Collective Chaos: A Conversation with Samantha Tucker, Amy Spears and Emily Mills

|| This event: Has LGBTQ content, Is LGBTQ hosted, May be of interest to the LGBTQ community ||

A Room of One’s Own is thrilled to welcome Samantha Tucker, Amy Spears and Emily Mills for a conversation on all things roller derby in Samantha and Amy’s newest book Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir.

This is a free, in-person event at A Room of One’s Own.

A view into the continuing evolution of the niche-yet-global sport through the historical lens of Ohio Roller Derby, one of the founding leagues of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association

Part sports autobiography, part cultural critique, this book offers the collective experience of a tenacious group of nontraditional athletes who play, officiate, plan, schedule, market, and manage the business of a (mostly) women’s amateur sports team.

This modern sport, with its alternative, punk rock culture, is often a place for those who’ve struggled within the mainstream. But even as the sport is often home for historically marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, roller derby organizations and participants often mirror and experience the same inequities as those in the world surrounding them. In a full-contact, theatrical sport that some consider revolutionary, the authors show that gaining truly radical self-knowledge is an ongoing, difficult process that requires love, teamwork, discipline, critical consideration of one’s local and global societies, and—above all else—one’s place and action within them.

|| free