“Fighting for Recognition: Identity and the Performance of Violence,” is an ethnographic study of independent professional wrestling. Independent pro wrestling is a community-based production of violence and spectacle. Based on three years of participant-observation and interview data, the dissertation details the experience, meanings, and motivations of working-class men who train and perform in community-level independent wrestling, where remuneration is inconsequential. The dissertation tackles several tensions within the discipline—including, performativity and innate behavior, pain and pleasure, and the body/mind dualism—not as dichotomies, as often considered, but rather as productive dialectics that inform our general understanding of social behavior. The findings contribute to the literature on culture, gender, and identity in three primary ways. First, I analyze an embodied form of symbolic interactionism to explain why participants stake their identity on this fringe activity despite receiving repeated injuries, little-to-no pay, and limited respect outside their reference group. I show how participants develop interpretive strategies that recast their personal narratives as the passage from being a “nobody” to becoming a “somebody.” Second, I describe how wrestling participants do emotion work with their “opponents,” illuminating the social consequences of such emotional labor. I argue that this joint labor allows for the sort of emotional breadth that is difficult to achieve in solo emotional work and that the attraction to such a dangerous pursuit is due in part to the product generated by their labor. The study analyzes how physiological pain is related to the social processes governing perception, experience and meaning. Lastly, I draw on gender studies and cultural sociology to clarify collective pursuits of legitimation. Participants’ social unease prior to wrestling is contextualized and understood in relation to their masculine sense of self. The project clarifies the post-industrial context by showing the attractions for young, suburban working-class males to an “extreme,” often dangerous, activity.