Killing the business: affect, work, and kayfabe in professional wrestling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".