The geographies of wrestling: A review.

The geographies of wrestling: A review. Imogen Fox.

ABSTRACT

This paper critically analyses debates surrounding the spatial scale of the ‘body’, with a specific focus on professional wrestling and the wrestler’s body. It addresses the ‘corporeal turn’ within sport literature, followed by an examination of how geographical thinking is crucial to an understanding of sports spaces, including the body as a space. This paper provides an insight into how wrestlers’ bodies interact and manipulate the space around them, creating a ‘spectacle of excess’, as well as how fighting roles and the professional wrestler’s body is determined by ideologies of race, gender and sexuality. In conclusion, this paper argues that to fully understand wrestling one needs to attend to socio-spatial relations and complex embodiments of cultural power.

Keywords Geographies of sport, Body, Wrestling, Spectacle, Gender