“My natural environment has provided me with about fifty different ways of expressing frustration”: Mining the visceral angst of Australian Rules football followers

Modern spectator sports provoke intense bodily passions in fans as well as athletes yet the embodied emotions of sports fans are understudied. This paper explores the frustrations of Australian Rules football supporters. Drawing on psychoanalysis and religious studies it traces the expressions and possible causes of their frustration by mining material from a set of interviews with fans along with the comments of Australian Rules football followers in books, articles and internet forums. An underlying question is how the frustrations of these football supporters might reveal something of the intersections of emotion, bodies and sport that spectator sports provoke.