Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism ed. by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism ed. by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes
• Scott Magelssen

PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING: POLITICS AND POPULISM. Edited by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes. Enactment Series. London: Seagull Books, 2020; pp. 241.

Professional wrestling might strike some readers as a sensational topic on the kitschy frontier of performance studies, and to these readers it will make sense that this edited collection found its home in Richard Schechner’s Enactment series with Seagull Books, the purview of which “encompasses performance in as many of its aspects and realities as there are authors able to write about them.” Those in the know, however, will find the twelve essays in Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism to be a thoroughly serious investigation of wrestling’s relationship with populism—both on the right, as seen in Trumpism and Brexit, and on the left, as seen in, say, Indigenous and pro-worker movements in Bolivia (as described in Nell Haynes’s essay). And they will welcome it as only the latest entry in a rigorous scholarly conversation that goes back to Sharon Mazer’s foundational Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (1998), and that has enjoyed scholarly legitimacy since Roland Barthes took up the topic in his “World of Wrestling” essay in 1957.

Refreshingly, then, editors Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes get right to the heart of their assertions within the first sentences of the introduction, without feeling the need to trot out the conventional paragraphs justifying their subject as real scholarship. Professional wrestling is “intrinsically political,” they write. But, moreover, it “captures the currents of daily life, distils them into a set of basic, easily recognizable and repeatable figurations, and replays them in a kind of low-art parody for spectators who, in playing along, engage in an ongoing, performative debate about what it all means” (1). Indeed, by the end of the volume, readers will be equipped to use wrestling to understand everything from Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power (as treated in essays by Heather Levi, Shana Toor, and others), to the Occupy movement (Eric Kennedy), to why some academics succeed and others don’t (Larry DeGaris).

Hitting the ground running as it does, Professional Wrestling’s introduction also dispenses with the formalities of acclimating new readers to discourse concerning the squared circle, like providing definitions of its terms of art (putting over, heat, smarks) or important junctures in the history of wrestling entertainment (e.g., the fans’ disapprobation [End Page 257] of Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 34). Patient newbies (who haven’t already scrambled to read readily available primers on the internet) will find that the individual contributions do slow down to explicate and unpack some of wrestling’s specialized language. Levi and Mazer each take the time to explain “heel” and “face” in the volume’s first two essays, although they respectfully disagree on which term more accurately describes Trump in his 2016 campaign and the first years of his presidency. And Laine devotes his essay to an analysis of “kayfabe” and fans’ complicated acknowledgment of it, through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” to advance the concept as a critical tool for analyzing performance in everyday life (197).

As a scholarly intervention into current politics and global crises, the discussions of wrestling and populism are immediate and timely. At the same time, the editors wrote in January 2020, as Professional Wrestling went to press “three years into Donald Trump’s presidency,” that they “do not know what the world will look like when this book reaches its readers” (221, 22). They certainly could not have anticipated what would happen in the next twelve months as the book entered production. It seems remarkable now, on the one hand, that Bernie Sanders gets several mentions as Trump’s biggest foil after Hillary Clinton, but Joe Biden, who would beat Trump in the November 2020 election, doesn’t have a single appearance. On the other hand, chillingly, even though the editors could never have predicted the populist uprising of January 6, 2021, the book’s contention that “voters, like wrestling fans, find surprising ways of...