Wrestling in Britain

Abstract

Richard A. Litherland was born in 1953 in England. He received his PhD at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1979 and moved to the USA in 1983. He had a lengthy and distinguished career as a professor of mathematics and researcher of low-dimensional topology, based primarily at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge until his untimely passing in November 2022. In this paper we (Rick's family and students) recount some memories of Rick, his life and his mathematics.

Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?

“…Academic analyses of pro-wrestling have separately described it as ‘a simulacrum of grappling and combat sport practices’ (Chow and Laine, 2014: 44), ‘an exciting, stimulating, beguiling form of performance’ (Nevitt, 2010: 322), and ‘a hybrid form of sport, street fight, ballet, spectacle, and soap opera’ that ‘defies easy categorisation’ (De Garis, 2005: 195). What these various descriptions emphasise is the performative nature of pro-wrestling, the genre-defying nature of said performances and the subsequent liminal space it occupies beyond traditional academic disciplines (Litherland, 2018: 5).…”

Scholarly Grappling: Collaborative 'Work' in the Study of Professional Wrestling

“…15 Regardless, those key questions about where media begins and performance ends are always so fascinating, whether you understand that textually or as I have done in my own work through something like Bourdieu's notion of fields. 16 A company like World Wrestling Entertainment is so intriguing because while it is a form of arena-sized commercial theatre, to riff on Eero Laine, it's also very clearly a media company. 17 Understanding which text you are analyzing is always a key question that someone studying wrestling needs to address: is it the live event or televisual text, because anyone who has been to a WrestleMania will be able to tell you that they are really quite different things, in ways both obvious and subtle.…”

“…This is one of the key strengths of the Wrestling in Britain book: that wrestling says about British history and culture in the very broadest sense of these words. 25 This is why it is a particularly successful book. It's not just a book about wrestling; it uses wrestling to allow us access to a range of cultural, historical, sociopolitical changes in the world.…”

“…If you say wrestling isn't sport then it unhelpfully places barriers around our definitions of sport. 26 The question "Is wrestling sport or theatre" always needs to be posed with the caveat that you propose in the book where you say, "Look. This conversation has to resist a sense of concretizing both those concepts [sport and theatre] as they are moving all the time."…”

“…This conversation has to resist a sense of concretizing both those concepts [sport and theatre] as they are moving all the time." 27 bl: I would be interested to return to a phrase Claire used earlier, which was about the risk of being a "fanboy" while doing research. We were all fans of professional wrestling before we were researchers, but as a term that has quite a long, contested, and controversial use in media audience studies.…”