‘Just don’t hit on me and I’m fine’: Mapping high school wrestlers’ relationship to inclusive masculinity and heterosexual recuperation

Abstract

This article examines the gender and sexual understandings of high school wrestlers, mainly through the lens of inclusive masculinity theory. It does so by exploring the level of acceptance participants exhibited toward gay wrestlers, as well as by how they made sense of and negotiated the popular claim: ‘wrestling is gay.’ Through 10 months of ethnographic research and 15 qualitative interviews, this research shows that the high school wrestlers in my study were by and large gay friendly, accepting both their presumably gay teammate and other openly gay wrestlers, but not without their own qualifications. While they were inclusive in this regard, they also took offense to the characterization that ‘wrestling is gay.’ How the wrestlers responded to this specific claim expands the literature on heterosexual recuperation, namely by illustrating how groups maintain heterosexual boundaries without referencing homophobia or heterosexuality explicitly.