Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (review)

Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle by Sharon Mazer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998; 208 pp.; illustrations. $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

It's not often that before a dissertation-become-book has had a chance to be reviewed, let alone remaindered, one of the people it writes about has published a scathing critique of its ethnographic authority and method. Such is the fate of Sharon Mazer's work on professional wrestlers.

One of her informants, Laurence de Garis, doubles as an ethnographer himself, and he has written a refutation of her work in the Sociology of Sport Journal (1999). In some ways, he is immensely respectful, of both her empirical labors and her interpretations, but excoriates her for imagining she can be an invisible subject, transcendentally coming and going from the scene of her research and refusing to participate in the culture of the ring.

This distance from the process is something that Mazer herself is aware of, of course, and she endeavors to negotiate it: she is not a wrestler, she is an academic, and she seeks to avoid the mimetic fallacy that requires analysts of popular culture to act as if they were its producers. She wishes to take the culture seriously, including her frequent astonishment at it, notably the gender plays that characterize its bizarre public displays, by both male and female participants. Mazer runs through the life of the gym, the TV screen, the training session, and the fan, respectfully following the circuit of wrestling.

But there is a strange lack of politics to the whole that matches the absence of epistemological humility that concerns her informant de Garis. She barely touches on the political economy of the sport, its economic pressures that make for characterization, drug use, television coverage, and so on. Nor does she deal effectively with the critical literature on sport or masculinity. It is truly amazing to me that writers like R.W. Connell, Jim McKay, C.L. Cole, Ann Hall, Susan Birrell, and many others are nowhere to be found here. Their rich blend of gender theory, political economy, and queerness would have added immeasurably to the analysis. But so dependent is the book on its notion of first-person testimony and enactment that it lacks dimensions that might have come from an engagement with the relevant literature.

This sounds like a tediously academic point. But the value of good critical literature is that it can make us think differently, to step outside the comforts of what our professors teach us as the only way and find multi-perspectivalism. It is as if the Turnerian dramaturgical method used by Mazer is unable to accommodate even the posing of such questions. I see no good reason why that should be so, and it is for others to state whether it is. But the book suffers from an apolitical form of looking just as much as its key informant claims it suffers from a lack of engagement.

--Toby Miller

Copyright © Richard Schechner

Toby Miller is Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy at New York University.

Reference

de Garis, Laurence
1999 "Experiments in Pro Wrestling: Toward a Performance and Sensuous Ethnography." Sociology of Sport Journal 16, 1:65-74.

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