Sunday, September 7, 2014

Professional wrestling as scholarly?


In Steel Chair to the Head, the authors claim that professional wrestling can be analyzed beyond a superficial coverage of whether it is sport, entertainment, or something in between. In doing so, the authors treat wrestling as any other art form or part of modern culture, going as far as to compare it to "vaudeville, jazz, rock n' roll, and punk" on the first page. A reader may view this as an ad hoc justification for a book on wrestling. However, Sammond and the other contributors deliberately lay out examples of how wrestling can be viewed from a scholarly lens, focusing in large part on the symbolism.

This leads to two larger questions: to what extent can professional wrestling be viewed in scholarly, analytic terms and does this change how a fan of wrestling views it? Barthes in 1957 highlights the role of symbolism and characters, in essence equating wrestling to plays, with themes that would resonate to either audience. This reminds me quite a bit of the anthropological works of Clifford Geertz, analyzing cockfighting in Bali. Even Ole Anderson, one loathe to refer to industry as "fake", references the importance of telling a story, not only within a match, but how a wrestling card should build in emotional intensity from the first match to the main event. If we accept wrestling as cultural symbolism in another form, what parts then should our analytic eye focus? Is it the actions, the words of the participants, or something else? Similarly, does this prevent one from enjoying the performance as simply entertainment?



3 comments:

Sam Ford said...

Great question here, Tim, and it does raise a question of "what should be studied." When I was talking to the BG Daily News reporter who is working on the story on our class, we started the discussion with, "How can you spend an entire semester studying pro wrestling?" We ended it with, "How can you cover all of that in a semester?" To me, pro wrestling makes for an ideal "case study" to examine culture because there are so many facets that are there and overtly/easy able to focus on...in part because wrestling is, as Barthes proclaims, "a spectacle of excess." There are the "meta" questions about wrestling that you can ask of the form, without talking about the stories. There's the study of the audience, the press reaction to wrestling, the nature of the types of characters or rivalries, the performance of a single match...but there's also wrestling as a "genre," and studies of particular storylines in wrestling. Think of this class as a cultural immersion...it's hard to study one's own culture, but if you go to a carnival world like pro wrestling, that holds up an exaggerated mirror to our culture, we can study the U.S.--and the sorts of stories we tell ourselves--through those "excesses," I think.

Timothy S. Rich said...

Sam, great point in terms of delving into a culture. Similarly, and something the authors and others have addressed, is that academic theories and concepts which certainly apply to other areas of sports and entertainment should apply to "sports entertainment".

Of course that begs the question (at least to me): which academic lens provides the most insight to wrestling? Media studies and anthropology seem obvious, but how can other disciplines shine light on wrestling?

I'll hold off on my own ideas of using political science for now.

Sam Ford said...

There's been great work done in relation to wrestling in terms of cultural studies/media studies/fan studies. We'll be reading quite a bit of anthropological work on wrestling, as well as folk studies, sociology, communication studies, etc. It certainly seems that political science work makes sense. Re: communication studies, I've seen wrestling used as a case study for rhetoric, crisis communication, etc. I'm reviewing an article for a journal on celebrity studies right now that uses pro wrestling as its case study...