{"title":"“Real” Wrestling","authors":"Sharon Mazer","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvx5w9pw.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvx5w9pw.5","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":183487,"journal":{"name":"Professional Wrestling","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115125765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Professional WrestlingPub Date : 2020-01-27DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.003.0006
Sharon Mazer
{"title":"“Real” Life","authors":"Sharon Mazer","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496826862.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"What fans come to recognize and interact with as they “get in on the game” and move from “mark” to “smart,” is the play outside the play: first the signs of a hero or villain, then the inevitable failure of the representatives of authority in the ring to assure a fair fight and a just end, and finally that the true power lies in the hands of the promoter whose purchase of a wrestler includes the right to dictate his success or failure. For fans, not only are the stories that are told to them in the ongoing professional wrestling narratives drawn from life, life itself can be read through the structures and understandings that professional wrestling provides. The real contest is not between wrestlers, with whom fans identify, but between themselves as competing experts and, most important, between themselves as consumers and the guys with the money and power.","PeriodicalId":183487,"journal":{"name":"Professional Wrestling","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134025902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}