The Awesome Ordinary: Notes of Pro Wrestling

2019

Performance Research, 2014

Professional wrestling presents a simulacrum of grappling and combat sport practices with ancient roots, framed by serial narratives of rivalry, jealousy and deceit that present a simplistic moral universe. [{note}]1 Situated between sport and theatre, the audience has a large and active role in the spectacle, participating as if the results of the matches were not determined before the performers enter the ring. Professional wrestling exaggerates the imperative to perform --the sentiment that the 'show must go on.' After all, it is as if there were something at stake for the spectators, and their gestures of affirmation often encourage excessive work and labour on the parts of the wrestlers. Fans cheer when wrestlers bleed. Risky leaps are rewarded with admiring chants. Throughout, the wrestlers labour through a performance of pain, which is frequently made apparent in their bruised, bloody, and broken bodies. These displays of performance labour frequently move beyond the theatrical. If an actor playing Hamlet stabs an actor playing Laertes in such a way as to actually draw blood, there is significant cause for concern. In pro-wrestling, a similar situation is met with cheers as it attests to the authentic labour of the performance. The three examples discussed in this article --an in-ring death, an extreme style of wrestling, and a stunt gone too far --demonstrate theatrical affirmation while troubling the ways in which audiences directly consume and affirm or encourage the labour of the performer. The cheers of the crowd, however, are only part of an economy of performance that includes affirmation in the form of remuneration. Most wrestlers work for a wrestling promoter or a corporation that produces wrestling events. Some wrestlers work on a per match basis, while others might be contracted to perform for longer periods of time. Marx reminds us of the relation between performer and entrepreneur: A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. (Marx 1864, emphasis added)

2011

This dissertation posits a new model for understanding media audiences, bringing the scholarship of game studies to the critical analysis of audience practices. The concept of play proves beneficial for understanding the complex processes of media audiences, as they are able to traverse dichotomous categories when engaging media content. The genre of professional wrestling proves a perfect case study for examining these playful audience practices, and this study is an ethnographic account of the practices of wrestling fans. Focusing on the behaviors of fans at live wrestling events, in online contexts, and in the subcultural setting of a card game entitled Champions of the Galaxy, this study demonstrates the necessity of the concept of play for understanding what media audiences do when they engage media content. These practices, however, are always negotiated by the hegemonic power of the rules that structure how audiences are encouraged to engage content, resulting in ideological constraints on the possibilities play offers.

Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

2021

All art is quite useless," declares Oscar Wilde at the end of the audacious preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and this essay is no exception (Dorian 1). Ideally, it will be mutually transformative, as Walter Pater believed the relationship between art and critic should be. The writings of aestheticism, especially Wilde's "Decay of Lying" and Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance, illuminate certain truths about professional wrestling, and vice versa.

2018

This special edition of the Popular Culture Studies Journal, overseen by Norma Jones, presents the range of work for professional wrestling studies as well as the Professional Wrestling Studies Association (https://prowrestlingstudies.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/special-edition-for-pcsj-on-pro-wrestling).

Emerging from a legitimate contest regulated by a set of rules, professional wrestling is today a fictional product, where no actual competition takes place. Those same rules serve as a setting for a particular kind of narration: the kayfabe, the fictional framework for all professional wrestling’s narrative, a fictional world with the characteristic of having a 1:1 ratio between real time and fictional time. Professional wrestling and videogames deal in different contexts with the same elements: rules and fiction (Juul 2005) [13]. By combining aspects of narrative theory and game studies research, this paper will analyze the narrative of professional wrestling utilizing the tools commonly used or specifically developed for videogames. An understanding of professional wrestling elements is necessary to explain and criticize the different approaches that videogame designer have used when creating wrestling videogames, a popular sub-genre that present specific peculiarities. The first chapter will provide a background to the history and the evolution of professional wrestling tracing the transformation from wrestling as a legitimate contest to a constructed media spectacle. The on-going constructed nature of contemporary wrestling will be addressed using Chatman’s concept of narrative. We will then use the theory of scripted narrative and alterbiography (Calleja 2009) [4] to explain how the pre-designed elements in a staged match are only partially scripted. This will be the ground for three subsequent passages, each one enlarging the view on the object of study: what happens in the ring, what happens just outside of the ring, and what happens in the fictional world of professional wrestling. By considering the transmediality (Jenkins 2003, 2004) [11, 12] of professional wrestling, we will analyze those conclusions and see how they are used by professional wrestling videogames: the territory where real rules have to be fleshed out in order to simulate the “fake rules” of professional wrestling. The paper concludes that theoretical frameworks developed within game studies have produced useful tools that can be deployed in different contexts, in this case to understand the constructed story that so deeply informs the agonistic (Caillois, 1962) [5] aspects of professional wrestling. The concept of scripted narrative and alterbiography clarifies how the narrative is enacted in and outside of the ring, integrating previous studies about wrestler fan behaviour (Ford 2007) [8], and claryfing the role of the wrestler as both a storyteller and an actor. By considering wrestling as a serialized fictional product, it is possible to analyze the kayfabe as a unique narrative frame, capable of keeping narrative coherence operating with a 1:1 ratio between real time and fictional time. The concept of transmediality, also discussed in game studies, proves to be deeply affected by the kayfabe. Wrestling has strong transmedial narrative elements: it is sufficient to feature few elements of the wrestling enviroment to project the contents of the kayfabe. With that said, making a game out of the mixture of dramatization, physical performance, and symbolical meaning of professional wrestling is no easy task. A theoretical framework can be useful to approach design issues: wrestling fictional elements appears in videogames thanks to its deep rooted transmediality, but the subtleties of professional wrestling’s narrative are still understated in wrestling videogames.

