Abstract
This article compares representations of soccer fanship in two Argentine films. It makes the claim that the representation of football fanship can be read as desire or jouissance depending on their historical and political context of production. Following Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ideological fantasy, the article claims that these two films stage the relationship between the symbolic and imaginary registers as they operate to construct the reality that masks the real of the fans’ desire in their given historical and political contexts.
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Notes
In employing the term “driving” Braunstein points here to the link between jouissance and the death drive, since “jouissance is the satisfaction of a drive linked to the death drive” (2003).
Reysen and Branscombe (2010) have made a distinction between “fanship” and “fandom”. They consider “fanship” and “fandom” as concepts to designate differing ways of relating to the object. For them fanship refers to “the individual’s sense of connection to a sport team,” or more succinctly, fanship is “identification with the object itself.” On the other hand, they define fandom as “the individual’s connection to other fans of the team,” or stated differently, fandom is “identification with others who share a connection with the object.” Because their study is not grounded on a psychoanalytical framework, I use the term fanship throughout this paper to refer to the subject’s identification with both an object or other fans. I understand the object to be a team, a habitus, or an identity itself.
As of 2002, when Alabarces published Fútbol y patria, they made up over 30 percent of the sports-themed movies produced in the history of Argentine film.
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Rabinovich, A.N. Ideological fan-tasy: desire and drive in football fanship representations in contemporary Argentine cinema. Psychoanal Cult Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-024-00435-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-024-00435-7