A wildly popular form of mass media and live entertainment, professional
wrestling makes a spectacle of violent acts. With its long history of
working contemporary events into storylines and commenting upon cultural
and military conflicts, professional wrestling is also intrinsically
political. Its performance--theatricalities, machinations and conditions
of production, figurations, and audiences--arises from and engages with
the world around. Whether flowing with the mainstream of popular culture
or fighting at the fringes, professional wrestling shows us how we are
fighting, what we are fighting about, and what we are fighting for.
This edited volume asks how professional wrestling is implicated in the
current resurgence of populist politics, whether right-wing and
Trump-inflected, or leftist and socialist. How might it do more than
reflect and, in so doing, reaffirm the status quo? While provoked by the
disruptive performances of Trump as candidate and president, and mindful
of his longstanding ties to the WWE, this timely volume looks more
broadly and internationally at the infusion of professional wrestling's
worldview into the twinned discourses of politics and populism. The
contributors are scholars from a wide range of disciplines: theater and
performance studies; cultural, media, and communication studies;
anthropology and sociology; and gender and sexuality studies. Together
they argue that the game's popularity and its populist tendencies open
it to the left as well as to the right, to contestation as well as to
conformity, making it an ideal site for working on feminist and activist
projects and ideas.
