‘Genus barracker’: Masculinity, race, and the disruptive pleasures of rowdy partisanship in 1880s Melbourne

Abstract

This article uses the emergence of the cultural category of barrackers in 1880s colonial Melbourne to examine the way a spectator sport became a site of intersecting discourses around emotions, health, science, class, citizenship, masculinity, and partisanship. Drawing on suburban newspapers it traces those aspects of barracking that were disturbing and thrilling enough to occasion the popularisation of a new noun and verb. The article also explores how barracking became a middle-class behaviour, as well as a middle-class concern, and the way popular reactions to barrackers in the 1880s differed to responses to another much more studied cultural category: larrikins.