In the Log Cabin with My Favorite Player: Appreciating Traditional American Masculinity Through Homoerotic Language in Baseball Fandom

Abstract

On the website r/NYYankees, a sub-forum (“subreddit”) of Reddit is devoted to the Major League Baseball team New York Yankees, with its predominantly male users showing their appreciation for baseball heroes by expressing erotic desires towards the players. When a player performs well, the subreddit is filled with admiration of desires to become the player’s intimate lover―explicitly expressed by “male” fans. This paper explains the phenomenon of young male fans’ desire for the now-lost model of traditional masculinity of domination and control, displayed in the context of baseball players’ dominant performances. The discrepancy between a fan’s non-homosexual real-world self and his homoerotic language on the subreddit is explained using the “performative fandom” theory, developed by Osborne and Coombs borrowing Butler’s notion of performativity. This paper suggests how this desire for traditional masculinity serves as recognition to the collapse of masculinity in the modern American society.