ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with an extended quote from a participant named June interviewed in 2011 about her involvement with roller derby in Australia. It argues that physical cultural studies (PCS) is a framework that can interrogate and support a type of feminist joy. The chapter focuses on June's interview responses and serves as a demonstration of the insights garnered from a PCS framework that privileges affective and pleasurable bodies. Understanding bodies as pleasurable speaks towards a type of feminist joy – women's bodies, often sites of control and desire by men – can now be spoken of, seen, and indeed experienced, as pleasurable. For to privilege affective and pleasurable bodies is not to negate questions of marginalization, nor is it an embrace of 'the perfect' neoliberal feminine subject competing for the perfect balance between successful sexuality and domesticity. Affective and pleasurable bodies in physical cultures are both textual and visceral – both the body image, and the body without image.
