Passion Work: The Joint Production of Emotional Labor in Professional Wrestling (original) (raw)
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Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a sport on the rise within the field of martial arts in which competitors fight in a cage and utilize full-contact movements using their fists, elbows, and knees as well as kicks, other strikes, and submission techniques to defeat their opponents. MMA has become a modern social movement in combat sports that has become globalized in a short time and is the fastest growing sport in the world. MMA encompasses disciplines from various martial arts and Olympic sports such as boxing, kickboxing, karate, kempo, jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, tae kwon do, wrestling, sambo, judo, etc. The rounds are five minutes in length and there are typically three rounds in a contest, unless it is a championship fight in which case the contest lasts five rounds. The aim of this study is to analyze the bodily constructions and productions within the MMA culture and especially the constructed human violence associated with the sport. Based on autoethnographic participation in three Swedish MMA clubs, as well as shorter fieldwork case studies conducted in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Brazil, and the US, this thesis investigates the interrelationship between MMA, excitement, sensationalism, and the spectacular physical violence that stains the participants’ bodies. Concepts taken from performance ethnography are applied to an analysis of what is reconstructed bodily. This is followed by an analysis that attempts to outline what body-violence means and how this understanding of the informants’ bodies, as well as of the researcher’s body-knowledge, reconstructs the definitions of MMA. A phenomenological approach to the concept of fighting is also included in relation to the MMA landscape. Thus, I present how the body learns the cultural enactments in fighting and how these forces shape the fighters’ gender, habitus, and way of resisting the discourse of critical opinions on MMA practice. Moreover, in trying to grasp the inner sense of MMA, I argue that the physical phenomenon of MMA is dependent on an intersubjective engagement and on the control of one’s inner coordination, which teaches a fighter how to deal with power, pain, suffering, aggression, and adrenaline flows. Keywords: abject, adrenaline, anthropology, athletes, autoethnography, body, combat arts, culture, desire, embodied, enculturation, ethnology, fieldwork, field-making, flow, fighting, full-contact, gender, harm, homosociality, intercultural, interobject, intersubjectivity, martial arts, materiality, masculinity, MMA, method, pain, personal, performance, performativity, phenomenology, pleasure, posthuman, postmodern, power, ritual, risk-taking, rush, self-reflexive, sportive, sport, stained, struggle, suffering, thrill, UFC, violence.
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This paper explores the seduction of pain within the increasingly popular practice of mixed martial arts. It is based on a three-year ethnographic study of training schools in Minnesota. Within these sites, often-affluent men train their bodies in combat skills, learning to strike and grapple, while building a community around the shared exchange of pain. The drive is often explained with a variation of the statement: ‘I do this because you don't know who you are … you don't feel alive … until you get hit.’ This paper contributes to the growing body of geographic literature centered on practice and affect. Within this approach, there has been little appreciation of physical and violent encounters. Appreciation of the role of pain shifts focus to the moment when the body retreats in upon itself, becoming a united mass of flesh and nerves. I suggest that pain attracts participants through serving three purposes within these fight-based schools: (1) it provides confidence that the experience is ‘real’; (2) it is itself an avenue to encounter the body as a united ‘self’ with clear limits and boundaries; (3) it establishes intimacy between participants, which is necessary for the formation of community within each site.
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The COVID pandemic’s impact on professional wrestling has come in many forms. Like other forms of sports and entertainment, professional wrestling is very dependent on physical interactions to produce content. So, what happens when wrestlers, who work as independent contractors, cannot engage in such physical labor? Fortunately, many had already been utilizing existing social media platforms as additional sources of income to supplement what they receive from their wrestling, trading on their characters and brands under neoliberal approaches to revenue generation. Their online work often aligns with their physical work, as the actual wrestling they perform is only a small fraction of their revenue-generating labor. From selling merchandise to selling themselves, the panel explores how professional wrestling uses these technologies to further their physical businesses and practices. The panel will critically explore these online activities to understand how such technologies mediate ...
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The aim of this article is to investigate bodily experiences through an autoethnographic fieldwork study in a mixed martial arts (MMA) club, and to analyze what experiences of pain can contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of MMA in general and the violence associated with the sport in particular. We argue that the experience of pain can give one the opportunity to sense the emotional and instrumental effects of MMA practice. We have crafted a definition of scripted violence in MMA, comprehended the body's development and evaluated the bodily accomplishments gained from the fighting process. Informed by Julia Kristeva's notion on horror and Maurice Merleau-Pontys' phenomenology of the body, we discuss the concept of "stained-violence" by applying an inter-subjective approach to the notion of a body's inner abject. The autoethnographical knowledge we acquired in this study allows us to assert that a researcher's own bodily reformation is an important asset to apply to examine the consequences of engaging in MMA training. We also apply a body-based method of performing autoethnographic research in order to examine the kinds of bodily improvements that can develop through MMA practice.
Professional wrestling in the USA, and elsewhere, is a profitable industry in which the commodification of professional wrestlers can be evidenced. Being neither a pure sport nor pure entertainment, professional wrestling occupies an ambiguous position, which arguably, at best, facilitates the mystification and neglect of the harm and victimization caused to professional wrestlers as part of their craft, or at worst, causes the victimization of professional wrestlers. In this article we discuss the victimization of professional wrestlers in the USA as a result of the demands of the industry. It is our contention that they constitute the "Victimological Other" and, focusing on the wrestling business in the USA, it documents their unnecessary victimization. We maintain that whilst professional wrestlers engage in performative violence, they pay a high price for such a performance and, as such, they are victims of their craft and of the industry in which it is located. The self-inflicted and occupational-related harm and victimization experienced by professional wrestlers as a result of the pressure of this industry is discussed and the issue of accountability is raised. We conclude that this area of victimization requires further academic investigation and discussion.