Spectacle of excess: The passion work of professional wrestlers,fans and anti-fans

Abstract

This article examines how professional wrestlers, promoters and audiences perform the passion work of sports entertainment. Rather than celebrate professional wrestling as a popular phenomenon, this articles seeks to use empirical research on live wrestling events to understand the meaning of passion work in sports entertainment. In Roland Barthes’ seminal article on professional wrestling in Mythologies, he describes wrestling as a spectacle of excess, where passions such as love and hate are exaggerated through the expressions of wrestlers and audience members. A key research question concerns how the passion work in professional wrestling involves different types of labour, the physical and emotional work of wrestlers and event organisers, and the work of audiences, fans and anti-fans interacting with professional performers. The article uses ethnographic research of professional wrestling to explore how different types of passionate labour re-enforce and legitimate each other, shaping an emotional structure to a spectacle of excess. The overall argument in this article is that the meaning of passion work in sports entertainment highlights what Stephen Coleman calls a public performance of power relations, where the particularities of power are made visible through the collective labour of wrestlers and audience members. Power is neither industry led nor in the hands of audience members; rather, it is made visible through the work of promoters, wrestlers and audiences as a collective performance in a high-energy, adrenalin-fuelled live event.