Participate and share: Interactive session 
Streaming Session
Recorded Session
Because professional wrestling has a checkered past, at best, it has often been relegated as a lesser form of entertainment and most always dismissed as pop ephemera, no more of lasting culture value than a one-hit wonder or a fad diet. However, upon closer inspection, professional wrestling has had a massive impact on learners’ media landscapes for generations now. Reasonably dating back into the 1970s and 1980s with Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan, and clearly present today via the mainstream success of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena, professional wrestling has impacted our relationships with heroism and villainy, reality and fiction, health and hubris.
From the design of ring gear and the degree to which it serves both form and function to the development of character through well chosen camera angles and expertly engineered music cues, professional wrestling is living breathing STEAM in ways no less important than traditional sports and far more reliant upon the arts. Participants will discover these truths in station activities, all while building out a wrestling persona that reflects their own inner truths and fictions.
Stage fighting, stunt work, and the art of filmmaking are readily discussed in filmmaking and stagecraft. However, those skills and lessons in physics and applied mechanics are just as present in professional wrestling and produced in real time in front of real audiences using real performers. What does it mean for these actions to be carried out by people and not CGI or AI beings? How do they accomplish these tasks without grave injury and with a regular commitment to weekly audiences?
We hope our participants harness some of our passion for this sports entertainment form and apply it to their learning spaces, so as to demonstrate to their learners that even these spandex clad characters owe their success to the intersections of science, technology, and art.
In a 1-hour interactive session, the presenters will follow this game plan:
- 5 min - Presenter Introductions/Share materials for the stations and outcomes.
- 10 minutes - Develop a wrestling persona. Participants will create their own wrestling personas that will be their avatars on this interactive experience.
- 30 minutes - Participants will circulate through a number of stations in the space, each designed to capture a key STEM concept in the context of professional wrestling culture. Stations may include, and are not limited to, the multimedia storytelling traditions of wrestling, digital storytelling through cutting promos on video, designing ring gear that follows both form and function as well as aesthetic purpose, using physics simulators, game simulators, and high speed photography to understand the extent to which wrestling is “fake” or real, and unpacking the troubling roots of professional wrestling culture and how the profession currently confronts those roots
- 15 minutes - Reflections, Q & A, and closing remarks
David Shoemaker and Kazeem Famuyide. (2023). The Masked Man Show. (Podcast)
Peter Rosenberg, Greg Hyde, Brian Dipperstein. (2023). Cheap Heat. (Podcast)
Ryan O’Dowd and Greg Whiteley. (2023). Wrestlers. Documentary Series. (Netflix)
John Zilcosky (2022) Wrestling: A Cultural History. Guggenheim Fellowship.
Beaty Barrett and Dana Levin. “What Love Got to Do with It?: A Qualitative Grounded Content Analysis of Romance Narratives in the PG Era of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Programming.” Sexuality and Culture 18(3) p. 560-591.
Broderick Chow. (2015). “A Professional Body.” Performance Research 20(5), p. 30-41.
Diane R. Collier. (2013). “Relocalizing Wrestler: Performing Texts Across Time and Space.” Language and Education: An International Journal 27(6), p. 481-497.
Thomas Hendricks. (1974). “Professional Wrestling as Moral Order.” Sociological Inquiry 44, p. 177-88.
Louis Kyriakoudes and Peter Coclanis. (1997). “The ‘Tennessee Test of Manhood’: Professional Wrestling and Southern Cultural Stereotypes.” Southern Cultures 3, p. 8-27.
Heather Levi. (2008). The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. Duke University Press.
Víctor Manuel López. (2010). “Mexican Wrestling: Its Compensatory Function in Relation to Cultural Trauma.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4, p. 33-45.
Kathleen Lowney. (2003). “Wrestling with Criticism: The World Wrestling Federation’s Ironic Campaign Against the Parents Television Council.” Symbolic Interaction 26, p. 427-46.
Brendan Maguire and John Wozniak. (1987). “Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in Professional Wrestling.” Social Science Journal 24, p. 261-73.
Sharon Mazer. (1998). Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle. University Press of Mississippi.
Patrice Oppliger. (2004). Wrestling and Hypermasculinity. McFarland & Co.
Marc Ouellette. (2016). “If you want to be the man, you’ve got to beat the man”: Masculinity and the Rise of Professional Wrestling in the 1990s. Dialogue 3(2), online.
Dalbir Sehmby. (2002). “Wrestling and Popular Culture.” Comparative Literature and Culture 4(1).
R. Tyson Smith. (2008). “Passion Work: The Joint Production of Emotional Labor in Professional Wrestling.” Social Psychology Quarterly 71(2), p. 157-176.
R. Tyson Smith. (2014). Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling. Duke University Press.
Danielle M. Soulliere. (2006). “Wrestling with Masculinity: Messages about Manhood in the WWE.” Sex Roles 55 (1-2), p. 1-11.
Danielle M. Soulliere and James A. Blair. (2006). “Muscle-Mania: The male body ideal in professional wrestling.” International Journal of Men’s Health, 5(3), p. 268-286.
Nicholas Sammond. (2005). Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. Duke University Press.
Return
Trips and Tours