professional wrestling, Professional Wrestling Studies Association, Page 3

Defining Convergent Wrestling

January 31, 2020May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c

Professional wrestling has been criticized for its emphasis on the fiction of its entertainment rather than the reality of its sport. My partner, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me), and I argue that professional wrestling functions as a convergent media product, representing a vital text for examining the media landscape of the 21st century.

The true nature of professional wrestling is in how it combines fiction with reality; it exists at the intersection of different identities, realities and conventions, which can seem oppositional to one another. When examined through the convergence of different identities, realities, and conventions, the true dialectical nature of professional wrestling emerges. Professional wrestling succeeds because of its ability to converge these different factors into a coherent post-modern and polysemic text with which an international polyvalent audience can identify and engage. This post will deconstruct this nature of professional wrestling by considering the various factors that are converging to construct the texts, practices and experiences of sports entertainment.

Smarks and Convergent Wrestling

January 31, 2020May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c

As part of the project on understanding professional wrestling through the theoretical lens of convergence (i.e. convergent wrestling), I recently wrote out an explanation for how Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I see this concept of convergence being able to describe various aspects of professional wrestling.

Now, being that we are academics, one way we advance our scholarship and our knowledge is by attending and presenting at academic conferences. In order to test out this idea of “convergent wrestling,” we organized two panels that would bring together different researchers whose work on professional wrestling could be considered as using this theoretical lens. We presented the first such panel at the 2015 Central States Communication Association conference. At this panel, I presented this argument for seeing professional wrestling as an example of various convergences, as presented earlier on this blog. Along with my introduction to the idea, several researchers presented their analyses of the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), its fans, and its business practices. With their permission, here are these presentations.

The Co-Construction of Kayfabe

January 31, 2020May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c

This blog post expands on the ideas of the co-construction of kayfabe, an idea I presented at the Popular Culture Association 2016 conference in Seattle. For this post, I reflect on a live wrestling event I attended in an attempt to define what my partner, Christopher Olson, and I mean by “convergent wrestling.”

The entire presentation can be heard on Soundcloud, but I will sum up the idea here to address a recent experience with a live wrestling event: AAW‘s “Take No Prisoners” on May 6th, 2016.

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The Communities of AAW

January 31, 2020May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c

It takes a community to build a wrestling promotion.

We have been going to AAW shows now for over a year. We have been to see them in the various venues they use in Chicago — Logan Square Auditorium, 115 Bourbon Street, the Berwyn Eagles Club, and Joe’s Live at Rosemont. We have watched some video clips of matches that go back throughout the 13 year history of the promotion.

What amazes me is how often I see the same faces across these different venues and spanning that stretch of time.

As part of my ongoing series reflecting on my time with professional wrestling, seeing the loyalty and dedication of some AAW fans got me thinking about the role of community in this promotion. With any fandom, community is immensely important. One of the reasons people self-identify as fans is because they want to bond with like-minded individuals over the passions that they have. Seeing your passion reflected back by another helps to validate your passion and worldview. And knowing that you share the same passion helps you to geek out or squee (pick your term) over just how worthy that this is to geek out or squee over.

The Fourth Wall and Professional Wrestling

January 31, 2020May 19, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c

In this brief essay, I want to share an idea I have had about how the concept of audience interaction helps to define sports entertainment as existing at the intersection of sports and entertainment. Audience interaction with content (what I have written about here as content interactivity) is the idea that the audience member (either individually or as an aggregate) can in some way engage with the text to the extent that they can influence the progression of the text’s content.

A video game like The Legend of Zelda, for example, responds to the individual’s decisions and actions to determine how the game unfolds for the player. A call-in contest reality show like American Idol responds to the aggregate of the masses voting for who succeeds and who doesn’t. If we look at professional wrestling from this perspective of audience interactivity, then I think we can notice something happening that helps define what it is while also demonstrating a convergence of identities as the lines between audience and producer blur.