Feel the suspense! masculine positions and emotional interpellations in Swedish sports betting commercials

ABSTRACT

Gambling advertising is often permeated by stereotypical portrayals of gender, including those of male gamblers as tough and successful. Simultaneously, representations of men in other advertising has become increasingly diverse, including emotional and sexualized, heroic and muscular portrayals. This article uses both these bodies of research to discuss Swedish sports betting commercials from 2019–2020. It shows that different commercials draw on diametrically different formulations of the game, emphasizing skill and luck, rationality and emotion respectively, which is conceptualized as different, gendered emotional interpellations. These include production of emotional or stoic masculine viewer positions, as well as the portrayal and evoking of emotions, and point to the psychic and emotional dimension of neo-liberal, consumerist culture, which strives to incorporate and exploit ever more aspects of the personal. The article furthers the theorizing of emotions in consumerist culture, contributes to gambling research by problematizing gendered ideas about skill and luck, and adds to studies of men in contemporary consumerist culture with discussions of emotionality, rationality, homosociality, and masculinized interpellations of different kinds.

KEYWORDS:

• Gambling advertising
• sports betting
• emotional interpellations
• masculine positions
• men in consumerist culture

Rationality and emotionality have a complex relation to masculine positions and gendered power relations: While men have often been connected to rationality and stoicism, recent research has complicated this picture (Sam de Boise and Jeff Hearn 2017). Gambling has a similarly complex relation to rationality and emotionality; for instance, sports betting is seen as a skill-game but is also associated with strong emotions, such as love and loyalty for sports, teams, or nations, as well as excitement, expectation, joy, and disappointment, which arguably permeate all gambling. The cultural production of rationality and emotionality in sports betting advertising has received limited attention, but other advertising research shows that such meanings are discursively produced, often through gendered interpellations asking viewers to feel in certain ways (Rosalind Gill 2017). Gambling advertising often celebrates and reiterates hypermasculinity, stoicism, control, and skill, but qualitative research is scarce (Klara Goedecke 2021a; Jukka Jouhki 2017 are exceptions). However, recent changes in how men are portrayed, perhaps especially pertinent in Sweden with its ideals of care and emotionality in men, points to possible new portrayals, whose significance needs further study (Sarah Gee 2014; Goedecke 2021b).

In this article, I discuss masculine positions in online and televised Swedish sports betting commercials broadcast during 2019–2020. Cultural representations, such as commercials, not only mirror but also produce “reality” in certain ways but not others, which connects them to power (Stuart Hall 1997). Centering what I call emotional interpellations, I show that sports betting and bettors are articulated in ways that differ along the lines of emotionality and rationality, even if they are all masculinized. In the article, I further the theorizing of emotions in consumerist culture and, using feminist and critical perspectives, I contribute to gambling research by problematizing skill, luck, and gender. I also add to studies of men in contemporary, consumerist culture with discussions of emotionality, rationality, homosociality, and masculinized interpellations.

Men and emotions in consumerist culture

While still often portrayed as actors, subjects, strong, and in control, the last 60 years has seen increased variation in representations of men in popular culture, including advertising (Kristen Barber and Tristan Bridges 2017; Elena Frank 2014; Gee 2014). Indeed, as Susan M. Alexander (2003, 536) argues, while corporations may have an interest in maintaining traditional gender roles to ensure continued consumption of their products, “they also serve as agents of social change by creating new consumer markets”, as epitomized by sexualized male bodies, addressed as in need of fashion and hair-removal products (Frank 2014; Gee 2014). Characteristics that have previously been connected to women now abound in advertising directed at men. However, the meaning of these changes is not clear: Do these new portrayals of men indicate actual change in gendered power relations or are they merely ways of making the same gendered power relations more acceptable (Barber et al. 2017)?

Emotions and rationality have a long history as a gendered dichotomy (Genevieve Lloyd 1993), with emotionality being associated with women and rationality with white men. Emotionality in men has taken on a symbolic role in popular feminist thought and self-help culture, the thought being that “the male role” causes men to repress, hide, or disregard their emotional lives. Thus, men’s emotionality is allegedly progressive (de Boise et al. 2017). Emotionality is comparable to other feminine characteristics that have been discussed à propos men in consumerist culture, but despite this, representations of men’s emotions and emotionalities have been overlooked in this research.

However, the gendered politics of women’s emotions in advertising have been discussed (Gill 2017; Gill and Akane Kanai 2019; Gill and Shani Orgad 2015). This research suggests that ever expanding neoliberal and capitalist forces appeal to us on emotional and psychic levels. These appeals draw on postfeminist discourses, resulting in postfeminist “mediated feeling rules”, encouraging women to feel confident or to love their body. Postfeminist feeling rules for men have been discussed in the context of Swedish television dramas. Sweden is often said to be one of the most gender equal countries in the world, with wide-spread ideals centering care and emotionality in men, especially fathers, which inform feeling rules prescribing emotionality (of certain kinds) and engagement in personal development among men (Goedecke 2021b). However, in the context of Swedish consumerist culture, men’s emotionalities remain to be discussed.

