Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage

Professional wrestling has all the trappings of sport, but is, at its core, a theatrical event. Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage, examines professional wrestling as a century-old, theatrical form that spans from its local places of performance to circulate as a popular, global product. The book presents professional wrestling as theatre in the formal sense, insofar as professional wrestling shares many theatrical elements such as plot, character, scenic design, props, and spectacle. In doing so, the book argues for professional wrestling as an exemplary form of globalizing, commercial theatre. This book assesses professional wrestling as a neglected but prototypical case study in the global business of theatre. The chapters in the book consider the laboring bodies of the wrestlers, parse wrestling’s form and content, delimit the edges of wrestling’s theatrical frame, critique established understandings of corporate theatre, and offer key wrestling concepts as models for future study in other fields.

Professional wrestling has all the trappings of sport, but is, at its core, a theatrical event. Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage, examines professional wrestling as a century-old, theatrical form that spans from its local places of performance to circulate as a popular, global product. The book presents professional wrestling as theatre in the formal sense, insofar as professional wrestling shares many theatrical elements such as plot, character, scenic design, props, and spectacle. In doing so, the book argues for professional wrestling as an exemplary form of globalizing, commercial theatre. This book assesses professional wrestling as a neglected but prototypical case study in the global business of theatre. The chapters in the book consider the laboring bodies of the wrestlers, parse wrestling’s form and content, delimit the edges of wrestling’s theatrical frame, critique established understandings of corporate theatre, and offer key wrestling concepts as models for future study in other fields.

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Performance and Professional Wrestling

Performance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider professional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it via other performance genres, this collection of essays offers a complete critical reassessment of the popular sport.

Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech, physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are explored in relation to professional wrestling, with work by both scholars and practitioners grouped into seven short sections: Audience, Circulation, Lucha, Gender, Queerness, Bodies, Race. A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Professional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by this uniquely theatrical sport.

Reviews

Communication Booknotes Quarterly
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
Studies in Theatre and Performance
Theatre Journal
The Popular Culture Studies Journal

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Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism

A wildly popular form of mass media and live entertainment, professional wrestling makes a spectacle of violent acts. With its long history of working contemporary events into storylines and commenting upon cultural and military conflicts, professional wrestling is also intrinsically political. Its performance—theatricalities, machinations and conditions of production, figurations, and audiences—arises from and engages with the world around. Whether flowing with the mainstream of popular culture or fighting at the fringes, professional wrestling shows us how we are fighting, what we are fighting about, and what we are fighting for.

This edited volume asks how professional wrestling is implicated in the current resurgence of populist politics, whether right-wing and Trump–inflected, or leftist and socialist. How might it do more than reflect and, in so doing, reaffirm the status quo? While provoked by the disruptive performances of Trump as candidate and president, and mindful of his longstanding ties to the WWE, this timely volume looks more broadly and internationally at the infusion of professional wrestling’s worldview into the twinned discourses of politics and populism. The contributors are scholars from a wide range of disciplines: theater and performance studies; cultural, media, and communication studies; anthropology and sociology; and gender and sexuality studies. Together they argue that the game’s popularity and its populist tendencies open it to the left as well as to the right, to contestation as well as to conformity, making it an ideal site for working on feminist and activist projects and ideas.

In Progress

Sports Plays
Broderick Chow and Eero Laine, editors

Sport Plays is a volume about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports. The chapters in this volume examine sports plays through a range of critical and theoretical approaches that highlight central concerns and questions for both sports and theatre. The plays examined cut across boundaries and genres, from Broadway-style musicals to dramas to experimental and developmental work. The chapters take up and trouble the conventions of staging sports as they open possibilities for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates. The authors in this volume are established and emerging scholars of theatre and performance studies whose work on feminism, sexuality, politics, and race points to and engages important considerations for both theatre and sports.