DThey put on short shorts and tight T-shirts and jumped on the gym floor. After the women's roller derby teams pushed, slapped and clashed against each other, the men's teams and their pom-poms were now gathered on the same court in Vienna, ready to put on an acrobatic, hip-shaking halftime show of the opposite. .
“We wanted to play with stereotypes,” said Andreas Fleck, one of the founders of the Austrian Fearleaders, Europe's first male and non-binary cheerleader team. “We have an image of heroic, strong male players on the field and highly sexualized female cheerleaders on the sidelines. We wanted to turn that around.”
Their quest to push boundaries dates back to 2011, when Vienna became home to its first roller derby team. Comprised primarily of women, their fiercely aggressive, full-contact style of play challenged the conventional role of women in sports. Fleck and his colleagues soon wondered if there was a way to take things even further.
“We're seeing this tension between roller derby, which is a very physical sport played primarily by female players, and the more sensitive, funny, classy men who support this team on the sidelines. “I wanted to create something,” he said.
Out came the Fearleaders, a group of about 30 members whose shorts, braces, colorful headbands and swinging dance moves are a staple of Vienna's roller derby scene and beyond. It becomes. This group reflects the inclusivity of roller derby. In roller derby, teams on roller skates use their hips, shoulders, and chest to prevent members of the opposing team from scoring. Roller derby is one of the few sports that welcomes transgender and non-binary players. .
Fleck said the Fearleaders' name pays homage to their bravery. “We have our own fear of putting on this costume and putting ourselves out there in front of an audience,” Fleck said. “And examples of us setting an example for others and trying to dispel their fears and get them to say, 'Okay, they can do it, so why can't I?' There is.”
The reaction from those around them was positive, but shortly after its inception in 2013, a feature in a left-leaning publication revealed just how much of an enemy the team was up against. “I was really horrified to see the comments,” Fleck said, citing comments that wished them death and those that directed them with vitriol and “homophobic, transphobic” language. “We live in a very progressive bubble, but I think there's still a lot of rejection and hatred outside of this bubble.”
In some ways, this reaction was not surprising to member Fabian Schipfer. “Society is really polarized right now, especially on the topic of gender,” he says. “We definitely feel like we're running into some kind of pain points, especially with social media.”
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Others quickly followed the Fearleaders' path. By 2016, France had launched its first all-male cheerleading team, Les Scrimages People, to support Lille's roller derby team, and other teams had sprung up in Montreuil, east of Paris, and Brittany. did.
Emma Dalquier, coach of Les Scrimmages People and a player on Lille's roller derby team, said that what unites them all is their connection to the world of boundary-pushing roller derby. “Without roller derby, these teams wouldn't exist,” she said.
“Roller derby players are showing that team contact sports aren't just for men, so this is a way to continue the conversation. Now these teams are building this in their own way and these It’s dismantling some very divisive stereotypes.”
As terms like non-binary and toxic masculinity have become more widely used and understood in recent years, Fearleaders supporters wonder if the effort has stalled. “At some point, we were questioning whether what we were doing was still necessary. We were thinking, maybe not,” Fleck said.
Sentiment quickly changed when signs of what Fleck described as a global “gender backlash” began to emerge. This has been fueled in part by the online “manosphere”, which seeks to promote its own views on masculinity. “It's becoming more toxic,” Fleck said. “It's getting harder and harder to counter these forces because they're somehow getting stronger. They're getting louder and more popular.”
The fight spilled over into the country in September, when Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) won the most votes in a general election, backed by a pledge that included a constitutional amendment declaring that there are only two genders.
Fleck said it was a sad throwback to the thinking that was dominant decades ago. “We've been thinking a lot about how we can tell a different story about masculinity. What other views of masculinity can we offer society?”
He said the quest to answer these questions has breathed new life into Fear Leaders' raison d'être. “This year, in 2024 and beyond, we feel that our actions matter more than ever.”
