ABSTRACT
This chapter explores both how fields like fan studies and performance studies have brought increasingly complex questions to academic understandings of wrestling audiences and how the activities of wrestling fans provide a continually rich area of exploring negotiations of masculinity within fandom. The film tackles the various ways in which World Wrestling Entertainment in particular presents a very narrow range of acceptable behaviors for its male characters—behaviors which characterize masculinity through physical dominance, bullying behavior, violent struggle, and glee in the demeaning of women. The history of concerns about the effects of the violence in professional wrestling on its spectators is perhaps especially unsurprising. Wrestling fandom, however, is not always content to have these arguments in private, or in online message boards. Wrestling fans have long taken those frustrations to the arena as well—which becomes a site for potentially voicing displeasure at the creative direction of wrestling stories.
