“It's About Belonging”: Masculinity, Collectivity, and Community in British Hooligan Films

Abstract

This article examines recent British hooligan films, exploring their nostalgic fantasies of collectivity, community, and primal masculinity. Their cult popularity reflects the ongoing appeal of “laddism” to young male audiences, but they also screen tellingly defensive responses to the fragmentation of traditional working-class identities, changing social relations, and the impact of deindustrialization and consumerism on British working-class masculinity, for which the violent tribalism of hooliganism acts as compensation. Despite the disturbing celebration of macho aggression and the evacuation of women from social ties, hooligan films self-consciously reference the performativity of masculinity and the homoeroticism undergridding male bonds as well as reflect on the shifting relationship between the individual and the collective, the self and community, in contemporary Britain.