Doing Fandom

Lessons from Football in Gender, Emotions, Space

Tamar Rapoport

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030468699
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030468705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Doing Fandom presents a body of knowledge essential to football fandom research, and the study of gender, space, emotions and culture more generally.

The analytical framework follows the theory of practice, drawing on three acclaimed sociological concepts to expand current scholarship on fandom: habitus, doing gender, and claiming the right to space.
The authors apply these perspectives to interrogate the development, performative and experiential aspects of fandom, and inform analysis of fans' social and political activism beyond the stadium.
Drawing on several case studies conducted among fans in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, the anthology provides substantial insight into the construction of fandom, and will be invaluable for students and scholars across sociology, anthropology of sport, and cultural studies.

Part II: The Genesis of Doing Fandom

Thematic Introduction - I

Part I deals with the social genesis of performing fandom. It brings to light the early developmental roots of inculcating and acquiring fandom’s bodily practices and the emotional experiences and expressions coupled with them.

In Chapter “How Children Become Fans:​ Learning Fandom via the Body”, Tali Friedman and Tamar Rapoport examine how fandom is acquired in childhood. They take a close look at how children become fans by focusing on the bodily process of mastering fandom practices that begins at a young age. In documenting and analysing this process, their research reveals that the habitus of fandom is learned at a young age mainly through imitation and the repetitive exercise of the constituent practices. The analysis draws on the well-known concept of habitus introduced by Pierre Bourdieu.¹ The concept denotes a system of embodied dispositions and orientations that organizes and manages the ways in which individuals perceive, react to and embody the social world—fandom and football in the case of this anthology. According to Bourdieu, habitus is the means by which the social order is expressed in and by the individual’s body, shaping the manner in which it conducts itself physically and appears in the social world. Applying the habitus concept to football fandom, the analysis shows how—through imitation and identification, experimentation and training as well as through experiencing bodily intimacy—children assume and assimilate the fandom habitus, thus becoming habituated to performing the practices properly and achieving the status of “authentic fans”. In this context, the chapter identifies the arenas (home, stadium, peer group) and the somatic events (routine and unexpected) where the inculcating and learning of fandom take place and fandom is transmitted to the next generation of fans.

Chapter “A Fan’s Emotional Pendulum”, contributed by Tali Friedman, demonstrates how the body conveys, enacts and displays the diverse, intense feelings intrinsic to football fandom. For example, the body sheds tears and sweats when the team drops a league or produces an adrenaline rush after a decisive victory. The emotional turbulence and passion involve a broad range of emotions encapsulated in what the author calls the fandom “emotional toolkit”. The analysis illuminates the roller-coaster of emotions entailed in doing fandom, the varied bodily manifestations and the rapid and extreme changes in the emotional expressions visible during a game. Drawing mainly on literature from the sociology of emotion, the chapter shows how fans engender a “symphony of emotions” in the stadium and how these emotional expressions preserve and re-create the essence of fandom, the community of fans and loyalty to the club.

In the Chapter “Contesting Love Through Commodification:​ Soccer Fans, Affect, and Social Class in Turkey”, Yağmur Nuhrat discusses football in Turkey, adding a social structural perspective to the common expression “love of football”. While Friedman studies the experiences and manifestations of love during the game, Nuhrat examines the intersection of (1) the increasing commodification in Turkey, (2) the law that promises to “clean up” fandom and (3) differing expressions of love along class lines following this clean-up. The cleaned-up version of football serves to secure class distinction for upper middle class fans, whereas it evokes resistance among less affluent and working-class fans. Her research reveals how the class conflict in Turkey created by the new law and how rising commodification are evaluated by the fans through contestations over what it means to be an “authentic fan” and especially over the quality of ones love for the team. True love is defined and experienced differently by members of the two groups, with working class fans often describing their love as maddening or self-sacrificing. In the context of increasing political repression, their resistance to commodification is discursively entangled with love and violence. By contrast, members of the upper class and the administration express their love by consuming paraphernalia related to the club.

