Making It Up

Abstract

The league is made in its members’ actions. Participants understood their DIY league, its organizational structures, and their selfrepresentations as contingent outcomes of their collective action; ‘you can control the direction that you’re going in … you can give everybody a say … if people aren’t happy you can look at if we could change the league in any way to try and make them happy … ’ (The Beefcake, individual interview, October 2010). There remains a sense among participants, to state it simply, that the league can be whatever we want it to be. However, in getting taken seriously participants’ understandings become tinged with inevitability; ‘we can’t keep everyone happy, that’s just the way it is’ (Tiny Chancer, field notes, November 2011). As participants put seriousness into practice, however, the league can’t be whatever they want it to be:

I was pleased when roller derby was recognized as a ‘sport’ because it legitimized the hard work it takes to be a skater to people that still ‘joke’ that it isn’t really a sport. Having said that I still resent the fact that some random governing body have the right to decide what we as a community must do to be ‘approved’.

Pauline Baynes, zine introduction, April 2013

… people were just making it up as they went along [laughing]

The Beefcake, individual interview, October 2010