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Roller derby is a unique and innovative phenomenon in the sporting landscape. Body image, gender policies, aggression/contact elements, music, art, and subversive and inclusive politics are all embraced to various degrees. Its growth was swift and significant – thousands of women around the world strapped on their skates and pushed themselves to meet the minimum skills requirements for joining a derby league. This unique sport was put in the (un)enviable position of somehow having done what governments and medical professionals had tried to achieve for years: to get people active who were inactive in the past, raise people's physical activity levels, and therefore (so the story goes) to improve their overall wellbeing and mental health. This article engages with interview transcripts with 12 derby skaters who chose to leave the sport in order to understand the complex social, cultural and personal forces at play in the relationship between sport and wellbeing. Drawing on feminist conceptualisations of care and movement, I explore the notion of "troubled derby subjectivities" to understand the ways in which the "sport" (including its style, music and affinities) provided a generative space for non-normative gendered subjectivities, embodied movement and "wellbeing".

This article explores how the global revival of roller derby as an alternative sport for women has been mobilised through online social networks, league promotion and fan sites that create imagined communities of 'roller grrrls'. In the creation of sport culture we argue that the virtual performance of 'derby' identities is as significant as the embodiment of play. Like other sports, derby sites mobilise affect (passion, pleasure, pain, desire to play) through a discourse of 'empowerment' that urges women to overcome limits and reinvent gendered subjectivity. However, within the virtual space of roller derby, complex affects are produced and circulated within power relations that can include or exclude. Through an analysis of the way affect is mobilised in selected roller derby sites, we identify how virtual sport identities are connected through the movement of 'affects' across bodies and leagues. These affects both circumscribe and undermine the notion of a single derby community.

Intro -- Acknowledgement -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Boxes -- 1: Introduction: Towards a Vital Feminist Politics -- Prologue -- Introduction -- Reconfiguring the Bio-Psycho-Social Model -- Vital Feminism -- Bodyminds -- A Post-Qualitative Approach: Thinking with Theory -- References -- 2: Rhizomatic Movements and Gendered Knots of 'Bad Feelings' -- Post-qualitative Writing-Agitating -- Thinking Depression-Recovery Rhizomatically -- Mapping the Biopsychosocialities of Depression-Recovery -- Chemical Imbalance: Moody-Bitch-Racism -- Creating, Moving Futures -- References -- 3: Reconfiguring Recovery Beyond Linearity -- Talking-Listening-Writing Research: Enacting Spacetime Configurations -- The Gender Performativity of Hormonal Intra-actions -- 'Silly' Girls, 'Snowflakes' and Young Womanhood: The Eruption of 'Depression' -- Psychopharmacologies, Placebo and the Entangled Politics of Care -- References -- 4: Motherhood, Hauntings and the Affective Arrangement of Care -- The Moral Terrain of Motherhood -- Objects of Classification and Order -- Haunted Arrangements and Infrastructures of Care -- Guilt and the Performativity of Motherhood -- Infrastructures of Maternal Care -- Matters of Attachment -- References -- 5: Moving-Transforming Bodyminds -- Everyday Habits and Rhythms -- A Little Public Sphere -- The Setting -- Immersive Bodymind Practices -- The Little Public Sphere Continues -- Visceral Practices, Gendered Habits -- We Return to the Little Public Sphere -- Little Public Sphere Continued -- References -- 6: Creative Enactments in More-Than-Human Worlds -- Creative Lines of Flight -- Creative Enactments: Recovery Blogs -- Hauntings -- Imaginings of Becoming Through Metaphors of Recovery -- References -- 7: Reimagining Feminist Futures: Vital Politics, Disruptive Pedagogies.

Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of "self" transformation at the "expense" of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women's empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist post-qualitative project seeks to do "research differently" through a generative ethos of knowledge production that is co-constituted with participants and the coach-researcher (Erin). We explore how a Thai boxing program—"fight camp"—worked through-with an affective feminist coaching pedagogy that sought to transform gendered patterns of movement mobilizing moments of discomfort and pleasure. This research practice involved attuning to the embodied dynamics of learning-coaching—the intra-actions of boxing—in terms of what these movement practices "do" and how they "affect" women in the process of becoming-fighters. We write through three provocations—"the drunk uncle," "get ugly with it," and "show and tell"—to engage readers in the affective relations entangled within the processes of coaching-researching MTB. Our post-qualitative research approach has implications for the provision of physical cultural practices and alternative coaching pedagogy more broadly.

In this article, we argue that the "turn to affect" can provide a generative framework for working through key sticking points for women in sport. Through an analysis of the rule changes and subsequent social media comments in the lead-up to the inaugural Australian Football League Women's (AFLW) competition, we demonstrate the power of emotions for intensifying and resisting discussion about women's participation in male-dominated sport, as they accumulate through fan encounters on social media. Through a focus on the expression of emotions such as disappointment and contempt, we interrogate the collective workings of digital affects for constituting gendered knowledge production and subjectivity in sport contexts. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of feminist thinking for sport research and practice.