Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-8566-8591

Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

College of Education and Human Services

Department

Not Listed

Committee Chair

Sharon Hayes

Committee Co-Chair

Audra Slocum

Committee Member

Melissa Sherfinski

Committee Member

Christine Hoffman

Abstract

This study sought to explore how six women in Central Appalachia negotiated embodied subjectivity and agency across discourses and gendered power relations. Women living in central Appalachia who play roller derby occupy a unique social position in which to position this study, as many are simultaneously challenging traditional gender norms and engaging in a highly physical and competitive sport that involves using their bodies relationally. Specifically, by conceiving women as vehicles of power and women’s flat track roller derby as a public pedagogy, I sought to trace what ‘doing’ a roller derby identity does to transform and advance their knowledge about themselves. Tracing their affective encounters across ‘growing up girl’ and participation in roller derby, this narrative inquiry highlights how dialogic learning in informal spaces of learning are productive for women’s development of embodied agency. I employed a theoretical frame based in the relational ontology of dialogic learning by bringing together the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to examine narratives within a region where economic conditions lead ‘the most educated’ to leave for better opportunities. While negative stereotypes of people within the region persist, these educated, capable, and strong Appalachian women have settled on ‘loving’ instead of ‘leaving,’ carving out their own space to challenge power relations. Their cultural production of community in roller derby reimagines what ‘homemaking’ means in a region where a gendered division of labor persists, maintaining motherhood and becoming a wife as the most ‘natural’ and available option to many. Their stories surface how roller derby can be a transformative social practice for women to learn and (un)learn relationships with other women and with their bodies as tools outside normative gendered ideologies.

Comments

The options for my college and department were not correct in the drop-down options. The college has since been renamed to College of Applied Human Sciences and my department is School of Education. This is correct on my dissertation, but those options were not available on the menu here.

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