Lecture Outline

• Wrestling as a Moral Spectacle• Gender Roles

• Rules and Transgression• Excess• Carnival

• Explanatory Paradigms

Barthes:

• not a sport• theatre of suffering

Good and Evil in Wrestling

• good rewarded in the end• white America

Royal Rumble Winners• note real, Anglo last

names• 1988 Hacksaw Jim

Duggan

• 1989 Big John Studd

• 1990 Hulk Hogan

• 1991 Hulk Hogan

• 1992 Rick Flair

• 1993 Yokozuna

• 1994 Bret Hart and Lex Luger

• 1995 Shawn Michaels

• 1996 Shawn Michaels

• 1997 Steve Austin

• 1998 Steve Austin

• 1999 Vince McMahon

• 2000 The Rock

Rowdy Roddy Piper vs. the Mountie

– Royal Rumble 1992

In Dafna Lemish’s Israeli study, boys

• watched more WWF• enacted fights much more often

Girls:

• most girls looked down on “boys” watching

• close to 1/5 of the girls watched on own initiative

• managed tension between curiosity and embarrassment

• experiment with male roles

Girls in public vs. girls in private

• practically no girls fought in public• some girls fought at home

Violence: From fiction to reality?

• No causal relationship has been conclusively proven– variables difficult to control

• Myths of causation– "Superman" flies out the window

Rules and Transgression

• order and disorder• rules for breaking the rules– cf. hockey

Excess

• vs. "reality"• more emotion more "powerfully"

expressed• stereotypical: things are simplified

to a small number of features and those are exaggerated

Japan

I am Japan, hot, with the blood red sun beating down, burning the cheeks of my people.I am Mt. Fuji, tall and mysterious as I take people's breath away.I am Kabuki, hidden in color and movement.I am green tea, hot as I creep down, relaxing as I go.I am sumo, three hundred pounds and pushing hard to get yokozuma, grand champion.I am sushi, sweet and sticky, surrounded with ocean sea weed.I am the bullet train, shooting through Tokyo, storming my breeze.I am Emily, maker of the poem.

by Emily N., 6 years old, Soos Creek Elementary, Kent, Washington

Carnival

• Michail Bakhtin: the "carnivalesque"• temporary transgression; excess

Inoculation model

• Barthes: A little dose of “evil” makes the “evil” harmless

Conformity-Resistance Paradigm

• Who Is “Empowered?– working-class males???– youth– gays and lesbians• the Mountie’s stick

• Rowdy Roddy Piper

• Hot Rod

• the Divas - http://www.wwfdivas.com/

Tori

Girls:

• most girls looked down on “boys” watching

• managed tension between curiosity and embarrassment

• experiment with male roles