#atomic elbow

Drew this after a baby Dva and I (mercy) got into a duel and she tried calling mech but I jumped down on her and fucking atomic elbowed her

Shit was funny - might post video of game play

Continue reading Chaotic and satirical fantasy adventure RPG game Sir Whoopass launches onto Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 today

Hey, y’all! FLUKE organizers Robert Newsome and Patrick Dean will do some readings from their zines and comics the night before FLUKE! 

Friday, April 10th at 6:30 p.m. we are stoked to announce a special Fluke Town Revue, which will be held in conjunction with the Fluke Mini-Comics and Zine Festival.  Location change to Flicker Theatre and Bar.  Robert Newsome and Patrick Dean are our readers. Emily Armond of Sea of Dogs is our musician.

Emily Armond is the brains and voice behind local folk band Sea of Dogs. She spends the rest of her time running, teaching the children, and sitting on the dogs and cats of Athens.

Robert Newsome is the editor of fanzine the Atomic Elbow and one of the co-organizers of Fluke.

Patrick Dean was born in Rome, Georgia, and relocated to Athens to attend the University of Georgia. His comics and illustrations appeared weekly in Athens’Flagpole Magazine for a decade and have been published in Legal Action Comics, Typhon,The Comic Eye, Vice Magazine, and The Oxford American Magazine. He lives with his wife, two kids, a cat, and a dog that acts like a cat.

This is an article I wrote for the Atomic Elbow in June 2013. It's a little outdated, but I wanted to post it anyway.

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Are We Not Men? We Are Divas

American Professional Wrestling, as a product of popular culture, inherently contains the same problems as the culture that spawns it. I’ve started and quit this article several times, because the gender inequality and misogyny is so widespread in wrestling (and all American culture) that it seems at times pointless and frustrating to try to write about it. Instead of launching into a long winded tirade about patriarchy, I’m limiting myself in this discussion to two quotes regarding professional wrestling, and analyzing them in terms of the current WWE Divas division.

I decided on the WWE for several reasons. First, it it is the largest promotion, so its depictions of women reach the largest audience. Second, it is also arguably the worst in terms of rampant misogyny.  In wrestling, and especially the WWE, the misogyny has become so normalized and institutionalized that it can go unnoticed by some viewers. Hegemony is the reason this patriarchal behavior continues, and it won’t stop until the behavior is no longer normalized. I highly doubt anyone at the WWE cares at all about how offensive its depictions of women are, but as intelligent, Atomic Elbow-reading viewers, you might care. Maybe by my essay, some viewers, who have been lulled into thinking things are okay now that bra and panties matches aren’t a thing, will notice that things are not okay, but instead still extremely problematic. Also, the Divas division is really boring right now, but it should not be, considering some of the talent and trainers they have. However, the tiny sphere they allow female wrestlers to operate in limits how interesting the characters can be.

When discussing Lex Luger’s entrance at Wrestlemania IX, Sharon Mazer says the following:

In professional wrestling’s mirrored funhouse, the only thing that is certain is that the “not-so-real” man is not a woman. The showgirls are presented to the live and pay-per-viewer in order to provide, literally, a mirror to the Narcissist. In the appearance of the showgirls, what Lex Luger is -- someone who, like a woman, develops and displays his body as an object for others to admire -- as well as what he is not -- a woman -- is made visible. (97)

Throughout her book, Mazer discusses the multitude of masculinities present in professional wrestling: men can be narcissistic, pretty, homoerotic, etc. as long as they have a counterpart to show that they are indeed masculine. In this instance, Luger embodies characteristics typically considered feminine: he spends time on his appearance, admires himself in mirrors, and is wearing lavender. The mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics present in Luger makes him a “not so real” man. The counterpart necessary to ensure that Luger is still interpreted as a male is the female showgirls. His body, while on display as women’s bodies always are (whether we like it or not), is obviously not a female body. Displaying showgirls, who are groomed to be idealized feminine bodies, showcases the bodily difference between the male wrestler and the showgirl.

This emphasis on physical difference is, according to Mazer, one of the ways professional wrestling can ensure that even “not so real” men can be men. As modern gender theory explains(1), gender is performative, and not based on biological sex. The multiple masculinities performed in the ring display the full spectrum of gender, from masculine to feminine and everything in between. However, to do so, the promoters rely on biological difference, referred to as biological sex, to counterbalance the “not so real” men who embody feminine characteristics. Because non-idealized male and female bodies are not that different, except for the sex organs which can’t be displayed on television, they have to rely on bodies where the physical traits associated with the female sex are emphasized: large breasts, long hair (2), and skinny waists(3). The Divas serve as these mirrors in the WWE, to allow the male characters to perform different types of masculinities.

