Toxic masculinity – Polish football fans as a far-right political actor

Football fanatics fighting with fans of other clubs and with the police are a violent part not only of the Polish society Poland, but also in many other countries. The analysis is based on the results of interviews conducted in 2018-2019 as part of the Dialogue About Radicalization and Equality (DARE) research project. To explain the path of fanatics into politics, we refer to the concepts of such classical anthropologists, as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Also to the thesis that radicalization is a deeply gendered process formulated by the contemporary researcher Michel Kimmel. The article presents the process of socialization in two ways: becoming strong men and Polish patriots at the same time. The “zoom effect” proposed in the summary explains how Polish fans move from spontaneous communitas (“fanatics”) to ideological communitas (“patriots”). This is how they become allies of the populist party in Poland since 2015, which uses homophobic discourse.