Scottish Masculinity: Football Fans
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social sciences
term papers
published 24/04/2007
review : Completed
level : Advanced
requested 6 times
Before the Forty-five, every man was a soldier, who partook of national confidence, and interested himself in national honour. To lose this spirit, is to lose what no small advantage will compensate (qtd. in Herman 153). This comment from Samuel Johnson sums up a worry that had begun to weigh on Scottish minds that with the final defeat and disarming of the Highland clans, something of the martial spirit that was seen as central to the Scottish (male) identity had been irretrievably lost. It was not quite as simple and romantic as this, but it was true that society was moving in a new direction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially economically with industrialization, and traditional forms of masculinityi.e. the stereotype of the hard manneeded to be renegotiated. Adam Smith addressed this problem in terms prescient of the problem of alienation of labor later defined by Karl Marx. Among the early remedies that were suggested was the formation of citizen militias, but it soon became apparent that masculine energies and violence were to be channeled in a different formthough still retaining the idea of the hard manthat of sport, especially football.
Table of Contents
- Football was not simply a sport. It also became a powerful focus of national identity
- On 16 April 1746, the Battle of Culloden proved to be the last stand for the Jacobite rebels
- The myth of the heroic Highlander disarmed and oppressed persisted
- This sense of loss and the resultant mythification of the Highlanders
- Ferguson saw the progress of both the fine and the 'lucrative arts?
- It is evident that the concern is more with the appearance of the volunteer in nostalgic uniforms of his own invention