In this article, I propose the term emotional interpellations. Cultural texts, including advertisements, create “structures of meaning” which are “translated into statements about who we are and who we aspire to become” with advertisements urging us, interpellating us, to become that which we are addressed as (Gill 2007, 50; see also Judith Williamson 1978). Arguably, the process of meeting and decoding cultural texts always has an emotional dimension (see also Margreth Lünenborg and Tanja Maier 2018). “Mediated feeling rules” builds upon Arlie Russell Hochschild's (2003) argument that emotions are produced in certain ways; “feeling rules” structure “emotion work”, which is performed both professionally and privately, and in gendered ways. Contrastingly, “emotional interpellations” points to the appeals made in cultural texts, attempting, like other interpellations, to address and thus produce viewers, a process that can be resisted, altered, or challenged (Gill 2007; Hall 1996). Simply put, emotional interpellations can, if successful, produce various feeling rules and emotional subjects.

More specifically, emotional interpellations captures both emotional flow and emotional integration in advertising (Edward Kamp and Deborah J. MacInnis 1995), that is, the patterns of emotions portrayed and their integration with the commodity in question, aimed at pulling the viewer into the circulation of emotion. Emotional interpellations also, I propose, produce (gendered) subjects as emotional in certain ways while also using emotions as part of the interpellations; they produce emotional or stoic masculine positions while also portraying and evoking various and varying emotions. In this case, emotions become even more poignant as emotional experiences arguably constitute the commodity in gambling advertising; it is not lottery tickets or betting slips that are sold, but the suspense, thrills, and dreams of gambling.

This approach rejects views of emotions as irrepressible forces from within, overflowing or exploding if restrained. Instead, emotions are seen as produced and circulated through culture, discourses, and between bodies (Jennifer Harding and Deidre Pribam 2009; Margreth Lünenborg and Tanja Maier 2018; Margaret Wetherell 2012). With this view of emotions, emotional expressivity in men should not be seen as a sign of liberation (Sam de Boise and Jeff Hearn 2017), but as an emergent form of feeling rules, which in the context of commercials must also be understood in relation to capitalist, consumerist cultures.

This article primarily focuses on the production and circulation of emotion through mediated materials, but emotions stretch across dichotomies such as mind/body, individual/collective, private/public, and inner/outer (Jennifer Harding and Deidre Pribam 2009; Wetherell 2012). Gambling is a similarly complex phenomenon, which renders emotional interpellations a suitable lens through which to study it.

Gambling and gender

Gambling research has a history of gender-blindness (Marie E. Mark and Henry R. Lesieur 1992), but it has long been known that gambling is gendered (Deborah K. Phillips 2009; Jessika Svensson 2013): Men gamble more than women, spend more money gambling, and game choice is gendered, with men preferring skill or strategic games to those of chance. Gambling research is dominated by medical and psychological perspectives and quantitative methods, often treating gender as a variable in searches for gender differences (e.g. Phillips 2009). However, a growing body of research acknowledges that gambling is a cultural and discursive phenomenon, changeable across space and time (Rebecca Cassidy, Claire Loussouarn and Andrea Pisac 2013; Virginia McGowan 2004).

In Sweden, the commercialization of gambling began in the 1980s, at which point gambling also became subject of marketing strategies (Per Binde 2013). Previously subject to a gambling monopoly by the state, in 2019 the Swedish gambling market was reregulated and opened to commercial, licensed companies and to “moderate” advertising. Swedish gambling research is a small field with only a few qualitative studies (ethnographies include Binde 2011; Max Hansson 2004; Philip Lalander 2006, and analyses of gambling politics e.g. Susanna Alexius 2017). Gender perspectives are largely absent (Lalander 2006; Svensson 2013 are exceptions) and only a few studies of gambling advertising exist (e.g. Åsa Kroon 2019; 2021).

Cultural representations of gambling, including advertising, produce meanings around gambling. Research of gender in gambling advertising is dominated by quantitative methods and points to stereotypical gendered performances and genderings of various gambling practices in several cultural contexts (Emily G. Deans, Samantha L. Thomas, Mike Daube, Jeffrey Derevensky, and Ross Gordon 2016; Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez, Ana Estévez and Mark D. Griffiths 2018; Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez, Frederic Guerrero-Solé and Mark D. Griffiths 2018; Zhen Sen and Wei Luo 2016). Men are portrayed with friends, “hanging out” and watching a game, as gamblers, lucky or winners, while women are casino hostesses or sexualized rewards. Sports betting, specifically, is connected to patriotism and love for sports, but also to control (Deans et al. 2016; Lopez-Gonzalez, Estévez and Griffiths 2018).

