Kicking metaphors of the body around in the mediation of self and other: conceptual metaphor in the Multimodal construction of football songs and chants

Football and music are both ubiquitous in contemporary society, and similarly ubiquitously devalued in the humanities and social sciences. This rests upon their vernacular omnipresence in our culture but is also the result of deeper shared connection to our somatic presence in the world. Part of the power of football and its songs, chants and tunes is in its double-sided agency to construct social belonging and division. The power of gendered, racial, ethnic and political constructions of Self and Other do not simply emerge in text and talk but, for football and music, are deeply embedded in our somatic sense of Self and the visceral connection to others. This emerges in multimodal metaphors sung and chanted at or around football matches. In this chapter, I focus in on the metaphorical use of somatic or embodied multimodal musical texts which reveals some important connections between our embodied Self, and crucially, how we construct social distance between our Selves and Others. I argue that this attention to the metaphorical and somatic discourse of football songs is important because of what it reveals about our socially constructed embodied lives.