Killing the business: affect, work, and kayfabe in professional wrestling
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Killing the Business: Affect, Work, and Kayfabe in Professional Wrestling approaches pro wrestling as a “liminal genre” of cultural practice that strategically makes use of and conventionalizes media, work, and sociocultural discourses and practices between events. It investigates how pro wrestling’s generic conventions mediate and pattern pro wrestling’s structures of feeling, and the formalized ways in which the industry operates as an affective economy that generates lived material and social effects (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2008; Chow, 2014). Since the 1880s, pro wrestling has operated as a “practice of staging contradictions” (Levi, 2008, p. 5). The most fundamental of these contradictions is the tension between pro-wrestling’s theatrical illusion of being a competitive sport and the reality that matches are predetermined or fixed. Matches appear as violent confrontations, but they are, in fact, performed through cooperative, embodied, and emotional work that aims to avoid bodily harm and to bring the audience to an expressive, affective climax (Chow, 2014; R. T. Smith, 2014). Across English-speaking pro-wrestling scenes, participants, including wrestlers, promoters, journalists, workers, and fans, refer to this illusion as “kayfabe” (Litherland, 2014; Schulze, 2014). Killing the Business turns to pro-wrestling during a time in which its local and transnational industries have been in flux. For decades, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) dominated the professional wrestling industry. However, beginning in 2016, the emergence of online media hosting platforms, social media, and online shopping saw the popularization of regional, independent wrestling, and transnational wrestling promotions (companies), such as New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and All Elite Wrestling (Castleberry et al., 2018; Reinhard & Olson, 2019a). International and “indie stars,” well-known wrestlers working outside of the major promotions, emerged. Likewise, independent wrestlers and promotions have engaged with social media and podcasts to build their personal brands, wrestling personas, and fanbases, which they leverage for income and bookings. As such, a pro-wrestling media industry that both resembles and contrasts the WWE has surged around it. This dissertation draws on feminist, queer, and pro wrestling scholarship and praxis to contribute new insights into the dynamics between affect, kayfabe, and work. It brings a new examination of the professional wrestling industry to cultural studies, media studies, and industry studies. Through ethnographic research and close analyses of pro wrestling media, performance, and cultural objects, it maps an affective economy networked between local independent wrestling promotions, including those in Montréal and Winnipeg, social media from individual wrestlers and participants, and the transnational company All Elite Wrestling. Killing the Business offers a unique and sustained inquiry into the “business” of American and Canadian pro-wrestling—its media industry, cultural scenes, aesthetic conventions, and meaning-making processes. Its chapters analyze the media texts surrounding an acclaim match, interview podcasts, material culture (i.e., gear, merchandise, photography), physical training, event booking, and backstage care. Across these analyses, it argues that pro wrestling is formed and fueled by the contingencies between affect, work, and kayfabe, and it takes an intersectional feminist approach to investigate how participants engage with these contingencies to shape the uneven material, cultural, and social conditions of pro-wrestling (Crenshaw, 1991). It investigates how “killing the business” describes not only a process of exposing the generic practices of pro wrestling, but engagement with and critiques of its conditions that seek to reconfigure what it means to be “killing it,” or doing well, in pro wrestling
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| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
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