Footnotes

1

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice (trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. Rapoport (ed.)Doing Fandomhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46870-5_2

Begin Abstract

How Children Become Fans: Learning Fandom via the Body

Tali Friedman¹ and Tamar Rapoport¹

(1)

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Tali Friedman (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Tamar Rapoport

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Bloomfield Stadium, Tel Aviv: A home game of Hapoel Tel Aviv against Beitar Jerusalem.¹ There are several father-son pairs in the stands around me. My attention was caught by a young father and child of about five sitting nearby. The father was highly active in supporting the Hapoel club while also provoking Beitar fans in the adjacent stand. All of a sudden he jumped up, raised his middle finger and waved it towards the opponents’ faces as he shouted at the top of his lungs: ‘Fuck off, Beitar!’ The young boy was watching his father and immediately started jumping along with him. Trying to imitate him, the boy waved his own small finger in the direction of Beitar fans, not the middle one like his father, but his index finger. Despite the imprecision, the father immediately rewarded his son’s attempt with a warm hug.

(Field notes, Tali Friedman, September 18, 2011)

The field notes describe a moment in the process of socialization into fandom in real time: A child² endeavoured to participate in the performance of fandom by imitating his father’s bodily movements. Shortly after this event, we found a photo taken Rotterdam (see Fig. 1) showing a counterpart of the little boy from Tel-Aviv performing a variant of the same gesture. Multiple versions of the photo went viral on the Internet, with the original photo capturing the protest of Rotterdam fans over a moment of silence at the stadium.³

Fig. 1

A young fan of Feyenoord Rotterdam performing a vulgar gesture of fandom

(Source ANP Photo, with permission)

Although the vulgar gesture is performed by children in different stadiums, in different countries and in support of different clubs (in this case, Feyenoord, Netherlands⁴), the image is almost identical. Common to two children living in different cultural contexts, then, the gesture demonstrates the universality of learning and performing fandom. Its primary significance—in its total embodiment of outrage and contempt—is its underscoring the major role played by the body in learning fandom at a young age. The learning of fandom via the body is the topic at the center of this chapter, which targets a question almost absent from the research on fandom⁵: How do children become football fans?

The scant literature on children and fandom emphasises mainly the role of socialisation agents and agencies in the inculcation to sport (see, for example, McPherson 1976; Wann et al. 1996; Wann 2006).⁶ This research focuses primarily on boys’ initiation into sports by a man, perhaps their father, brother or a friend (Messner 1992). Yet it tends to overlook the manner and timing of children’s learning of fandom, the type of fandom practices and experiences (both routine and extraordinary) that they learn, and how they perform practices in their journey to becoming “authentic fans” (see Harris and Alexander 1998).

Besides bypassing the issue of how fandom is learned in childhood, social research on fandom has not addressed the body (Maguire’s 1993); likewise, research on the body has passed over fandom. This is rather surprising, given that the experiences and practices of fandom are essentially inculcated, generated, performed and maintained by the body of the individual and the collective (see Bromberger 2016). The body learns and performs these practices publicly and visibly.

The authors of the present chapter conceptualise becoming a fan as an active, ongoing process of learning fandom through experimentation with and repetition of specific bodily practices.⁷ This body-based perspective draws on Bourdieu’s well-known theorising of the “habitus” (Bourdieu 1977). The habitus concept according to Csordas (1999) and Crossley (2001) provides the long needed connection between “somatic sociology”, which examines what the body does (in our case, it jumps, sings and forms a vulgar gesture) and “sociology of the body”, which focuses on what is done to the body (regulation and restraint, for example). According to Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, habitus is a system of bodily schema (movements, expressions, gestures) that are assimilated in the body at a young age , primarily through the imitation of parents and other adults. The body per Bourdieu is the key player in social interaction and a powerful, symbolic axis in the construction of meanings in context.⁸

Following this approach, the concept of habitus has recently been employed as the theoretical underpinning of numerous studies in the fields of formal and informal education.⁹ Surprisingly, this conceptualisation has not yet been utilised in the empirical research on the inculcation, learning and acquisition of fandom in childhood. The present study, then, set out to fill this gap by enlisting the habitus concept to elucidate how children learn fandom: It examines the early developmental roots of doing fandom and becoming a fan. Moreover, we propose that acquiring fandom at a young age via bodily practices, accounts for the endurance of loyalty to a particular club, sometimes over a lifetime, whether in football or in other sports (Friedm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• An Analytical Framework for Investigating Fandom
• Part I. I: The Genesis of Doing Fandom
• Part II. II: The Gendering of Fandom
• Part III. III: Claiming a Foothold in Spaces Beyond the Stadium
• Back Matter