Wild and Tame Pleasures

Abstract

When you think of ‘soccer fans’ who is it that springs to mind? The most probable image is a rowdy collection of young men in their club scarves, swaying and chanting in a soccer stadium somewhere in Europe. A community of seemingly innocent, young Buddhist monks in Tibet — heads shaven and dressed in burgundy robes — is an unlikely image. Yet, as the film The Cup (1998) suggests, soccer is desired by young men even in the most out of the way places. Boys taking pleasure in football is a global phenomenon. Soccer culture and the ways in which it has become enmeshed with media technologies and the international marketplace offer rich examples of a global culture of masculine pleasure. Such pleasures are often experienced in virtual communities. Yet various local circumstances inflect these virtual communities of masculine pleasure in different ways.