The performance of physical transformation poses a methodological challenge for historians of 19th- and 20th-century physical culture: it is primarily the still image that evidences a dynamic, embodied practice. The archive of Stanley Rothwell (1904–1986) — British miner, artist’s model, bodybuilder, boxer, wrestler, writer, and physical educator — reveals the sculpted masculine “ideal” as a performance of becoming, in which the image is constantly trained, constructed, and rebuilt through repetition, allowing for the possibility of difference.

The physical practice of pro-wrestling is one of cooperation, improvisation, and care for the other. Against the precarious labor economy of wrestling, the cooperative nature of this unique performance form embodies a politics of friendship.