Jouhki, in a rare qualitative study of masculinity in poker advertising, argues that “the hegemonic masculinity which is nowadays more flexible and contested in ads than ever … is rather stable, if not stereotypical in poker” (2017, 196). Contrastingly, Goedecke notes the discursive connection between Swedish ideologies of gender equality and postfeminist, allegedly reformed masculine positions and “soft”, moderate gambling in Swedish betting commercials (2021a). Gambling advertising produces meanings around gender and articulates gambling in certain ways (Kroon 2021), a process I suggest is intimately related to gendered formulations of emotionality and rationality, and how they are used to appeal to viewers.

Sports betting, skill and emotionality

It is often repeated in gambling research that men and women prefer skill and chance games respectively, but research about gambling as a cultural practice complicates these statements. Cassidy (2014) shows that skill, rather than being a preference among male gamblers, produces gamblers as masculine and betting-shops as homosocial spaces. Among Cassidy’s male research participants, elements of chance were deemphasized while mathematics, logics, control, and knowledgeability (traits described as unavailable to women) were highlighted. Hansson (2004) discusses similar tendencies of privileging skill and rationality and disregarding luck among Swedish male horse bettors but does not discuss gender.

The connection between mathematics, logics, rationality, and the masculine is familiar from feminist research (Lloyd 1993), but it is also intimately related to emotionality, as rationality and emotionality function as each other’s constitutive outside (Hall 1996). As mentioned above, rationality, objectivity, and the mind are connected to white men; indeed, historically, this group has been seen as the only one capable of rational thought. Women, meanwhile, have been connected to irrationality, emotion, and the body (de Boise et al. 2017). This dichotomous thinking serves to reproduce gendered, raced, classed, and able-ist power relations, portraying not only women but also PoC, the disabled, and the working-classes as irrational, more closely connected to the body, animalistic, and impure. The discussions about skill and luck noted by Cassidy (2014) are permeated by these ideas, and just as in Cassidy’s example, rational, masculine subjects are not pre-existent but produced by ideas about rationality and predictability (Judith Butler 1992, 10 f).

Together with these ideas about rationality and emotion, Cassidy’s discussion suggests that different forms of gambling are variously associated with skill, competition, and mastery, and are gendered in different ways. While poker is associated with masculinity, glamour, mathematics, and skills in “reading people” (Jouhki 2017), sports betting is less glamorous, but still associated with skill. Like horse betting, sports betting is dominated by men, and connected to mathematics, rationality, and predictability. However, several researchers argue that so called skill games should really be seen as skill and chance games (e.g. Gerhard Meyer et al. 2013). Sports betting also has an intrinsic connection to sports, which arguably gives it an air of toughness, athleticism, and maleness (see also Garry Whannel 1999; Martha Wörsching 1999), and associates it with the emotional engagement of supporter culture.

Apart from furthering gambling research by problematizing gender, skill, and luck, the study of sports betting advertising deepens the understanding of the gendered dynamic between emotionality and rationality, mathematics, sports, and embodiment. As such, the study adds to studies of contemporary, consumerist culture and how emotional appeals and masculine positions are handled within it. Below, I present the methodology, and then the analysis, which points to two different kinds of emotional interpellations, tied to different formulations of sports betting; overtly emotional appeals and discourses of chance, and discourses about control, skill, and rationality.

Methodology and material

The material consists of four audiovisual sports betting commercials broadcast during 2019–2020 from Betsson, Coolbet, Rizk, and Unibet.¹ In Sweden, the money spent on advertising by gambling companies rose steeply between 2016 and 2018 (Spelinspektionen 2019), and televised and online gambling advertising was arguably the most prevalent cultural representation of gambling in the late 2010s, shaping meanings of gambling and gamblers in the Swedish context.

The four commercials are part of a larger corpus, consisting of online and televised audiovisual gambling commercials from 2019–2020, broadcast after the reregulation of the Swedish gambling market in 2019. Online searches complemented by televised commercials, encompassing most Swedish gambling brands, resulted in a sample of 160 commercials from 40 brands (see Deans et al. 2016 for a similar sampling approach). Through a hermeneutic process where I studied the corpus together with literature from gambling and gender studies, I identified skill, luck, rationality, and emotion as analytic themes. The four commercials studied were strategically selected as they provided differing perspectives and thus enabled detailed discussions of these themes. Thus, I follow researchers who use semiotic and discourse analysis of limited ranges of materials enabling in-depth discussions which enrich broader debates about cultural representations, subject positions, and gender politics (e.g. Gee 2014; Gill 2007; Hall 1997; Williamson 1978).

