The Making of a Desirable Body: Gendered Labor and Competing Consumer Desires in Lucha Libre

• In Event: Embodied Labor and Laboring Bodies (Co-sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Abstract

This project begins with a deceptively simple question: What does it take to be seen as desirable? In the transnational world of lucha libre (Mexican professional wrestling), the answer often lies in a body’s ability not only to endure grueling physical labor on a nightly basis, but also to reflect the fantasies audiences pay to see. Wrestlers are expected to embody exaggerated ideals of strength, sex appeal, national identity, and flamboyant spectacle. Yet these expectations do not exist in a vacuum; they emerge through historically gendered forms of labor and are continually reshaped by the demands of an increasingly globalized industry, where audiences, performers, and corporate decision-makers converge to define what makes a wrestler’s body desirable and marketable.

Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork at 62 professional wrestling and lucha libre events in Chicago and Mexico City, I argue that wrestlers’ bodies are not individual achievements but are collectively produced through a dense network of technologies, actors, and lay expertise. From performance-enhancing drugs, testosterone, and painkillers to elaborate costumes, whispered locker-room advice, and tacit knowledge, wrestlers’ bodies are continually reworked to meet the demands of those who consume them.

This labor is intimately gendered and embodied—mirroring dynamics found among boxers (Wacquant 1995), sex workers (Hoang 2014), models (Mears 2014), and beauty pageant contestants (Balogun 2020), all of whom must continually remake their bodies to meet shifting expectations of value and desire.

To analyze these processes, I extend Hoang’s (2014) concept of technologies of embodiment to examine the chemical, cosmetic, and aesthetic tools wrestlers use to modify their bodies and recalibrate their gender performances. In doing so, I show how wrestlers’ bodies become sites where gendered labor, global entertainment markets, and local cultural scripts intersect, revealing the uneven, ongoing forms of embodied labor required to meet the wrestling industry’s demands.

Author

• Miguel Chavez, Northwestern University