Wrestling with Blackness: play, precarity, and the Black geographies of pro wrestling

Abstract

Wrestling with Blackness: Play, Precarity and The Black Geographies of Pro Wrestling centers the lives, histories, and experiences of Black people to understand how power works in spaces where precarity is the nucleus of the industry. Given that Black people have long been excluded from the formal economy in the US, they are the prototypes of the gig workers of today. The pro wrestling economy is built on precarity as pro wrestlers do not have a union, nor do they have an off season. Pro wrestlers are independent contractors who sign non-compete clause contracts while not being insured by their employer. Furthermore, pro wrestlers on average travel 300 days per year, pay for it out of pocket, and are not reimbursed. This dissertation situates the US pro wrestling industry as a site to study the structural elements of labor precarity. Despite professional wrestling being a multibillion-dollar international industry that is underwritten by melodrama, action, and the spectacular. It is I argue the heart of labor precarity in the US. As Roland Barthes remarks “it is the spectacle of excess.” Despite this excess, it arguably has the most labor precarity of any professional sport in the US. This dissertation examines labor precarity in pro wrestling centering the experiences of Black professional wrestlers using the concepts of play, performance, and Black geographic space as an analytic to understand how race and power operate in a sport where winners and losers are predetermined. Chapter 1 examines the gimmick of the the wrestling trio the New Day thinking through the ways they play not only with their gimmick but with the libidinal economy to navigate precarity in pro wrestling. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between the pro wrestling industry and Black women, specifically focusing on the mechanisms through which the the labor of Black women, historically and contemporarily, has been erased, suppressed, and omitted. Chapter 3 analyzes the way technological innovation of streaming services has shifted power relationships between companies, changed hiring practices, and produced an intimacy between local and global wrestling cultures. Chapter 4 introduces Black queer wrestlers on the margins of the industry illustrating how they have utilized digital grassroot political methods and branding to promote progressive change in the wrestling business industry. Together, these chapters craft a broader relational analysis that connects Black cultural production to political economic practices of value extraction, appropriation, and expropriation of Blackness, illustrating the co-production between Black cultural production and economic practice. By reformulating the understanding of Black cultural production and political economies through a centering of Black cultural geographies, Wrestling with Blackness develops an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between Black culture, labor, and anti-Blackness as a structural component integral to labor precarity.