Inspired by previous research, I scrutinized (gendered, racialized, classed) portrayals of protagonists, including their dress, body poses, and interaction, as well as the discursive production of the commodity (sports betting) (Williamson 1978). Following discursive approaches within cultural studies (Hall 1997), I studied what was taken for granted and what was portrayed as arguable, controversial, or new, as well as explicit and implicit appeals within the commercials, indicating the commercials’ imagined viewers (Gee 2014; Williamson 1978). In order to study emotional interpellations, I focused on portrayals of emotional states and how emotions were tied to commodities and subjects, explicitly and implicitly (see also Kamp et al. 1995). My hermeneutic research approach extended to an iterative and reflexive analysis process, where I repeatedly scrutinized my assumptions, analyses, and positionality as a white, middle-class, woman academic.

“Odds are devious creatures”: chance and excitement

Commercials foregrounding the thrills, fun, and emotions of sports betting can be seen as engaging in very overt emotional interpellations. These commercials simultaneously articulate sports betting as unpredictable and based on chance.

A commercial from Rizk sports (Rizk 2019) illustrates this: Set to a piano soundtrack and inside what appears to be a 1950s fair tent, with walls striped in yellow and red and with lightbulbs along the wall, two white men, lighted from above, are arm-wrestling. One is burly, with muscular, tattooed arms, bald with a dark beard and wearing a wrestler’s singlet and a black leather bracelet. His opponent, smaller and younger, dressed in the retro-style visor sunhat, waistcoat, and shirt with sleeve garters of an iconic retro office clerk, seems to be losing the match. Next to them, a white man in a straw hat, checked suit, and a cervical collar meets our gaze and addresses us in American English: “Odds are devious creatures. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, a little something happens that turns everything around”.

Behind him, a cheering crowd of women and men in 1950s clothes watch the match. The narrator in the straw hat grabs the clasped hands of the arm wrestlers and pushes so that the small man wins. “My advice is, change horses in the middle of the race”, the narrator says as the muscular man, shocked, looks around while part of the crowd cheers, hugging the small man. “Ouch, big fellow, that’s got to hurt”, the narrator says, touching the loser’s shoulder. He leaves the frame, the muscular man still sitting, confused and dejected, at the table. “Everything can happen when you play live at Rizk sports” a female voice-over says in Swedish, while a red and yellow banner is shown, on top of the tent-scene: “Play live at Rizk sports”, followed by the Rizk logo.

Both athletes and the narrator, who gets to address and meet the viewer’s gaze while also addressing the combatants, are white and male. The man-to-man nature of arm wrestling connects to masculine narratives about sports, where strength prevails while the lesser man loses. In contrast to commercials suggesting that online gambling can be done from the comfort and safety of one’s own home, Rizk suggests that online gambling is exciting, equivalent to being at a Tivoli or watching a game live, thereby connecting online gambling with the masculinized public sphere (Svensson et al. 2011; see also Lopez-Gonzalez, Estévez, and Griffiths 2018, 48). These aspects contribute to a masculine address.

The narrator, holding our gaze and addressing us directly is the obvious protagonist of the commercial, but his interference in the arm-wrestling match, which would predictably have caused fury among the crowd and the athletes, goes almost unnoticed, and when he addresses the muscular loser, there is little reaction or eye-contact. This renders his position unclear—he does not seem part of the scene. However, similar to the female voice-over at the end, he interpellates the viewer, “you”, directly, with advice and an articulation of what sports betting is all about: unpredictability. This is further illustrated by him acting as that “little something” which turns the match around and by his cervical collar, reminding bettors to not be fooled by outward signs, such as cervical collars or bodily size, but be flexible and smart in order to handle the unexpected.

The tent audience, facing us, watch the game in considerable suspense, cheering when their favorite wins and “hurt[ing]” when he loses. They point to the centrality of emotional engagement in the commercial’s articulation of sports betting, connecting it to the unpredictability of the game. Together, the centering of emotion, men, and unpredictability function as an interpellation of a masculine viewer, willing to appreciate the emotional ups and downs and the risks of betting.

A similar example comes from the “Feel the moment of suspense/excitement” (Känn spänningens ögonblick)² campaign, issued by Betsson in 2018, and broadcast during 2019 by various Swedish TV-channels.³ A board showing scores for a home and an away team (2–2) and the roar of a sports audience indicate that we are at an ice-hockey match, at the end of the third period, i.e. at the very end of the game (Betsson 2018). Dressed in a black hockey helmet and white-and-black striped shirt, a judge slides up to two players from Swedish teams Djurgården and Frölunda for a faceoff. We see the audience, both women and men, wearing winter jackets and team scarves, and then two players crashing into each other. The face of one Djurgården player comes into focus, and in the next shot, we see him receiving and shooting the puck with his stick.

