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.

Introduction: Hamlet Doesn’t Blade: Professional Wrestling, Theatre, and Performance

Audience

Ch1 The dissipation of "heat": changing role(s) of audience in professional wrestling in the U.S.

Ch2 Pops and promos: speech and silence in professional wrestling

Ch3 Playful engagements: Wrestling with the attendant masses

Circulation

Ch4 Stadium Sized Theatre: WWE and the World of Professional Wrestling

Ch5 Wrestling’s Not Real, It’s Hyperreal: Professional Wrestling Video Games

Lucha

Ch6 Don't Leave Us in the Hands of Criminals: The Contested Cultural Politics of Lucha Libre

Ch7 Wrestling With Burlesque, Burlesquing Lucha Libre

Gender

Ch8 The Impact of Women’s Pro Wrestling Performances on the Transformation of Gender

Ch9 "Most women train with mostly men, so why not wrestle them?" The performance and experience of intergender professional wrestling in Britain

Queerness

Ch10 Grappling and Ga(y)zing: Gender, Sexuality and Performance in the WWE debuts of Goldust and Marlena

Ch11 ‘King of the ring, and queen of it too’: the exotic masculinity of Adrian Street

Ch12 "Gold-dust": Ricki Starr’s Ironic Performances of the Queer Commodity in Popular Entertainment

Bodies

Ch13 Muscle Memory: Re-enacting the fin-de-siècle Strongman in Pro Wrestling

Ch14 The Hard Sell; The Performance of Pain in Professional Wrestling

Race

Ch15 "Tell Them It’s What Their Grandfathers Got": Racial Violence in Southern Professional Wrestling

Ch16 Grappling with the "New Racism:" Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonialism in British Wrestling during the 1970s and 1980s

Ch17 Some Moments of Flag Desecration in Professional Wrestling

Epilogue: The Game of Life

Broderick Chow is a Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London, and an active performance practitioner.

Eero Laine is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Claire Warden is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University.