The club is my life: the meaning of emotions in Brazilian and Argentinian football in different ethnographic contexts

Abstract

In this paper, our focus is on how emotions are narrated and represented in two different
ethnographic contexts. First, we aim to observe a masculinity curriculum in football stadiums in Porto
Alegre, Brazil. Second, we consider the processes of the ‘modernization’ of sports management in a
football club in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We intend to interpret how emotions and feelings are
understood in the construction of masculinities and commercial narratives of the “football product”.
If, to some extent, emotions allow us to question the hegemonic maxims of culture to stress the
permissiveness of gender performativities, they can also delimit people by repeating gender and
consumption disputes. This emotional experience that our interlocutors go through is neither an
absolute challenge to the norms nor a total acceptance of them. Perhaps, sentiments are in dispute,
and we believe that fighting for that cause is quite fair.