As he hits the puck, the tempo slows down considerably and an operatic basso voice starts to sing in a slow staccato.⁴ We see the puck hitting the stick and the stick springing back with a deep, contorted “slow motion sound” as the shot is made. Still in slow motion, two men in the audience stand up, evidently noticing that something exciting is happening on the ice. A pair of skates, braking and sending ice fragments whirling, are hit by the puck, which bounces onwards, off the helmet of the judge. The audience is shown again, more people rising, all with half-open mouths and expressions of utter suspense on their faces. The board from the first shot is shown, indicating that it is two minutes left of the match, then a player hits the puck with his stick at waist height. The puck hurls towards the goal at a very slow pace, and the goaltender scrambles to come into position as the music grows more intense. Just before the puck approaches the goal, the narrative is interrupted and the name of the campaign, “Feel the moment of suspense/excitement”, and the Betsson logo are shown against a black background.

As in the Rizk commercial, white male athletes are engaged in sports, watched by an audience whose expressive faces and body-language are vital to the narrative, and the setting of the commercial informs the viewers that betting with Betsson is exciting and thrilling in the same way as watching a game live. As above, the commercial centers men, emotionality and, in the light of the puck’s movement among the players, unpredictability.

Both commercials use direct appeals to the viewers which constitute explicit emotional interpellations, most notably in the Betsson commercial’s imperative to “feel” and enjoy the excitement and unpredictability of the game. The masculinized viewer is interpellated as emotional, as willing to show feelings and seek out emotional responses through engaging with sports betting.

This appeal is strengthened by the emotional expressivity in the audiences of both commercials; betting is demonstrably exciting. The masculine viewer is encouraged to partake in these emotions, that is, a social relationship is offered with the audiences of the commercials, and, by implication, with other sports bettors, who are portrayed as suffering and rejoicing together (especially notable as both commercials feature fans of both “sides” seated or standing close together⁵). The framing of the game as unpredictable is central to the emotional interpellation; precisely because of it, excitement, suspense, thrill, and the hurt of losing can occur, which is demonstrated through the audiences’ emotive responses. These invite the viewer into a communal emotional experience, and into a cultural, embodied, and physiological circulation of emotion (Wetherell 2012) by selling the emotional experience associated with betting.

Interpellations in commercials about body grooming may tell the viewer that their body is unruly and in need of control, but the emotional interpellations featured here produce the viewers’ lives as boring, in need of consumption and risk to “spice it up”. Boredom and the seeking of excitement is an important factor in the development of gambling problems according to psychological research (e.g. Kimberley B. Mercer and John D. Eastwood 2010), and the discursive production of boredom in commercials like these can be seen as referring to this, even, perhaps, as a cynical use of boredom as a commercial strategy. To simplify, a “yes” to such an interpellation means taking up a subject position as bored, and agreeing to the premise that life (without betting) is boring, a feeling produced by consumerist discourses centering spending and consuming. Tanja Joelsson discusses boredom in relation to space and gender, and suggests that public places are connected to danger, risk, masculinity, and the alleviation of boredom (2015, 1256). This fits in well with these commercials’ ideas of online betting as equivalent to visiting a game or a Tivoli—through online betting, one symbolically leaves the feminized boredom of the home to join the thrill of a masculinized online experience.

However, the interpellation also evokes emotions. This is most notable in the Betsson commercial, which leaves the viewer breathless, literally caught in “the moment of suspense”. This effect is achieved, I suggest, through the use of slow motion, which connects this commercial to sports broadcasting (Margaret Morse 2003). Representing a “spatial compression and temporal elongation and repetition” (Morse 2003, 380), slow motion entails a dreamlike quality, where speed and violent impact are turned into a dance-like beauty (Morse 2003, 381), while the virtuosity of the actors is emphasized (Vivian Sobchack 2006, 342). This evokes an emotional state of excruciating excitement where time does not exist.

Similar distorted temporalities are often discussed in gambling research as “flow”. As originator Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has noted, flow is defined by an intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment as well as a distortion of temporal experience (Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2014, 240). This is often described as a profoundly positive experience, but in gambling research more sinister aspects have been noted, including “dark flow”, connected to depression, excessive gambling, and gambling addiction, especially in the context of online gambling and slot machines (e.g. Mike J. Dixon et al. 2019).

The implicit reference to the emotional state of “flow” is an important aspect of the emotional interpellation of the Betsson commercial. Focusing on the breathless moments ending the match, the viewer is invited not only to engage in and appreciate the strong emotions of sports betting, but actually given a taste of these emotions during the course of the commercial. Thus, this commercial presents both dynamic emotional flow and emotional integration, that is, it portrays a changing pattern of emotions which is highly integrated with, shown to be motivated by its commodity, pulling the viewer into its circulation of emotion (Kamp et al. 1995).

