With everything "going on" right now, you might need a little bit of new wrestling scholarship. If so then I got you covered. My new article 'Queer Music-Hall Sport: All-In Wrestling and Modernist Fakery' has just been published my Modernism/modernity. I am still quite amazed that this great journal agreed to publish this article at all! It is the first time I have tried to uncover resonances between the disparate bits of my research. At first it didn't seem that wrestling and modernism had that much to say to each other. Hopefully this article begins to prove this assumption incorrect. It connects the 1930s' history of British professional wrestling to broader modernist concerns about fakery, pretence and lies. There are some fun stories in there, as well as some theoretical stuff, and, best of all, I managed to sneak mentions of Jerry 'The King' Lawler v Andy Kaufmann (1982) and the Parents' Television Council's law 2001 lawsuit against the WWE into the footnotes of the world's leading modernist journal!
Currently you can access the article for free through the journal's own website here. But if a paywall ever reappears then you can find a green-access version at Loughborough University's repository here. The article is published with huge thanks to everyone at Modernism/modernity, Andy Frayn (who managed to solve my framing problem for me), Ben Litherland (who kindly read the article and offered lots of helpful suggestions) and everyone at Wrestling Resurgence for inspiring me to write it in the first place.
Currently you can access the article for free through the journal's own website here. But if a paywall ever reappears then you can find a green-access version at Loughborough University's repository here. The article is published with huge thanks to everyone at Modernism/modernity, Andy Frayn (who managed to solve my framing problem for me), Ben Litherland (who kindly read the article and offered lots of helpful suggestions) and everyone at Wrestling Resurgence for inspiring me to write it in the first place.