Professional Wrestling Studies Association
Studying the Past, Present, and Future of Professional Wrestling
By Claire Warden In 1957 Roland Barthes famously said, “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres”. In fact the histories of professional wrestling and theatre are deeply intertwined, from the music hall where wrestling pioneers such … Read more “Our Uncle Vanya”: Red Ladder’s production of ‘Glory” (April 2019)
We should perhaps reconfigure [nostalgia] in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search … Read more Nostalgia and the Wrestling Fan
One night while working on the Ciampa/Gargano slash project i.e. reading fanfic and luvin it), I realized how all these fanfics are not attempts to recode the Ciampa/Gargano (CG) NXT story (e.g. characters, plot points, facts) but to recode the emotions of the stories as those emotions play a role in how fans decode the stories. … Read more The Emotionality Behind Ciampa/Gargano: Part 1 Pre-Tag Team Titles
The story of Lanny Poffo, as told in the recent biography by Squared Circle Press, is a story of family. Poffo’s first wrestling opponent, in this biography, was his father. But the story starts earlier, with his father’s record for situps, recorded in a single-panel newspaper cartoon. Poffo also wrestled with his brother, Randy Savage. The … Read more Wrestlers in Comics: Leaping Lanny, the Genius
Squared Circle comics continues its wrestling biography series with a look at Bruno Sammartino. The story begins in Italy, and the bulk of the first issue of the series is set in Italy and then Pittsburgh. Taken together with the biography of Nicolai Volkoff, the first thing that this series of comic biographies teaches me … Read more Comic Biography of Bruno Sammartino
Research in comics studies has gone a great distance toward defining comics as a medium, not a genre. Within the American context, comics as a medium was, for decades, conflated with comics as a genre, typically the superhero genre. In some ways, the scholar of wrestling studies might see such conflation as similar to the … Read more Andre the Giant [Critical Reflections on a Graphic Novel, part one]
When I first got into professional wrestling — way back in 2014! — my first favorite wrestler was The Miz. I was watching WWE Main Event, which aired Wednesday nights on our Ion TV channel. This was before the WWE Network was launched, and before I had any access to higher level cable channels like … Read more Pro-Wrestling Slash
EDITOR’S NOTE: There is a spoiler here for NXT UK and is marked as such. This past Sunday night was WWE’s first ever all women’s pay-per-view called Evolution. While other promotions feature an all women roster (Shimmer and Shine most notably), this is the first time WWE has put all the focus on their women … Read more “Ladies All Across the World!”: An Evolution Review
by David Beard, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Duluth WizKids has announced that they have licensed WWE intellectual property for their tabletop games. WizKids, the leader in high-quality pre-painted miniatures and established board games, today announced a new multi-year licensing partnership with WWE, with plans to bring the organization’s iconic Superstars to the … Read more WWE and WizKids: An opportunity to rethink game theory
by David Beard, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, UM Duluth The history of women in wrestling was given a brief overview in Chris Kelly’s August 10th essay in The Washington Post “Lifestyle Section,” “The Women Wrestlers of WWE Have Created a Movement. Is it Built to Last?” But the history is partial, only reaching back as far … Read more Women’s Wrestling and the Erasure of History