Relocalizing wrestler: performing texts across time and space

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the textmaking potentials of the popular cultural resources of professional wrestling, including its modes of textual expression, as performed by Kyle, a boy in the middle years of elementary school. Kyle remixed wrestling, and its performative affordances, style and textmaking potentials across time and space. Using a spiral as metaphor, I explore how practices, texts and identities travel across particular moments by tracing the trajectory of a textual resource in new texts that Kyle made. I focus on how hybrid textmaking practices can be viewed as productive, creative and playful through Pennycook's concept of relocalization, which recognizes the roles of time and place in hybrid forms. This examination of textmaking and popular culture points to transformative possibilities in educational practice.

Keywords:

• text
• literacy practices
• ethnography
• identity
• literacy
• multimodality

Notes

¹This paper focuses on professional wrestling of the type promoted by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. and uses the terms wrestling and professional wrestling interchangeably.

²Pennycook (2007) first wrote about this concept of relocalization as recontextualization, and builds upon Bernstein's (1996) explanation of how official pedagogic discourses are modified and redistributed and on van Leeuwen's (2008) description of how language practices are social practices that are recontextualized in other social practices. Pennycook, also focused on language, focuses on locality, rather than context, and argues that that repetition is a form of relocalization and can produce difference, as well as sameness.

³PlayStation 2 is an older, less expensive version to the current alternatives such as X-Box or PlayStation 3. Kyle plays this game on a small television set in his bedroom, where he cannot watch cable television but only play the games, and where he stores his small collection of PS2 games.