This focus on the thrills of watching sports differs from a masculine interpellation that invites the masculine viewer to imagine that he himself is the athlete. As Morse (2003, 377ff) points out, televised sports are connected to scopophilic pleasures of watching athletic male bodies, and the appeal to emotional flows among primarily male audience members points to an unexpectedly emotional and close homosociality. Morse argues that the use of slow motion “saves” televised sports from this potential homoeroticism, as it represents a scientific view of the game, “allow[ing] the viewer to outguess the referee and see what ‘really’ happened” (2003, 381). Here, I suggest that the difference between watching and betting on a match is drawn upon in a similar way.

Watching a game might echo of passivity, voyeurism, and erotic pleasure at athletic men, but by betting, the stakes rise; you have “skin in the game”. This transforms mere watching, potentially (homo-)eroticized and passive, into a risk; the monetary investment in the game turns the viewer into a proxy-athlete, and the suspense is doubled, as both bettors and teams become possible winners and losers. The emotional interpellation to engage with the game emotionally is thus transformed and intensified into heroic risk-taking.

In drawing on emotionality in men, the commercials connect with negotiations around gender in consumerist culture (Alexander 2003; Frank 2014; Gee 2014). Such negotiations often combine stereotypical masculine features, such as athleticism and sports, with more unexpected ones, including fashion and body grooming. Emotionality and lack of control over an unpredictable game arguably constitute such features; these are “balanced” by sports and masculine risk-taking (see also Gee 2014). As de Boise et al. (2017) suggest, it would be a mistake to regard emotionality in men as in itself subversive or a protest. In this case, men’s emotionality is not a protest, but called for and encouraged through emotional interpellations, and even if (perhaps) unexpected, it does not subvert gendered power relations or heteronormative expectations of men.

“Luck is no coincidence”: rationality and control

Previous research has shown that rationality, skill, and control are associated with men’s gambling (Cassidy 2014; Jouhki 2017; Lopez-Gonzalez, Estévez, and Griffiths 2018). However, luck is an aspect of all gambling, even skill-based games such as poker or sports betting, and the division between rationality and emotionality is similarly complex, even in commercials ostensibly expelling emotionality.

A Coolbet commercial (Coolbet 2019) portrays an odds maker, “Mikael”, white and 30–40 years old. Sitting down in an old, over-snowed Volvo, he drives along a snow-covered road to an ice rink, listening to his car radio. Its male voice speaks in a northern Swedish dialect and functions as the voiceover of the commercial, describing the virtues of the Coolbet brand, which include setting their own odds and being uniquely knowledgeable about not only big, well-known teams but also small, local ones. At the ice rink, alone in the stands, “Mikael” watches the team’s practice, jotting down and crossing out numbers in a small notebook. He wears a moustache, and greying hair can be seen below his woolen hat, which together with his leather jacket with a fleecy collar gives him an un-styled, rural appearance. Next, he is portrayed sitting in a small, over-snowed forest house, by a fire. He ponders the odds in his notebook, crossing out and filling in new numbers. The voice-over describes Coolbet’s unique transparency and knowledgeability; bettors can find out how others have betted to further refine their betting decisions.

This commercial exclusively features men, and as opposed to portrayals of gambling as glamorous (Jouhki 2017; Sen et al. 2016), it relies heavily on masculine discourses of knowledgeability, mathematics, and skill, as well as ordinariness, rurality, and old-schoolness. The odds maker is alone, and his car, appearance, and technology are unpolished and unmodern; he is equipped with the classic book of the bookmaker rather than a computer. Kroon (2019) notes a similarly “ordinary man” portrayal in her analysis of a Svenska Spel commercial, but while her man is made trustworthy and familiar through being white, unstylish, and a “football dad”, the Coolbet man is constructed as trustworthy and familiar due to his knowledgeability, precision, and white, rural, down-to-earth-ness. The interpellation in this commercial is connected with rationality rather than emotionality as it addresses its viewers as interested in precise, localized knowledgeability, and positions the brand as providing the bettors with uniquely accurate information, without frills.

While viewers were invited to partake in emotional thrills as part of an enthusiastic audience above, the bookmaker watches the players alone, with an analytical eye. However, the air of loneliness is counteracted by the possibility to see other bettors’ bets. The sociality suggested here addresses Coolbet bettors as learning from, perhaps outwitting other bettors.

Another example is a Unibet commercial featuring Magnus Carlsen, the Chess world champion (Unibet 2020). In the commercial, a suit-clad Carlsen is engaged in a chess game watched by an elegantly attired audience. This scene is interjected with ones of his preparations, mostly set outdoors. To the sound of dramatic drum music, a male, deep-voiced voiceover tells us that “It’s all about preparation … Doing the same thing, over and over. Making your body ready … your mind … your soul. Hours, months, years of work. Never stops … Making the most of every single thing. Then, he might be lucky”. Scenes of Carlsen running, playing football and basketball, reading about chess in magazines and working on his laptop accompany this message, with similar scenes repeated to create an impression of “over and over”.

