It’s Still Real to Me”
Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neo-Liberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894795 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian Jansen (0000-0002-1269-2054, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 302-330 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-12 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras.2018.024 |
| OpenAlex | W2997909779 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 12 |
Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly
Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Dystopia · Embodied cognition · Entertainment · Epistemology · Fallacy · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Premise · Rationality · Salon · Scholarship · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · Anthropology · Law · Philosophy · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Sports, Gender, and Society
| Citations per year | 1.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |