ABSTRACT
Professional wrestling first emerged with the advent of nineteenth/twentieth-century music hall, fairground and, indeed, circus. This liminal sport-art is rarely read as avant-garde practice, however, and for good reason given its continued association with mainstream global capitalism and its awkward history of rightist politics, misogyny and racism. This chapter proposes an alternative narrative, analysing the subversive performing body as a connective nodal point for the disparate histories of circus, the avant-garde and professional wrestling. Approaching the (specifically British independent) contemporary professional wrestling as embodied, collaborative, avant-garde exhibitionism destabilises definitional readings of wrestling and enables new categorisation as a contemporary performance practice with similarities to drag and burlesque. Grounded in historiographical research, yet impacted by the author’s practice-based experience, this chapter makes a case for an integrated rereading of circus, the avant-garde and professional wrestling by focusing on the radical, participatory body.
