Ultras in Turkey: othering, agency, and culture as a political domain

Abstract

Football administrators and non-fans or non-ultra fans in Turkey tend to posit ultras as either the 'fire of the show' or write them off as instruments of violence guided by irrationality. These two stances are the two sides of the same coin which points to a fascination/fear discourse that serves to produce ultras as the perfect other. The financially powerful actors of football tolerate and accommodate ultras so long as they don't challenge dominating commercial or political interests. This relegates ultras to the supposedly innocuous realm of culture divorced from politics, especially in the aftermath of the Gezi Uprising of 2013. However, through organizations like the Fans' Rights Association and in their everyday practices of fandom, ultras reject subjectivities assigned to them by the fascination/fear discourse, they agentively engage with their own spectacularization and othering as well as the legal or administrative efforts to contain and confine them.