Dissertation: Activist Fandom, Sport Communities and the Performance of Place

A comparative analysis of two contemporary soccer fan activist communities in Liverpool, England and Portland, Oregon. Together, Liverpool’s Fans Supporting Foodbanks and Portland’s Rose City Riveters illustrate how the particularities of place impact fan resistance within the transnational formation of soccer. Ethnographic fieldwork serves as the basis to discuss the ways in which the fan activist groups engage in the performance of place by taking actions to create, maintain, and contest local community. I utilize my embodied experience taking part in collective fan performances and organizational work and my movement through each city, alongside memoirs, social histories, journalism, government papers, organizational archives, personal ephemera, and 46 recorded conversations with fan activists. The key argument is that the Liverpool and Portland-based fan groups take part in activist struggles in three interdependent ways. They create enclave communities of care, solidarity, and strength for their marginalized members. They develop and maintain alternative nodes of power that contest and dismantle soccer’s dominant institutions. And they leverage the attention cast on elite-level soccer to enter into broader political activism against individuals and institutions that seek to ridicule, disrupt, and crush the vulnerable lives within their communities. Performance studies, feminist and queer theories of geography, and critical cultural sport studies provide analytical frames to understand how fan communities and resistances form in and around stadiums through the bonds of expressive performance, lived experience, locality, emotion, identity, and sport. As a whole, Pleasurable Labors illustrates how groups with limited access to conventional forms of power use everyday practices of pleasure to persist and thrive, while, at times, challenging and confronting dominant ideologies and institutions.

Available for download: https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Pleasurable-labors-activist-fandom-sport-communities/9983988197602771