Alternate Wrestling Universe
Hopefully, this section will help any stray website viewers out there understand what this site is, and why we created it. The Alternate Wrestling Universe and storylines included in this site were designed, filmed, edited, and presented by the Western Kentucky University students who enrolled in "Professional Wrestling in U.S. Pop Culture" as an honors colloquium in the fall of 2014 (with special thanks to non-class member Blake Vanderpool for allowing us to make him into a professional wrestler "extra"). Under the direction of Sam Ford, we have studied cultural themes that emerge in wrestling, and I think we have all learned to appreciate the show a little more. Thank you, Sam, for such an amazing semester!
Also, for grading purposes, each section of content bears our names or initials to indicate who was a contributor.
Academic Analysis and Explanation
By Gary Gordon, with quotes from Melissa Smith, Marshall Metcalf, Mikey Richardson, and Katie Clark.
We came together at the end of our wrestling class to explore what we have learned this past semester about the history of U.S. professional wrestling by providing a group project. This web project demonstrates some key concepts that we have covered this semester.
The purpose of the Alternate Wrestling Universe (AWU) is to provide an alternative performance experience from our wrestlers to our fans everywhere. We offer a complete counterculture program as compared to McMahon’s WWE program, and as Laurence de Garis would put it, we have more spontaneous improvisation. We have no pure fantasy here, just structured reality!
We decided to create a wrestling company with performers who reflect certain characteristics based on a few of the professional wrestlers in the WWE. These characters, along with their wrestling abilities, represent Barthes,’ “spectacle of excess.” We offer a lampoon enactment of the culture wars, between the left and the right, as well as addressing the overt sexual stereotyping and diminution of women’s roles in wrestling through our characters.
We developed these characters to satirize the WWE which has been traditionally intransigent about its over-exaggeration of stereotyped performers — stereotypes on steroids, so to speak. As we saw throughout the semester, characters are portrayed and developed as boilerplate structured members of society in performances rivaling theater productions, and their plots or storylines are nurtured and unfold as classic Greek tragedies to modern day soap operas. These storylines help fuel the feuds which feed the predominantly historically working class public fans to seek justice, retribution and a sense of fairness within the wrestling matches, symbolically within the social order, which of course models reality.
One of our characters is Reginald Roebuck, a pretentious man, a conservative elitist who can buy anything and everything he wants. You know the kind, when a young kid inherits old money.
Another of our characters is a strong, dominant woman who hates men, and in the man’s world of wrestling, she has no place being there, let alone as a top contender. Historically, the portrayal of
women as wrestlers has been second class, with an overabundance portrayal of sexual subservient type roles dominated by men, as we have seen in numerous timelines from the WWE. Starhawk provides parody in addressing these stereotype issues.
Our third main character, presents our very own Trotskyist, The Militant, who is the voice of the Socialist Party in England. His meteoric rise in the AWU is due to his desire to kill the profit-obsessed monster that enslaves the underprivileged—our wrestling fans. It is The Militant who will remove the shackles of capitalism from his growing fan base. It should also be noted that throughout modern wrestling history, archetype foreign character wrestlers never needed a backstory, as the stereotype evil foreigner was backstory enough. However in keeping with those academics who believe that wrestling and politics parallel each other in the ebb and flow over time, we provide a backstory. That’s just another reason why AWU rules.
We think that the WWE needs to be more accurate and make readjustments in their vision and image of society, and we are here to prove it!