Seminars (392-0-21)

Topic

Lucha Libre: Bodies, Borders, & Belonging

Instructors

Miguel Alejandro Chavez
Miguel Chavez is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. His research broadly focuses on culture, labor, gender, masculinity, and migration. Drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and physical training alongside luchadoras/es in Mexico City, his dissertation explores how competing understandings of Mexicanidad, whiteness, and gringo-ness emerge and are contested both inside and outside the wrestling ring as local and global audiences collide.

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall G31: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

Lucha libre (Mexican professional wrestling) operates as a hybrid of physical sport and political theater, thriving on the reciprocal relationship between performers and audiences. Understanding the evolving social, cultural, and political dynamics unfolding outside the ring is therefore essential to making sense of the performances taking place inside it.

This course uses lucha libre as an empirical site to provide students with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of core sociological concepts and debates across cultural sociology, global and transnational sociology, and the sociology of gender and sexualities. Through this lens, we will explore how luchadoras/es' bodies are constructed and commodified, how the meanings attached to these bodies are negotiated and contested across borders, and how communities mobilize around this spectacle to create alternative spaces of belonging when they are pushed to the margins of the arenas they once called home.

Students will have the opportunity to apply the analytical and theoretical skills developed throughout the course to a cultural object of their choosing, examining how its meanings, practices, and representations are transformed as it moves across class, national, and/or racial boundaries.

Class Materials (Required)

All materials for this course will be made available on Canvas - no purchase necessary.

Class Attributes

Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipl