Within Walls – the Fictional Audience of Professional Wrestling (original) (raw)
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Fake Rules, Real Fiction: Professional Wrestling and Videogames
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American Professional Wrestling: Evolution, Content, and Popular Appeal
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Over the past several years, professional wrestling, now referred to as sports entertainment, has become a hugely popular cultural phenomenon. There are several reasons to account for why tens of millions of Americans are attracted to this form of entertainment, but this article centers attention on three allures that stand out: excitement, intrigue, and political incorrectness. Content analysis suggests that these three foci form the core of pro wrestling program content. The present paper identifies the macrosocial forces that explain sociologically why these themes are especially marketable today: community breakdown, social disenchantment, and political correctness.
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Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019
Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.
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.