This paper presents a case of jointly produced passion work. Passion work is emotional labor designed to elicit a strong response from subjects through an impression of extreme states such as pain, agony, or suffering. Based on an ethnographic investigation of professional wrestling participants, this study analyzes the backstage emotion teamwork that takes place within the self and with other performers. The study traces how performers do this physical labor and the social consequences of such work. The findings demonstrate that a) social rewards are intrinsic to performances of passion work, b) jointly produced passion work allows for the sort of breadth that is difficult to achieve in solo emotional work, and c) emotional labor shapes identity in recreational performances of the body.

2018

Chapter 1. Literature Review (Part 1) A History of Professional Wrestling and Wrestling Academia Chapter 2. Literature Review (Part 2) Stars, Celebrities and Audiences Chapter 3. Methodology Chapter 4. Results Overview Chapter 5. The Wrestling Industry and Star System Chapter 6. Inauthenticity versus Authenticity The Multiple Modes of 'Authenticity' in Professional Wrestling Chapter 7. Memories, Nostalgia and Identities in Audience Responses to Wrestling Stars Conclusion Appendix Bibliography The 1990s McMahon then shifted attention from the national to the international market. In the early 1990s, he took advantage of the new Sky satellite system in the UK to compete with British wrestling. 1 Under Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher and her free market policies, the landscape of British television shifted from a public service to a market driven industry. The result of this, was BskyB emerging as the major provider of satellite services in the UK in the 1990s to challenge the traditional national services of the BBC and ITV (Hilmes, p.59). McMahon took advantage of these changes to undercut the British Joint Promotions, who had recently lost their slot on ITV, by offering Sky recorded content at a lower price than the British organisation could offer for new content (Litherland, 2012, p.588). The higher production values and faster paced action of the high-profit entertainment company also made the British product look stale and outdated. Complacent and unready for competition, Joint Promotions was overwhelmed and WWE came to dominate wrestling for British audiences (Litherland, 2012). International success came at an opportune moment, as the early 1990s was a difficult time for WWE in the American market. In 1993, WWE was hit by scandal, including allegations of sexual harassment, a negative media backlash to its portrayal of Iraq during the Gulf War, and McMahon facing trial for distributing illegal steroids to his wrestlers. Despite being acquitted, the negative publicity and lack of creative attention given to his product led to a significant slump in audience numbers and profit. The door was open for his competitors to take advantage. By the end of the 1980s, the rights to Georgia Championship wrestling, which had been renamed World Championship Wrestling (WCW), had been acquired from McMahon by the 1 The exhibition history of the WWE within Britain is of particular significance to this project with the majority of my research respondents coming from the UK.

Sport in History, 2001

One of the formerly major spectator sports which has been relatively and surprisingly neglected in British sports historiography is wrestling, a sport with many varieties. These include its 'all-in' dramatic entertainment form, with its good guy 'faces' such as Danny 'Boy' Collins or Billy Two Rivers, and 'heel' baddies like Mick McManus or Hulk Hogan, found in spectator contexts from British city halls to the more mediated and Americanised events regularly broadcast on both satellite and terrestrial television. They also include the freestyle and Graeco-Roman styles of those more amateur British clubs aiming at Olympic representation, and the exotic subtleties of regional variations. These range from 'traditional' Cornish wrestling to ethnic varieties such as Sikh and Indian wrestling in the Midlands or Turkish wrestling in London. Globally there is huge interest in wrestling, especially in the USA where it is a major commercial entertainment form, attracting larger TV audiences than professional American football.