Besides the obvious problems of exclusively presenting these idealized (and fairly unrealistic) female bodies, there also is a narrative problem with limiting the Divas to this body type. Roland Barthes discusses the importance of bodies in the storytelling of professional wrestling: the body is the first signal to the type of character a wrestler plays, and the way he will perform in the fight (6). One look at Brock Lesnar tells you he’s a monster heel, and he fights as such. If all the Divas have similar body types, then they all perform the same character, and fight in similar ways.

The sameness of the bodies problematizes the audience’s perception of the characters. The audience does not have cues to what kind of a character a Diva is. Instead, there is just a series of female bodied people with long hair and large breasts. Even the basic division between heel and face is not obvious. The story-lines and performances of the Divas is also very similar. They get in cat fights backstage, exchange petty insults, have secret admirers(4), call each other fat, and other stereotypical ideas of how women behave. This gender behavior is limited to only a certain stereotype, despite the many (offensive) stereotypes available. However, the WWE does not have a Women’s Division, which would allow for these other stereotypes to be presented. They only have a Divas’ division, and the character they present is simply the stereotype of how they believe the archetypal Diva(5) behaves.

Additionally, despite depending on and emphasizing their biological bodies, the Divas have been stripped of their womanhood. The WWE presents hyper-sexualized yet unsexed bodies. The Divas are objectified, as are all wrestlers, but the objectification extends beyond just being the object of the Gaze. The physical aspects of the Divas are discussed on commentary, such as which of the Bellas is “bigger,” yet the commentators cannot refer to them as women. They are, instead, not female bodied people, not Divas, and not heels or faces. They are, instead, the symbol of a specific part of the female anatomy, as their belt clearly depicts. Lacking the artisticness of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, this pink butterfly is a rendition of the external female genitalia. Also, with that in mind, the placement of the WWE logo on that belt is just … ugh.   

All the women wrestlers in the WWE are crammed into this mold of the Diva, and that character type is paraded before the audience as a counterbalance to the various form of masculinity presented, and to give viewers a bathroom break before main events. However, the WWE would benefit from expanding the roles allowed for women in several ways. For one, only two Divas, AJ and Kaitlyn(6), have any merchandise for sale on the website, and those just happen to be the only two with any kind of storylines. If more Divas had more storylines, the WWE would sell more merchandise. I don’t think they dislike money.

Additionally, the WWE has embraced other aspects of postmodernity, so integrating flexible gender roles for women would not be outlandish. Instead of one type of character wrestling very similar matches (when the WWE actually bothers to book them), several different types of characters with storylines and matches would add interest to this floundering division. Female characters who challenge gender roles generate actual heel heat (remember Chyna?). The audience viscerally hates the one female character who is not a Diva, “the Cougar” Vickie Guerrero, any time she interrupts someone speaking. The audience appears to react with extreme ambivalence to the Divas. I assume the WWE would prefer an audience reaction.  

In conclusion, despite the end of the bra and panties era, there are still problems in the treatment of female characters in the WWE. These problems may be more subtle, but that makes them even more dangerous, because they are easily normalized. The standardized bodies of Divas lead to standardized characters and matches, which makes the division uninteresting. Because of postmodern gender theory, the function of female bodies counterbalancing male bodies can still be upheld with fluid genders, because sex and gender are separate entities. All bodies in wrestling are objectified and idealized, as the nature of visual culture and performance necessitates, so even different female body types would still fulfill the function of counterbalancing objectified and idealized male bodies. If nothing else, a woman has to wear clothing on their upper body, meaning even a female body that looks very similar to an idealized male body would still be identifiable as female.

Notes:

1. In gender theory, “sex” is biologically male or female, based on the genitalia one was born with. “Gender” is a construction, based on performance of traits considered masculine or feminine. There are many more genders than simply male or female.

2. All the Divas having long hair really weirds me out.

3. To be fair, the WWE limits the types of male physical bodies they allow as well, but the male wrestlers are allowed to perform more types of masculinity than the female wrestlers are femininity.

4. The active desiring/passive being desired problem has been explored by many scholars, including Lacan. Here, the problem as I see it is again more imposed feminine characteristics: Divas are the object of desire and not an active desirer. When a Diva is an active participant in desire, as AJ is, she is slut-shamed to a ridiculous degree. In many ways, AJ is an outlier in the “Diva” archetype the WWE has created.

5. Somewhat similar to Jung’s Princess archetype, but more annoying.

6. Kaitlyn doesn’t even get a t-shirt, but instead there are two posters and cardboard standee. I don’t have the theory and argument developed for it yet, but I feel there’s a really big difference between a shirt, which one can actively wear and represent one’s fandom, versus a piece of paper one hangs in their room and looks at. The problem is an active/passive and public/private one, which upholds traditional masculine/feminine binaries.  

Bibliography:

Barthes, Roland.  “In the Ring.” Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Print.