Earlier this year I organized, ran, and presented at the inaugural WrestlePosium open online symposium for the Professional Wrestling Studies Association. My presentation concerned the work I have been doing looking at wrestling fans writing slash for the characters of Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. The entire presentation can viewed here. The other presentations from…
Tag: fan fiction
When the Rebel Heart Met the Blackheart: Slash in Professional Wrestling
NOTE: This post was originally posted on the Professional Wrestling Studies Association blog and can now be found at this link. I’ve been working on this project for awhile now, and this presentation from MPCA/ACA 2019 contains my preliminary results on slash fanfic that feature NXT wrestlers Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. This work began…
The Pop Culture Lens on Yojimbo (1961)
In the twenty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961). In this episode, the conversation focuses on the film’s position as a transnational and transcultural pop culture text that acts as a link in a…
This Jedi’s Reaction to The Force Awakens: An Autoethnography in Fractured Fandom
I didn’t go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens when it was released in theaters. I couldn’t bring myself to. And this is coming from someone who saw — willingly and enthusiastically — each of the prequels in midnight openings. I saw Phantom Menace numerous times in the theater — even while doing an internship…
The Pop Culture Lens: Episode on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Fandom
On a special episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss a subject that has been one we have debated numerous times in our private lives and has become one that I have been focusing on as a research project: fandom, is it good or bad? We begin the conversation with…
Pop Culture Lens Podcast: The X-Files
In the sixth episode of our ongoing podcast, The Pop Culture Lens, Christopher Olson and I discuss my favorite television series of all time, The X-Files. I was a huge, huge, huge fan of this series; I can still recall sitting there when the show premiered, on that magical Friday night back in 1993, with…
