Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Portugal, Jose Alberto

Area of Concentration

Gender Studies, Spanish Language and Literature

Abstract

This exploration takes on Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre as a distinct form of wrestling expressed through its spectacle’s continuity of aesthetic, balletic maneuvers, and attached iconography. Beginning with an analysis of the melodrama and fiction on the creation of lucha libre, the study navigates through the development of lucha libre in connection to fictional expectations of melodrama, its ritual aspects both inside and outside of the ring, and its gendered components within the films created. Drawing on the works of Peter Brooks, Roland Barthes, Catherine Bell, and Heather Levi, I examine how certain aspects of the sport can be understood through oppressive narratives, as exemplified by the transformative ban of female wrestlers. I extend these concepts by analyzing the film Santo contra las mujeres vampiro, illustrating the social effects of the spectacle in a different form, highlighting the feminine role within the film. I focus on how the expansive reach of the sport touches audiences well outside of the arena. With television of the ‘50s dominated by the popularity of lucha libre, big screen adaptations were a natural, obvious transition by the 1960s and 1970s. With this shift, this thesis highlights how through fiction and ritualization, the spectacle evolves outside the both physical and metaphorical ring. Consequently, this blueprint enables the idea of the ‘ring’, and what it entails, to be somewhat overlooked, pushing both the protagonist and antagonist to evolve outside of their original roles and categories. Additionally, it shifts the original dynamics of the spectacle that foregrounds the displacement of the feminine role.

Download

Share

COinS