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Fighting For Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, And The Act Of Violence In Professional Wrestling by R. Tyson Smith

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2015.0061

1086-332X

Eero Laine,

American Sports and Literature

Reviewed by: Fighting For Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, And The Act Of Violence In Professional Wrestling by R. Tyson Smith Eero Laine FIGHTING FOR RECOGNITION: IDENTITY, MASCULINITY, AND THE ACT OF VIOLENCE IN PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING. By R. Tyson Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014; pp. 240. Examining professional wrestling as “physical theatre where spectators pay to be entertained by performers acting out a fight” (1), R. Tyson Smith’s exemplary ethnography of independent pro wrestling revels in the theatrical play between what is perceived and what is performed. While Smith is certainly interested in the spectacle of the performance itself, this study dwells backstage where a mostly white, heterosexual, working-class group of men primp, pluck, perfume, and pump themselves up, “completely preoccupied with preparing to be men they are generally not” (92). Smith spent two and a half years in the homosocial spaces of an independent wrestling promotion located just outside New York City. The study finds him in school gymnasiums and repurposed auto-repair shops, pressed into ad hoc dressing rooms clouded with [End Page 376] equal parts Axe body spray and sexual anxiety. Indeed, the study does not shy away from the casual and ironic homophobia that policed the interactions of the often nearly naked men cooperatively working one another into compromising positions. Smith treats his subjects with empathy, however, and resists the often classist urge to treat pro wrestling simply as “comic fodder: a shirtless variation of the community theatre parodied in Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman” (38–39). Smith’s work joins the slowly expanding collection of academic book-length studies on pro wrestling, and is the third such entry published by Duke University Press. The book’s focus on pro wrestling as a performance form is evident in the prologue, which begins with a deep description of a wrestling match. While the firsthand account may reinforce some readers’ notions that pro wrestling is silly, troubling, or easily dismissed, Smith’s descriptions of the cheering crowds and the wrestlers’ nuanced interactions will resonate with performance scholars interested in active, immersive, and local or community performance. The author is clear to distinguish independent wrestling from the better-known, commercially successful WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and takes the bulk of the first two chapters to introduce readers to the wrestlers at the heart of the study. The wrestlers live precariously, and while they may “tend to perceive middle-class lifestyles and opportunities as fleeting” (20), their near constant attention to training, self-discipline, and the craft of the performance echoes that of other artists today, who are increasingly entrepreneurial, contingent, and working for exposure rather than wages. While the question of why people would pursue and even claim to enjoy such a vocation may seem self-evident in the acting studio, the answer may be less clear in a realm where powerbombs and swinging steel chairs are commonplace. Smith does well in tracking the seemingly simple question of motivation by focusing on the lives of the wrestlers and the physical injuries that affect their work, education, relationships, and finances. The book is especially strong in this line of inquiry when it hews toward ethnographic details of training sessions and performances, but it falls short in other areas. For instance, the section on the philosophical and sociological concept of recognition (from which the book gains its title) is cursory, but perhaps illustrates an opening for further work on the subject in relation to pro wrestling and other highly physical performance forms. The third and central chapter takes up wrestling as exemplary of “the joint performance of emotional labor conducted with the body” (68; emphasis in original). While the chapter is written from Smith’s vantage as a sociologist and not a theatre scholar, it contains valuable descriptions and analyses of pro wrestling as a theatrical form and the labor of the performers. This chapter is highly portable to other studies and should prove useful in a theatre or performance studies classroom (for example, anyone teaching Kristoffer Diaz’s play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity might consider this chapter for supplemental reading). Indeed, Smith’s analysis of what he calls “passion work” and the affective demands of...