Scottish Masculinity: Football Fans

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

6 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/24/2007

Category :

Political science

Sub category :

Social sciences

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Summary :

Introduction
The Battle of Culloden: The last stand for the Jacobite rebels
The myth of the heroic Highlander: Disarmed and oppressed
This sense of loss and the resultant mythification of the Highlanders
The progress of both the fine and the 'lucrative arts'
Conclusion
Works consulted

Abstract

"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 masculinity-i.e. the stereotype of the 'hard man'-needed 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 form-though still retaining the idea of the 'hard man'-that of sport, especially football.