“It’s Still Real to Me”: Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neo-Liberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".