The Mad King: violence and vulnerability in professional wrestling

Abstract This article explores the articulation of masculinity in professional wrestling, focusing on how violence can be used to forward alternative performances to hegemonic masculinity. Many modern professional wrestlers are more frequently and openly breaking with traditional masculinity in not just their in-ring/on-screen performances, but also in mediums that blur the lines of the fiction. I detail how one performer, Eddie Kingston, articulates masculinity alongside his own real-life struggles with and the importance of mental health, vulnerability, and violence. In doing so, I contend Kingston performs what I call a nascent masculinity, an emergent reconfiguration or articulation of masculinity that positions key characteristics of traditional hegemonic masculinity in such a way that at least potentially produces something non-hegemonic, and non-toxic. Crucially, such examples reflect the complex relationship between violence and meaning.