Sport and Melodrama: The Case of Mexican Professional Wrestling

Abstract

When I tell people that I work on professional wrestling in Mexico, they Heather Levi often respond by asking me if it's totally corrupt there like it is here. Their reaction simultaneously foregrounds and misrecognizes some of the central features of this genre. Yes, Mexican lucha libre (free fighting) is a variant of the transnational entertainment genre known in the Anglophone world as professional, all-in, or all-star wrestling. basic conventions (which may be familiar to many readers) are as follows: It is a contest between two or more wrestlers who compete not as themselves but as characters that they (or their promoters) invent. characters are morally coded, so that normally each match features one good guy (or team of good guys) and one bad guy (or team of bad guys). A wrestler enacting the role of bad guy cheats, uses unnecessary roughness, and displays cowardice and trickery. There are referees but, because of corruption and/or incompetence, they are unwilling or unable to enforce the rules against the bad guys. When people ask about corruption, they refer to a widespread understanding that the fighting is staged and the outcome of each contest is decided in advance. To say that it is corrupt, though, indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre. It is not corrupt. Instead, it is a drama about corruption and, as such, its relationship to other sports is problematic. ambiguous relationship of all-star wrestling to other sports has led interested scholars in several national settings to ask why fans enjoy watching a seemingly fixed contest. For the most part these scholars categorize wrestling either as sport or as theater. I argue, however, that the fundamental difference between professional wrestling and, say, soccer is not that one is drama and the other sport, but that as sports they represent different types of drama. In this reading, professional wrestling represents sport in the mode of melodrama. foundational statement analyzing professional wrestling as a social phenomenon is Roland Barthes's The World of Wrestling (1972). In the introduction to Mythologies, the collection of essays in which it appears, Barthes identifies his agenda as treating 'collective representations' as sign systems [by which] one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petite-bourgeois culture into a universal nature (9). In this context, Barthes suggests that appreciating the genre requires recog-

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