Current PhD Students

Tom Dean

Thesis Title:

Work, Shoot; Shoot, Work: Confessional Storytelling and Performer Wellbeing in WWE’s Monopoly Era 2001–2019

Supervisors:

Dr Janine Bradbury & Dr Claire Westall

Description:

As a performance art and form of popular culture, pro-wrestling explores, and commodifies, the friction between reality (‘shoot’) and fiction (‘work’). In wrestling parlance, this friction is called ‘kayfabe’ – a term now employed by scholars to examine post-truth Trumpian politics, as well as the everyday workings of interpersonal relationships. My thesis returns kayfabe to its original field by re-emphasising its uniqueness as a dramaturgical structure. Examining the period when the WWE held a near-monopoly in the US pro-wrestling market, I outline how kayfabe distinctly shaped the commodification of wrestlers’ real-life trauma, damaging their wellbeing in the pursuit of profit. By reading these reality-based storylines of love, addiction and mental health within the confessional mode, I aim to place pro-wrestling alongside contemporary literary forms such as autofiction, and promote its influence in popular culture.

For the practice-based side of my doctorate, I am writing a fictitious biography of a female wrestler’s chaotic pursuit of stardom, told by her unfaithful partner as an act of penance. This mediation of the female experience through a male perspective plays with literary traditions seen in, for example, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana. To this end, and in keeping with the concept of kayfabe, I use male and female narrative voices to explore the tension between competition and complicity.

More generally, my research interests include: creative writing, pro-wrestling, sports fiction, reality TV, autofiction and related forms across literature and screen, and the commodification of trauma.

I hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. I am currently teaching on the module, ‘Approaches to Literature I: Writing Modernity.’