Vol. 39 No. 4 (2024) Articles
By Gregory Hollin
In this article, I explore attempts to organize a precarious workforce in a setting that is always-already post-truth: professional wrestling. I focus in particular on a nascent, bottom-up unionization effort in the UK that foregrounds the rights of wrestlers who perform for low wages, in unsafe environments, and in the absence of both the state and traditional trade unions. I show that while many wrestlers agree with this movement’s diagnosis of problematic working conditions, there is also widespread skepticism about activists’ motivations, with many wrestlers suggesting that the organization may be telling a self-interested story about work, rather than engaging in a form of work. I argue that wrestlers’ permanent questioning emerges at the intersection of the self-appreciating, entrepreneurial subject and the post-truth, zany situation and conclude that wrestling affords insight into labor organization under employment conditions emblematic of a contemporary post-truth neoliberalism.
activism; carnivalesque; neoliberalism; post-truth; precarity; professional wrestling; trade unions; United Kingdom
Copyright (c) 2024 Gregory Hollin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
