page_title: The World of Lucha Libre
section_title: Chapter 1: Staging Contradiction
hierarchical_section_title: The World of Lucha Libre / Synopsis / Chapter 1: Staging Contradiction
caption_attribution_description: Tlahuac, Ciudad de México
context_page_description: The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity is a book, published in 2008, by Heather Levi. The book is an account of lucha libre, a term used in Mexico for a form of professional wrestling.
context_section_description: Levi begins with an introductory chapter emphasizing lucha libre to be a practice of staging contradictions. In this section, Levi argues that lucha libre “occupies a space somewhere between sport, ritual, and theater and is thus capable of drawing its power from all of those genres.”  The chapter offers a simple view of lucha libre; two or more wrestlers enter a boxing ring to put on a fighting show that ends only when one of them is pinned down or surrenders.  Levi, however, expands lucha libre to be a “complex performance that integrates a range of ideas about agency, power, modernity, gender, and national culture.”
caption: live match
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