Academic article on WWE

[Ross]

Abstract:

 

This article argues that the ideological mechanisms and norms used to render the War on Terror both familiar and seemingly inevitable to a wide public have long been present in popular American culture in the form of professional wrestling. The professional wrestling performances of American company WWE attract an enormous global audience of committed followers. This article considers pro-wrestling as an example of what Jon McKenzie calls a regime of normative force, identifying similarities in structure, imagery and rhetoric between a range of WWE performances and the US-led War on Terror. The article analyses the familiar codes of pro-wrestling performance in the contexts of propaganda and ideological reaffirmation. The analysis includes the considerations of performer/spectator relationship, the slippage between fiction and reality, the centrality and inevitability of unending combat and the construction of foreignness in opposition to a paradigmatic America. Through a range of examples of post-9/11 WWE performances, this article will draw out connections between the ongoing state of combat entertainment and the popular US preparedness for an ongoing state of war.

 

Download full article here Here.

[Dearly Devoted Dexter]

Sounds like a load of postmodernist twaddle to me

[twelve_grand]

Doesn't sound like postmodernism to me at all. How spectatorship and norms are consciously or unconsciously created in nation states (whether they are the ancient Rome, USA, UK, France, Syria or Iran) are central to understanding history.

 

And given the hilarious rubbish on WWE TV this week it's rather relevant.

[Mawhrin]

Back when the war drums were beating over Iraq the French Resistance (whose very existence as a heel tag team was a product of American jingoism) came out to celebrate Bastille Day, singing their anthem. The Dudleys interrupted, beat them up, and lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

 

I can't really see that as anything but a metaphor for the conquest of the US over France, and was truly offensive bullshit.

 

I'm sure WWE merely follows public feeling, but if the then US government had created a wrestling show purely to propagandise in favour of its foreign policy it would have looked a lot like the WWE.

 

Of course the dastardly frogs then went and added insult to injury by turning out to have been right about Iraq all along.