Explaining the Prevalence of Sexual Content in Football Fans' Antagonistic Communication.

Abstract

The role of chanting and banner display by fans during football games is both instrumental (performance enhancing) and expressive (identity affirming). Focusing on the latter function, it can be observed that fans express and affirm their identities not only by praising their own team (and its fans, i.e., themselves) but also by applying an "us vs. them" communicative model to contrast what they are to what they are not, imposing the latter on the opposite team's fans. Thus, the identities and superior qualities (whether athletic, physical, social, moral, etc.) of the ingroup are confirmed and praised by discrediting the identities and exposing the inferior qualities of the opponents. This is where prevailing texts of antagonistic communication during football games (chanting and banner displays) come from: by boldly discrediting, ridiculing and humiliating the opponent, fans praise and augment their own superiority. This study presents an in-depth analysis of the logic of this antagonistic communication by focusing on sex-related themes—which are by far more prevalent than other common themes (e.g., politics, racism, ethnocentrism, locality or religion)—in football fans' chants in Cyprus First Division games. It focuses on three specific themes: masculinity, heteronormativity and family reputation. Among the countless ways in which these themes are manifested in football fans' chants, the most intriguing are the uses of various insults and attacks on the integrity and reputation of the "others", e.g., calling the opponents "pussies", "gays" and their female family members, predominantly mothers, "whores" or "sluts". A large number of chants, extracted from observations of football games, were presented in 21 recently conducted interviews with football fans as stimuli for semi-structured discussion. The study asks why fans choose to use these themes and how they interpret them. Based on the data from the interviews, it concludes that (i) the primary purpose of these antagonistic communicative actions is to smash the reputation of the opponent, (ii) for this purpose, sex-related themes are more effective that other less prevalent ones and that (iii) this can—and actually does—happen because of the cultural milieu of sustained sexism, homophobia and the sacredness of the family, which are deeply internalized mainstream cultural elements in Cypriot society (and, by extension and at various degrees of intensity, in other Mediterranean and Western cultures).