian Streets (2014) CaiRollers: Empowering women one skater at a time. 20 June. Available at: https://egyptianstreets.com/2014/06/20/cairollers-empowering-women-one-skater-at-a-time/ (accessed 4 January 2020).

23.

Finley

(2010) Skating femininity: Gender manoeuvring in women’s roller derby. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39(4): 359–387.

24.

Gbadamosi

(2017) The girls spearheading roller derby’s revival in Egypt. CNN, 22 January. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/18/africa/egypt-roller-derby-revival/index.html (accessed 4 January 2020).

25.

Glas

Alexander

(2020) Explaining support for Muslim feminism in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Gender & Society 34(3): 437–466.

26.

Grira

(2014) Roller derby: Helping Egyptian women stand up for themselves. The Observers, 14 August. Available at: https://observers.france24.com/en/20140814-roller-derby-egypt-women-cairollers (accessed 4 January 2020).

27.

Leeuwen

Jewitt

(2001) Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage.

28.

Lutz

Abu-Lughod

(eds) (1990) Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

29.

Markula

(2006) Deleuze and the body without organs: Disreading the fit feminine identity. Journal of Sport & Social Issues 30(1): 29–44.

30.

Mohamed

Mahdi

Dabashi

(2020) The aesthetics of dissent: Culture and politics of transformation in the Arab world. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(2): 141–149.

31.

Nouraie-Simone

(2014) On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY.

32.

Olive

(2013) ‘Making friends with the neighbours’: Blogging as a research method. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(1): 71–84.

33.

Pavlidis

Fullagar

(2013) Becoming roller derby grrrls: Exploring the gendered play of affect in mediated sport cultures. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48(6): 673–688.

34.

Pavlidis

Fullagar

(2014a) Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby. Farnham: Ashgate.

35.

Pavlidis

Fullagar

(2014b) Women, sport and new media technologies: Derby Grrrls online. In: Bennett

Robards

(eds) Mediated Youth Cultures. London. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165–181.

36.

Pavlidis

Fullagar

(2015) The pain and pleasure of roller derby: Thinking through affect and subjectification. International Journal of Cultural Studies 18(5): 483–499.

37.

Pavlidis

O’Brien

(2017) Sport and feminism in China: On the possibilities of conceiving roller derby as a feminist intervention. Journal of Sociology 53(3): 704–719.

38.

Pavlidis

Kennelly

Rodriguez Castro

(2020) White women smiling? Media representations of women at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Sociology of Sport Journal 37(1): 36–46.

39.

Pavlidis

Rodriguez Castro

Kennelly

(2020) Shame, pain and fame: Sportswomen losing in Australia’s mainstream media reporting. Sport in Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2020.1777101.

40.

Puwar

(2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg.

41.

Ratna

(2018) Not just merely different: Travelling theories, postfeminism and the racialised politics of women of color. Sociology of Sport Journal 35(3): 197–206.

42.

Rose

(2001) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage.

43.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

44.

Samie

Toffoletti

(2018) Postfeminist paradoxes and cultural difference: Unpacking media representations of American Muslim sportswomen Ibtihaj and Dalilah Muhammad. In: Toffoletti

Thorpe

Francombe-Webb

(eds) New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–109.

45.

Pierre

St (2001) Coming to theory: Finding Foucault and Deleuze. In: Weiler

(ed.) Feminist Engagements: Reading Resisting, and Revisioning Male Theorists in Education and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 141–164.

46.

Thorpe

(2020) Informal sports for youth recovery: Grassroots strategies in conflict and disaster geographies. Journal of Youth Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2020.1763936.

47.

Thorpe

Ahmad

(2015) Youth, action sports and political agency in the Middle East: Lessons from a grassroots parkour group in Gaza. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(6): 678–704.

48.

Toffoletti

Palmer

(2017) New approaches for studies of Muslim women and sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 52(2): 146–163.

49.

United Nations Women, Arab States/North Africa (2018) Take five: ‘Roller derby and sport, in general, is empowering for women’, 2 July. Available at: http://arabstates.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2018/7/roller-derby (accessed 4 January 2020).

50.

Van Ingen

(2013) ‘Seeing what frames our seeing’: Seeking histories on early black female boxers. Journal of Sport History 40(1): 93–110.

51.

Walsh

(2017) Bump, tumble, go faster! In Egypt, roller derby is real life. The New York Times, 28 December. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/world/middleeast/cairo-roller-derby-women.html (accessed 4 January 2020).

52.

Wetherell

(2013) Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity 6(4): 349–368.