ABSTRACT
The dialogic relationship between wrestling audiences and performers is rich terrain for sociological inquiry. As seemingly marginal as professional wrestling appears, it remains decidedly part of modern life: more than a reaction to the conditions of contemporary culture or a subversion of them, pro wrestling is embedded in and manifests the values and contradictions of consumer culture. The strategies and practices of the “lowly” wrestling fan (Sehmby 2002) shed light on what is generally understood as a postmodern sensibility of ironic nihilism; a penchant for “authentic inauthenticity” is key to the logic, spirit, and practices of American consumer culture.1 Far from being a mere manifestation of the so-called postmodern media environment, this historically constructed spectator position has a much longer trajectory: the practices, sensibilities, and discourses associated with late twentiethcentury postmodern consumer culture find their roots in the late nineteenth century, and the ongoing popularity of professional wrestling illustrates this continuity. This chapter offers an historical analysis of shifts in the industry argot used in professional wrestling, an insider language that has only recently come to be shared on a mass scale by performers, producers, and fans alike. Of particular interest is jargon that determines the way audiences understand and engage in the pleasures of watching pro wrestling, a language through which we can trace the spectator positions conceived of by the pro wrestling industry over the last century. The history of pro wrestling – and its lingo regarding categories of audience engagement – reveals a continuity between
modernism and postmodernism, nineteenth-and twenty-first-century leisure culture; it is through this continuity that we can detect what amounts to a longstanding vernacular theorization of spectator knowledge and pleasure.
