Grappling with Gender: Exploring Masculinity and Gender in the Bodies, Performances, and Emotions of Scholastic Wrestlers

We contribute to the sociology of sport and gender literature with an ethnographic analysis of scholastic wrestling by observing the current climate of masculinity and gender. Our results suggest that it is necessary to understand men and sporting behavior within a broader framework of gender, not just masculinity, because the behavior of high school wrestlers fell along a gender continuum between an orthodox masculinity and femininity. Our exploration of the body, performance, and emotion practices of scholastic wrestlers gives credence to the current critiques of a hegemonic masculinity in men's sports. We show that gender is not dichotomous and that even in the highly masculinized sport of wrestling, feminine behavior by men is evident.