Meanwhile, at the chess game, as Carlsen’s chess opponent hits the clock, the camera moves towards Carlsen’s eye, into the blackness of his pupil, taking us inside his mind as it were. Inside it, in a lofty hall, chess pieces hover near the ceiling and Carlsen watches them as he decides upon his next move. Next, Carlsen makes his winning move as the voice-over narrates that after much preparation, “he might get lucky”. Shots of Carlsen winning the game are then interspersed with shots of a happy, younger Carlsen winning other matches, and the commercial ends with a serious Carlsen meeting our gaze, sitting in the lofty room inside his mind, accompanied by the text “Luck is no coincidence”.

The protagonist, Carlsen, is a possible object of betting rather than a bookmaker as above, but the Unibet commercial, like the Coolbet one, centers knowledgeability and skill. If “luck is no coincidence” and it is “all about preparation” (Unibet 2020), preparedness and insight are possible to attain, both for the object and the subject of the betting, that is, both for Carlsen and the imagined viewer, the bettor. As above, the impact of luck, coincidence, and chance are minimized; Carlsen’s preparedness and control mirrors the bettor’s.

Both the Coolbet and Unibet commercials center men through portraying male athletes, male bookmakers, and male voice-overs. Sports betting is articulated as being about control and mathematics, which radically differs from the articulation discussed above. In the light of the masculinization of rationality, this in itself constitutes a masculine interpellation. As Lloyd (1993, 37) notes, “[i]t is not a question simply of the applicability to women of neutrally specified ideals of rationality, but rather of the genderization of the ideals themselves”; knowledge, reason, and rationality as well as the knowing subject are masculinized.

However, the articulation of betting not only spans the glamorous and the rural but also the athletic and the “brainy”. We are taken inside Carlsen’s mind, the loftiness of which indicates his intellectual capabilities, but we also get to see him working out and scoring goals, “saving” him and the Unibet brand from being associated with a solely intellectual, nerd-like masculine position (see also Gee 2014). As Wörsching (1999, 182, italics in original) points out à propos sports advertising: “the effort it takes to master the body and mind, the emphasis on unrivaled performance and the ‘super-human’ concentration on the goal to win” is connected to how the media legitimize male superiority, a description that connects to the doubleness of sports betting.

These interpellations, in their centering of control, rationality, and leaving nothing to chance, are seemingly non-emotional, apart from the final moments of the Unibet commercial, when Carlsen is portrayed winning. However, emotions are present in several ways. As rationality and emotionality are each other’s constitutive outside, emotionality constitutes the border which gives rationality its meaning, rendering it present in its absence. This applies also to skill and luck, a dichotomy explicitly addressed in the expelling of luck in the Unibet commercial. Also, the call for stoicism is an emotional interpellation, calling for a specific, gendered, way of handling emotionality (Hochschild 2003).

However, emotions are not only present in their absence. While the commercials above centered the emotional experience of betting, these center winning, at which point some emotional expressivity is called for. This differs from what Cassidy describes in the context of horse betting, where emotional displays when winning were strongly discouraged (Cassidy 2014, 180). In my material, the joy of winning is reachable only for the sufficiently rational gambler, thus, it constitutes a promise that is deferred to the end of the game; emotions should be controlled, and then released at the appropriate moment.

As de Boise et al. (2017, 786, italics in original) note, “to be rational, often, is to, quite literally, feel rational”. In accordance with this, the emphasis on rationality and control constitutes an emotional interpellation centering the feeling of being in control. The centering of mastery, control, knowledge, and rationality is intimately related to the fantasy of the independent subject, acting upon and thereby controlling the world. Butler (1992, 10) notes that the instrumental actor “is itself the effect of a genealogy which is erased at the moment that the subject takes itself as the single origin of its action” while “the effects of an action always supersede the stated intention or purpose of the act”. With this critique in mind, it becomes evident that rationality and control are aspects of a constructed and arbitrary masculine subject seeking to realize its own existence and stave off ontological anxiety. Interpellating viewers to feel like they are in control offers them an illusory investment in a seemingly stable, normative masculine position. However, it also subtly produces the viewers’ lives as out of control, perhaps referring to a time when many markers of normative masculine positions, such as unquestioned access to women’s bodies, life-long employment, and affordable housing are questioned or becoming increasingly inaccessible.

