Playing dangerously: Reproducing and displacing heroic and entrepreneurial masculinity in Senegalese wrestling with punches

Abstract

During their training and daily life, làmb (Senegalese wrestling with punches) wrestlers usually embody forms of entrepreneurial and “heroic masculinity.” It is crucial for a wrestler to epitomize the “virtues” of these forms of masculinity in order to augment his popularity, and to be offered a fighting contract. Yet, during less intense training sessions, wrestlers were also less disciplined and enjoyed parodying heroic masculinity. Examining situations in which wrestlers played with masculine stereotypical values, I show how the gendered mythologies of wrestling were both reproduced and displaced. By paying more attention to moments in which playful experience in sporting contexts goes hand in hand with improvisation, experimentation, and openness to unintended consequences, it becomes possible to better grasp the open-ended formation of (gendered) subjectivities through sport. More generally, I argue that examining the articulation of disciplinary and playful bodily practices embedded in materiality can deepen our understanding of the making of subjectivities.