Sharon Mazer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496826862
- eISBN:
- 9781496826626
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
Professional wrestling is an unsporting sport, a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre. Its display of violence is less contest than ritualized encounter between opponents, replayed repeatedly ...
More
Professional wrestling is an unsporting sport, a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre. Its display of violence is less contest than ritualized encounter between opponents, replayed repeatedly over time for an exceptionally engaged audience. To watch wrestling and write about its performance is to attempt to come to terms with the significance of a highly popular performance practice as it intersects, exploits, and parodies the conventions of both sport and theatre. Rather than simply reflecting and reinforcing moral clichés, professional wrestling puts contradictory ideas into play, as with its audience it replays, reconfigures, and celebrates a range of performative possibilities. Beyond its spectacular elements, professional wrestling is an athletic performance practice, constructed around the display of the male body and a tradition of cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men as directed by the promoter. The fight is fixed, in the squared circle as in life.Less
Professional wrestling is an unsporting sport, a theatrical entertainment that is not theatre. Its display of violence is less contest than ritualized encounter between opponents, replayed repeatedly over time for an exceptionally engaged audience. To watch wrestling and write about its performance is to attempt to come to terms with the significance of a highly popular performance practice as it intersects, exploits, and parodies the conventions of both sport and theatre. Rather than simply reflecting and reinforcing moral clichés, professional wrestling puts contradictory ideas into play, as with its audience it replays, reconfigures, and celebrates a range of performative possibilities. Beyond its spectacular elements, professional wrestling is an athletic performance practice, constructed around the display of the male body and a tradition of cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men as directed by the promoter. The fight is fixed, in the squared circle as in life.
Sharon Mazer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496826862
- eISBN:
- 9781496826626
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
More than a vulgar parody of “real” sport, professional wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the transgressive, violent urges generally repressed in everyday life. More than ...
More
More than a vulgar parody of “real” sport, professional wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the transgressive, violent urges generally repressed in everyday life. More than a staged fight between representatives of good and evil, at its heart is a Rabelaisian carnival, an invitation to every participant to share in expressions of excess and to celebrate the desire for, if not the acting upon, transgression against whatever cultural values are perceived as dominant and/or oppressive in everyday life. More than an elaborate con game in which spectators are seduced into accepting the illusion of “real” violence, wrestling activates and authorizes its audiences, makes them complicit in the performance. Matches can be described in conventional dramatic terms that remain consistent whether in Madison Square Garden or Gleason’s Arena. Because the fight is fixed, the contest is for heat—for the fans’ attention—rather than for victory per se.Less
More than a vulgar parody of “real” sport, professional wrestling is a sophisticated theatricalized representation of the transgressive, violent urges generally repressed in everyday life. More than a staged fight between representatives of good and evil, at its heart is a Rabelaisian carnival, an invitation to every participant to share in expressions of excess and to celebrate the desire for, if not the acting upon, transgression against whatever cultural values are perceived as dominant and/or oppressive in everyday life. More than an elaborate con game in which spectators are seduced into accepting the illusion of “real” violence, wrestling activates and authorizes its audiences, makes them complicit in the performance. Matches can be described in conventional dramatic terms that remain consistent whether in Madison Square Garden or Gleason’s Arena. Because the fight is fixed, the contest is for heat—for the fans’ attention—rather than for victory per se.
