The Ferocity of Fandom

Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle Review

Something was afoot. My students began to wear red and blue, travel in flocks, attend pep rallies, detest rival colleges, and call themselves River Hawks. It was the fall of 2013, and my midsize research university had joined Division I sports.

I was not a fan of this decision. As an undergraduate, I’d nearly dropped out of Penn State because Saturday football tailgating was disturbing my life of monkish study. In hindsight, I know that it was also a life of self-imposed isolation, depression, and anxiety, but I attributed my malaise to the general anti-intellectualism of my surroundings — to those disgusting, beer-swilling idiots who paraded to Beaver Stadium each week. I said as much to my football-loving roommates, all but one of whom promptly disowned me. He insisted that I join him for a game — just one — and then, he promised, he would leave me alone. I went, got thoroughly drunk, screamed my head off, hugged (and then vomited on) a complete stranger, and stayed at Penn State.

In the end, I understood my university’s decision to embrace the NCAA. Fandom, for better and for worse, can help make a group into a student body.

But how? Let’s turn to Erin Tarver’s The I in Team. Tarver, an assistant professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory University, provides a detailed account of how, as she writes in the subtitle, sports fandom creates and reproduces identity in contemporary (principally American) society. As a student on the outside of the football mayhem, I found that the phenomenon of cheering and booing seemed absolutely pathological, but when I let myself join in, the insanity seemed not only normal but necessary. Tarver explains how that transition happens, how being a fan structures one’s social existence and affects the racial, gendered, and economic categories by which we understand ourselves.

While Tarver employs sports history and sociology, her book is, for the most part, philosophical. She contends that fandom is, in the words of Michel Foucault, a form of “subjectivization.” Foucault plays on the two meanings of the word “subject.” It refers to being an agent or person with a particular identity, but it also describes a being who is placed under obligation or a certain form of authority. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that in the modern era, one’s identity is both constituted and constrained by rituals of authority and obedience.

This describes both the college fan and the college player. When I went to my first Nittany Lions game I did the wave as other fans did, chanted when they chanted, and, I am ashamed to say, did my small, scripted part in shredding an Ohio State Buckeye effigy. All the while, predominantly black bodies smashed one another on the grass below. Through these routinized acts of pseudoworship and pseudoviolence, a fan was born. In the proclivity for a fan to tell and retell these stories, he or she is reborn in the act of what Foucault calls “confession.”

Well before she became acquainted with these Foucaultian terms, Tarver was familiar with their form and perpetuation. She grew up in Southern Louisiana, as a fan of the Louisiana State University Tigers. The sports section of the newspaper was the running commentary of her childhood, a narrative that reinforced a longstanding sense of a “we” — represented by a striped animal with a large head — who are “number one.”

The mantra of athletic domination is often paired with a mascot or nickname — a Seminole, the Fighting Irish, or whatnot — that is a caricature of a racialized and oppressed group. Who exactly are we cheering for when we buy a “scalped” ticket and enter a packed football stadium or basketball arena?

The cartoonish actor who does somersaults and leads cheers at the 50-yard line is not the only mascot that fans applaud. College and professional sports, according to Tarver, are full of them. Here she is using Malcolm X’s understanding of the mascot to refer to any person who is not regarded as a genuine person but rather as a kept object, or pet. In Tarver’s words: “There is a second form of mascotting: the instrumentalization of athletes of color as a vehicle for the vicarious experience of aggression, sexuality, or violence.” That phrase alone should be enough to get you to read — and perhaps teach — this book. It’s where fun and games end and serious introspection begins:

Collegiate sports fandom in its current state is — particularly in the American South — a central mechanism in the reproduction of whiteness as a hierarchizing racial category. This is not to say that individual sports fans have racist beliefs (though many do); rather, it is to claim that the structure of collegiate athletics and the mascotting of black athletes in the American South contribute to the constitution of regional and community identities that are racialized as white and to the maintenance of a white-supremacist social order.

The exploitation of black bodies in high-stakes athletics may be the most egregious problem, but it’s far from the only one. Fandom often turns on tropes of hypermasculinity and misogyny. When fans turn against rival teams or their own players, it often takes the form of racist, sexist, or homophobic jeering. When mascots fail to perform their prescribed roles, they face intense ridicule and, in some cases, violence at the hands of fans. “Fans love to hate,” Tarver writes.

So maybe my first impression of college football was the correct one. That said, Tarver acknowledges that “sports fandom is pleasurable because it offers clear identity and a sense of valuable belonging — and offers them in abundance, to people who, increasingly, live lives disconnected from or marginalized by the communities around them.”

What is a diehard fan to do? Attending women’s sports events might be a good first step, Tarver suggests, noticing the way that cheering for talented female athletes does not, for the most part, play into the heterosexism, exploitation, and white supremacy of the athletics-industrial complex.

On Saturday, August 26, Stanford will play Rice to open the 2017 college-football season. Players will be practicing through the dog days of summer. Fans should stay busy, too — we have some important preseason reading to do.

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. His book American Philosophy: A Love Story was published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.