Fighting for Recognition

R. Tyson Smith, Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling (London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. xvi + 220. ISBN 978-0-8223-5709-4 (hb); 978-0-8223-5722-3 (pb).

American Journal of Sociology Review of Fighting for Recognition

In this paper, I take a no-holds-barred approach to cultural criticism, using performative writing as my primary combat style with which to kick Ultimate Fighting Champion Brock Lesnar's ass. Under the performative guise of a three-round fight, I offer a counter-hegemonic reading of Brock Lesnar's move from professional wrestling to Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). I argue that Lesnar's quest to become the Ultimate Fighting Champion parallels a crucial feature of hegemonic masculinity-the constant struggle to become a man-while demonstrating the process of formalization and informalization that continually shapes our understanding of what it is to be a man. The battle between the critic and the criticized dramatizes the contest over what it means to be a real man, a contest enacted in the culture of MMA and reflected in Brock Lesnar's career change.

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.

2006

This analysis of the professional wrestling genre attempts to understand the complex reading practices employed by wrestling's fan community. I argue that wrestling fans consume these texts in the context of both the official narratives of media producers and the meta-narratives that exist independently of the official texts. In addition, I argue that wrestling fans display characteristics normally reserved for traditional media producers, collaborating with those producers over the direction of the official narratives. This process of collaboration is indicative of the blurring of the boundaries between textual producers and consumers and necessitates a theoretical conception of the audience that accounts for these unique fan practices. I have called this audience conception the productive audience model.

CAPACIOUS JOURNAL FOR EMERGING AFFECT INQUIRY, 2017

This article offers a critical, idiosyncratic take on the staging of sincerity in pro wrestling. It engages this popular cultural product as an athletic performance event, with the intention of highlighting the affective underpinnings of fans' interest in and connection with the medium. Specifically, it is argued here that the lack of legitimate competition in wrestling allows for images,

Of Pain and Penises: Deconstructing Hegemonic Masculinity in the Ultimate Fighting Championship Fights, 2014

ABSTRACT Berame, J. P. (2014). Of Pain and Penises: Deconstructing Hegemonic Masculinity in the Ultimate Fighting Championship Fights. Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. The study uses textual analysis to read how masculinities are expressed and articulated in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) maincard bouts, and how these expressions relate to the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Sports that rely on body-contact confrontations are viewed as an unrelenting renewal of the manhood, an affirmation of hegemonic masculinity, which is problematic, since the physical intimacy of the sport opens discourses of homosexuality and homoeroticism. The study incorporates poststrcuturalist perspective, mainly of Derridean deconstruction to produce an understanding of hegemonic masculinity’s articulation and operation inside UFC. By studying and applying the different ideas and concepts of deconstruction on how hegemonic and subordinate masculinities are expressed and articulated, the study wishes to discuss the following: the relationship and politics of hegemonic masculinity and subordinate masculinities, and how the expressions of these masculinities rely on the very ideas and concepts that they reject—fear, anxiety, homoeroticism, and femininity, based on the textual analysis of the UFC maincard fights. Keywords: hegemonic masculinity, deconstruction, UFC

Qualitative Sociology, 2008

This paper draws upon the relational turn in the study of pain to understand and explain the ways in which professional wrestlers manage and make sense of physical suffering. The paper focuses on how pain-laden interactions in the ring and the gym give form to the ways in which participants of wrestling think and feel about pain. The research is based on a long-term ethnography of professional wrestling. The article does two things: (a) explores the bodily skills that wrestlers cultivate to handle a context of ever-present pain, and (b) explains what the wrestlers’ interactions tell us about the meanings of pain that wrestlers come to share. Based on the reconstruction of participants’ lived experience of pro wrestling, I suggest that pain becomes attractive to wrestlers because it is given substantive meaning which encompasses denial, authenticity, solidarity, and dominance.

Sex Roles, 2006

This study was designed to examine messages about manhood revealed by televised professional wrestling through content analyses of 118 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programs and pay-per-view events. Specifically, messages concerning masculinity and the way in which proof and assertion of manhood are accomplished were investigated and compared to the culturally ideal version of masculinity. Findings revealed that the messages imparted by the WWE about manhood support the dominant hegemonic form of masculinity, which emphasizes aggression and violence, emotional restraint, and success and achievement. Popular culture messages about manhood that emphasize hegemonic masculinity have implications for alternative expressions of masculinity and potential gender role socialization, which are discussed.

2018

Käsillä oleva pro gradu-tutkielma koskee pohjoisamerikkalaista viihteen muotoa, jota suomeksi kutsutaan yleisesti joko showpainiksi tai ammattilaispainiksi (professional wrestling). Showpainissa kaksi (tai useampi) esiintyjä eli painija esittää yleisön edessä, painikehässä ja sen välittömässä läheisyydessä painiottelun, jonka voittaja on ennalta sovittu. Esitys on siten osa fiktiivistä kamppailu-urheilulajia, sillä ottelijat toimivat yhteistyössä kertoakseen yleisölle tarinan. Tutkielma keskittyykin showpainin fiktiivisyyteen ja tämän lisäksi siihen aktiiviseen osallistuvaan rooliin, joka showpainiesityksen yleisöllä on. Lopulta showpainia tarkastellaan osallistavan taiteen teorioiden valossa. Tutkielma pyrkii vastaamaan kysymykseen: voiko showpaini toteuttaa osallistavan taiteen ideaalia?