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

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.

R. Tyson SmithEmail:

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R. Tyson Smith   is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at SUNY Stony Brook. His research focuses on culture, gender, health and the media. He has published in Signs (2005), Advertising and Society Review (2005), Contexts (2006), and Social Psychology Quarterly (2008).