Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

Abstract

This paper draws upon the relational turn in the study of pain to understand and explain the ways in which professional wrestlers manage and make sense of physical suffering. The paper focuses on how pain-laden interactions in the ring and the gym give form to the ways in which participants of wrestling think and feel about pain. The research is based on a long-term ethnography of professional wrestling. The article does two things: (a) explores the bodily skills that wrestlers cultivate to handle a context of ever-present pain, and (b) explains what the wrestlers' interactions tell us about the meanings of pain that wrestlers come to share. Based on the reconstruction of participants' lived experience of pro wrestling, I suggest that pain becomes attractive to wrestlers because it is given substantive meaning which encompasses denial, authenticity, solidarity, and dominance.

Caged Morality: Moral Worlds, Subculture, and Stratification Among Middle-Class Cage-Fighters

“…Instead, they employed a narrative of stoicism that recognized injury, both acute and cumulative, as "just part of the game." As in other sports, the ability to be tough and to endure pain and injury was understood as an axis of prestige (Atkinson 2008;Birrell 1981;Smith 2008b). Danny, a 27-year-old small business owner put it succinctly when he said to be a fighter, "you have to be tough."…”

“…Danny, a 27-year-old small business owner put it succinctly when he said to be a fighter, "you have to be tough." For fighters, like other athletes, the ability to ignore or manage pain is a marker of moral distinction (Atkinson 2008;Smith 2008b;Wacquant 1995aWacquant , 2004. Physically inscribed bio-cultural markers such as a muscular physique or "cauliflower ears" (see Photograph 4) serve as badges of honor and criteria for moral appraisal in the world of cage-fighting.…”

“…It is a multifaceted tool that comprises both the sword and shield of a sportive engagement (Wacquant 2004). While the ability to endure pain, suffering, and injury in the course of training and fighting are taken as a marker of status and morality (Atkinson 2008;Birrell 1981;Smith 2008b;Wacquant 2004), having a body that can function at the required level is a prerequisite for participation as a fighter. In many ways an injury can call into question the fighter's identity and status in the subculture, while denying him or her access to the affective (Sweetman 2001), corporeal (Wacquant 2004), and social pleasures that participation entails.…”

“…Trying to seriously hurt training partners in the gym is considered an egregious breech of accepted behavior, which typically results in the transgressor being banned from the gym (see Donnelly 2004;Smith 2008b for similar findings). This is not to say violence or bloodshed does not explain much of the appeal of the sport for a portion of the large American audience.…”

Understanding sports violence: revisiting foundational explorations

“…Principally, such 'slippage' would include acts defined simultaneously through violence-as-force and -violation, such as when professional wrestlers take personal vendettas into a performance and deliberately harm their (unsuspecting) opponents (Smith, 2008), or when a contact sport athlete is pressured by a coach into harming their body through excessively rough and risky play (Messner, 1990;Young, 2012). Barring such obvious transgressions of the situational codes of legitimacy, ritualised violence is clearly experienced and understood differently than when the same actions are engaged in outside of their ritualised context.…”