Lecture Wednesday April 3rd, 2002
(Richard Griffiths)
"In Your House: Wrestling as Televised Spectacle".

Summary of Mulvey's critique; quotations from lecture; list of suggested readings

Introduction
In my lecture today I am going to explore the world of televised wrestling. Although this "hybrid" form of sports entertainment may seem a world away from the field of visual culture, I will demonstrate to you how professional wrestling offers a rich textual and visual terrain with which to engage. I start with a consideration of how the notion of spectacle and carnival applies to televised wrestling. Then, in the second half of my lecture I explore the way in which vision can be "gendered", and how the scholarship of feminist film critic Laura Mulvey may be potentially used to understand the visual presentation of male and female figures in the spectacle that is professional wrestling.

Theoretical Perspectives of the "Spectacle"
The notion that sport can be theorized as "spectacle" has been employed as a conceptual framework with which to read a variety of sporting events staged hundreds of years ago to the present day. What is common and indeed central to sports entertainment across the centuries is the gaze of an audience who watch specific types or representations of social interaction and activities.

Interestingly, the idea of the spectacle operates on a number of different conceptual levels. Firstly, the previous examples of sport from the ancient world exemplify how the spectacle may be characterized by the various activities on show and the quantitative dimension, or numbers attending the event. Secondly, the way in which ancient sporting events "naturalized" masculinity and warfare relates to a second definition of spectacle that is ideological and can be located within the discourse of visual culture. For instance in the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argues that within capitalist-based societies: all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.... The spectacle is ... a social relation among people, mediated by images. The spectacle... is a world vision, which has become objectified.... In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.... The spectacle's form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system's conditions and goals (Debord 1999: pp. 95-96).

In short, this is a hegemonic-based argument that posits that the spectacle is an instrument of ideology that via images permits the maintenance of social relations without force. Although the sporting examples taken from antiquity are not from capitalist-based societies, it is clear that they were intended to serve an ideological purpose, which revolved around warfare and gender roles.

And finally, some social theorists have recognized the potential relationships that exist between the spectacle and the notion of the "carnivalesque". The central thematic of this third type of spectacle is the concept of the "world turned upside down", or the inversion of "normal rules" and "social conduct", or violation of conventional expectations. In The Visual Culture Reader Ella Short and Robert Stam (1998) describe how the theory of the carnivalesque may be applied to a variety of films produced by non-European film-makers, in which institutional hierarchies are "anarchized", and social and racial inversions are celebrated....

We can therefore think of "spectacle in 3 ways

Spectacle 1: Size and scope of event;
Spectacle 2: Ideological;
Spectacle 3: Inversion /Subversion (the "Carnivalesque")....

Psychoanalysis and Wrestling
It is something of a rash understatement to say that the scholarship of feminist film critic Laura Mulvey has had an extremely significant impact on academic studies revolving around film, gender and seeing or spectatorship. As such, Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is concerned with identifying how visuality is structured around gender positions and the potential pleasure that is obtained from the act of looking. In psychoanalytic terms, this process is known as scopophilia.

Mulvey posits that the forms of viewing pleasure that can be identified as existing in mainstream Hollywood cinema are male-dominated: i.e. that men have the power, pleasure and active control of the gaze, while women have became the objects of that male-centered gaze. She also suggests that: "Traditionally, the woman displayed [on film] has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium" (Mulvey 1999, 384).

She also argues that mainstream cinema "neatly combines spectacle and narrative.... [and that] The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film" (Mulvey 1999, pp. 383-384).

However, Mulvey claims that this status of women as spectacle "poses a deeper problem" as "she" threatens the male spectator / viewer because she does not have a phallus. Indeed, in psychoanalytic terms this is a scenario that suggests a threat of castration and therefore, "unpleasure" for the male viewer. Gillian Rose (2001) offers a neat summary of the castration complex", which is of course related to Dr. Freud. She writes:

In the castration complex, the father asserts that the mother is "his" and the threat that forces the boy to give up his closeness to his mother... is that he sees his mother as not having a penis.... when the boy sees his mother's genitalia, he sees them not simply as different from his, but as lacking.... The boy-child must already be seeing through a visuality that asserts that the masculine position is to look, the feminine is to be looked at, and that the feminine is to be seen as lacking (Rose 2001: pp. 107-108).

Rose continues, describing how this model, which revolves around the argument that we appear to live in a "world ordered by sexual imbalance" intrinsically informs Mulvey's approach to visuality. Accordingly, pleasure in looking has been split between the male as being active and the female as being passive, which led Mulvey to further claim that women have been represented in cinema via patriarchal terms: i.e. not on their own terms.

Fetishistic Scopophilia
Mulvey's concept of fetishistic scopophilia revolves around the idea that "the female figure is represented simply as a beautiful object of display" in mainstream Hollywood cinema. As such, fetishistic scopophilia relates to how women have been represented as passive or powerless objects in mainstream film. Gillian Rose (2001, 111) describes how for Mulvey this is a "mode of representation" that is specifically directed at or intended for both the male hero of the film and the male spectator in the audience. This ensures that men do not suffer castration, and that they maintain their active status, while continuing to derive pleasure from the film's text....

Mazer (1998) offers an interesting discussion revolving around women's participation in the wrestling carnival as wrestlers. She argues that "A woman must perform her role in a way that parallels or opposes the masculine ideal while conforming to the dominant culture's idea of femininity". She continues,: What changes when women enter the squared circle is the relationship of the performer to the audience, as framed by the narratives provided by male announcers and cameramen, and by the habit, inculcated in the culture at large, of looking at women's performances as pornographic display.... the spectacle of women wrestling may be seen to imitate male-generated pornographic images of pseudo lesbian lovemaking. In this context, even the simplest hold is transformed. The basic "cover" in which one wrestler pins another... may be seen within the frame of dominance and submission when performed by men. When performed by women it becomes the means by which the women is "opened" for inspection for an extended, counted period of time (Mazer 1998, pp. 135; 144-145).

References / Suggested Readings (these readings offer theoretical perspectives)

Debord, Guy, 1999. "Separation Perfected", in Evans and Hall (eds.), Visual Culture: the reader. London: Sage Publications, pp. 95-98.
Fiske, John, 1989. "Rock 'N' Wrestling", in Undestanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, pp. 83-90.
Mazer, Sharon, 1998. Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Mulvey, Laura, 1999. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", in Evans and Hall (eds.), Visual Culture: the reader. London: Sage Publications, pp. 381-389.
Rose, Gillian, 2001. Visual Methodologies, (Chapter 5). London: Sage Publications.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, 1998. "Narrativizing Visual Culture. Towards a polycentric aesthetics", in Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 27-49.

| Faculty of Arts | University of Auckland | Sociology | Last updated: 12 March 2002


	SOCIOLOGY 331