“We wasted a lot of time fighting among us”: Theoretical Approaches to the Participation of Football Hooligans (barras) in the 2019-20 Chilean Socio-political Revolt

Abstract

This paper starts out of the necessity to research and analyse the several elements shaping the ongoing Chilean socio-political revolt which began in October 2019, which has been pointed out as one of the main political crises in the country since the Military Dictatorship (1973-1990), a crisis embodied in the tearing apart of the country’s social tissue and the rise of a sharp division between state and society. We deal with the speech practices of football hooligans (or barras) and the protagonist role that these took at some stages of the revolt, with the aim of theoretically approaching transgressive collective action, setting the foundations for, and opening up the use of, post-structuralist theories and power-relations studies in the definition and codification of territories and the resistance emerging as a response to these processes, all of them considered in their full collective, political, aesthetic and revolutionary potentialities. Theoritical notions such as de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, contributed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, are the toolbox used to shape the analysis of these systemic crises and their socio-political structure.