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Working from Underneath: Masochism and the Performance of Pain in Professional Wrestling
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Date
2011-12
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Indiana University South Bend
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Abstract
The focus on the performance of physical pain makes professional wrestling unique among forms of popular entertainment, especially because of the challenge of communicating and making intelligible physical pain. Film and literature (not to mention sports) also depict and describe physical pain, but professional wrestling makes physical suffering its main storytelling component. Professional wrestling, then, relies on the most difficult of storytelling tools, physical pain, to play out conflicts for its audience, and that form lends immediacy to its narratives. The narrative that is played out, then, is one in which the mainstream is assaulted and made to suffer by those who, in the larger culture, have no true power, physical or otherwise. The lack of agency that the marginalized values embodied by the heels suffer from in the culture at large is obscured by the powerlessness assumed by the mainstream as embodied by the babyface. The pain of those with all the power is made to be the only pain that we can see, the only pain that matters. Additionally, because this powerlessness is assumed willfully, there is a masochistic element to the performance. The pain and suffering on display is pleasurable because it helps the viewer ignore or disregard contradictions and inconsistencies in the dominant ideology, contradictions and inconsistencies that are sometimes highlighted by the heel character. Wrestling's emphasis on pain helps create a fantasy world, making it easier for the viewer to close their eyes to the more troubling elements of dominant culture. In the limited existing scholarship dealing with professional wrestling, the subject of masochism has, to my knowledge, rarely been previously explicitly addressed. This thesis thus contributes to existing scholarship by initiating a discussion of masochism and its relation to narrative pleasure in professional wrestling.
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Thesis (M.A.) Indiana University South Bend, 2011
Keywords
Wrestling--Social aspects--United States, Masochism
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