Emotionality was a prominent aspect of an offered sociality in the last section. Here, a subtle homosocial closeness is proposed between bettor and bookmaker/athlete. The relation between bettors instead has an air of competition as the viewer is interpellated as exceptional; smarter, and more rational and knowledgeable than other bettors. Hansson (2004) notes that luck-based, casual bettors are seen as cash cows by “serious”, knowledge-based bettors, which is applicable here; rationality and knowledgeability are key to winning only if other bettors are sufficiently ignorant and irrational. This relation between bettors echoes of ideas about homosociality as based on competition rather than intimacy (Sharon Bird 1996), which, as Michael S. Kimmel (1997) points out, is coupled with fear of failure or exposure. Hansson (2004, 53) points out that meetings with other horse bettors are risky, as flaws in one’s knowledge might be exposed, which connects to this aspect of the emotional interpellation.

Concluding discussion

Using the lens of emotional interpellations, this article has scrutinized four betting commercials. While consistent in their centering of men and the masculine, the emotional interpellations have varied widely, especially notable as the commercials concerned the same form of gambling. This variation connects to other parts of contemporary consumerist culture (Alexander 2003; Frank 2014; Gee 2014; Goedecke 2021a), but the question whether it indicates actual change in gendered power relations or merely is a way of making the same gendered power relations more acceptable remains.

As Lopez-Gonzalez, Estévez, and Griffiths (2018) note, control and reduction of risk in betting commercials is connected to masculinity, but as I have pointed out, so are messages emphasizing risk, emotion, and lack of control. While men’s politics are not addressed explicitly in the material (cf. Goedecke’s (2021a) article about postfeminism in betting commercials), the variation in itself holds subversive promises as it exposes the incongruent, constructed nature of masculine positions and gender.

The centering of emotions in part of the material can be interpreted as subversive, and the emotional interpellations foregrounding emotionality and excitement in a community of bettors come across as more honest than those foregrounding rationality, arguably cynical as they exaggerate the importance of control and with it, the chance of winning. However, emotionality is made comprehensible through the connection with risk, sports, supporter culture, and consumption, and is an aspect of neo-liberal, consumerist culture striving to incorporate and exploit ever more aspects of the personal (Gill 2017). This reduces the subversive potential. The commercials emphasizing control also tie in well with individualist, capitalist ideologies; there, other gamblers are competition, not company, and the (possible) success of the individual is promoted while the necessary failure of others is obscured. Thus, the emotional interpellations vary as do the masculine positions produced, but ultimately they converge in accommodating neoliberal discourses; whether stoic or emotional, men should still bet.

The normalization of men within gambling advertising is achieved through the centering of (white) men and male bodies. Women’s peripheral presence in three of the commercials, as audience, can be seen as a first step towards normalizing women as customers and bettors, but female athletes are still conspicuously absent, as are PoC and other minorities. However, it is important to note that the interpellation of men also subjects them to consumerist logics. Future research on gambling from feminist and gender perspectives must embrace this complexity.

The article has added to gambling research by putting it in dialogue with methods and theories from cultural and feminist studies. The variation between formulating sports betting as a game of skill and of chance complicates the association between certain games and skill or chance, as well as the often habitual connection between men and skill games in gambling research.

I have proposed emotional interpellations as a term for capturing cultural production of various emotions and emotionalities in contemporary consumerist culture. As previous research (Gill 2017; Hochschild 2003) suggests, gender is central to these interpellations. Importantly, interpellations can be decoded or resisted, and while I have pointed to little subversive potential, other readings are possible; for instance, closeness among men and distorted temporalities may be seen in a queer light. Additionally, the emotional interpellations discussed here have to do with the cultural production and circulation of various emotions and emotionalities, but emotions and gambling encompass both the cultural and the embodied. This points to the need for more multidisciplinary research on gambling and to future possibilities of studying emotional interpellations in consumerist culture.

Author bio

Klara Goedecke is a researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on men and masculinities from intersectional perspectives, and includes work on homosociality, men’s friendships, postfeminism, race, nationality, and gender equality. She has a particular interest in methodology, including combining ethnographic methods and studies of cultural representations. Her current project concerns men, masculinities, and gambling as cultural phenomena, with a special focus on emotions and class in Swedish gambling.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by FORTE, The Swedish research council for health, working life and welfare, grant no 2019-00102. Thanks to the higher seminar of gender studies at Stockholm University and to Cecilia Rodéhn for valuable comments. Thanks also to Kent Westerberg for his help and assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FORTE [2019-00102].

Notes

1. The commercials focused upon here centre sports betting, but these brands also offer casino and live casino games, poker, and bingo in addition to sports betting and live sports betting.

2. The Swedish word “spänning” can mean either suspense or excitement.

3. Thanks to Kent Westerberg at TV-check for his help at confirming this.

4. This song is an adaptation of the aria “What power art thou” from Henry Purcell’s opera King Arthur.

5. Thanks to Jakob Jonsson for pointing this out.