Description
"Want to understand how swing voters watch the news? Watch with the volume turned off for a while and imagine what the audience at WrestleMania will think."
-Dominic Cummings (Substack, 21 Oct 2021)
Professional wrestling is a structurally unique genre of entertainment. No other form of fiction involves a live audience as so active a participant in the construction of its internal narrative. From week-to-week broadcasts, character arcs and entire storylines are dialogically constructed by performers and audience, who frequently respond to in-ring developments in ways that diverge from the intentions of those putting on the show.
The result is a crowd-sourced narrative universe characterised by a constantly shifting antagonistic frontier between fan-favourite ‘babyfaces’ and villainous ‘heels’ which recalls both the friend/enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt and some post-structural accounts of hegemony theory (cf. Laclau & Mouffe 1985). The resemblances to political contestation are many, and oft-remarked upon. Serial hegemonist and former Chief Adviser to the UK Prime Minister Dominic Cummings has employed the wrestling concept of ‘kayfabe’ as an analogy for the performative antagonism propagated by two-party electoral systems.
In this paper I draw together the numerous structural resemblances between wrestling and politics which have been frequently noted but never developed in the field of International Relations. I conclude that wrestling as a form of dialogic narrative fiction provides a useful – decidedly populistic – epistemological lens through which to view the construction of hegemony by political actors and the ongoing dialogue with publics it requires.
