Unicorns, rainbows, and unicorn magic: storying new knowledge of black masculinities within the WWE
This paper examines the story arc of a trio of Black male wrestlers called the New Day within the World Wrestling Entertainment industry (WWE) who go from militant nationalists, stereotypical singing/dancing preachers, and finally to self-described unicorns bringing magic back to the WWE. Wrestling is used to explore anti-Blackness, Black masculinity, and conceptions of the human/humanity. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick's Black methodological intervention of textual accumulation to interrogate issues of race, masculinity, and sexuality within their performances, I argue the group's unique position as wrestlers allows us to conceptualize the trio as “writers” of fiction; a position that when read through Kevin Young's concept of storying provides insight into a Black creative practice engaging in alternative worldmaking and rewriting understandings of the human outside of a Western European framework. I advocate that the stories of the New Day not only provide glimpses into new genres of being human, but also forms of Black manhood(s) outside of a patriarchal framework.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
International Review for the Sociology of SportPublisher
SageVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Acceptance date
2023-12-01Publication date
2024-01-09Copyright date
2024ISSN
1012-6902eISSN
1461-7218Publisher version
Language
- en