What Pro Wrestling Has To Teach Us

We all know that pro wrestling is not a sport in the sense that boxing is. Pro wrestling presents as a genuine struggle between wrestlers for victory, but it does so with a complicit nod to the audience: we realise that what we’re seeing is people playing characters and working together put on a show. As Barthes puts it, this show is often a spectacle about suffering, defeat and justice – or, more brightly, it tells stories of virtue and vice, heroism and villainy. Here we have a re