Real Men Don’t Wear Shirts

Abstract

Professional wrestling’s play of masculinity is profoundly carnivalesque as it affirms and mocks, celebrates and critiques prevailing definitions of what it is to be a “real” man in contemporary American culture. Because it is centered on, and always returns to, the display of male bodies, and because the action is both a simulation and a parody of violence between men, the performance is always highly ambivalent and profoundly transgressive, at once hypervisible and hypermasculine. As professional wrestlers mask their profound dependence upon and cooperation with each other in the ring, so too they perform a denial of intimacy, even as their performances are exceptionally, provocatively intimate. Despite its apparent social subversiveness, in the end, professional wrestling affirms the dominant culture; it is always a performance by men, for men, about men. Both its ethos and its aesthetics are explicitly centered on the idea of masculinity at once essential and performed.