Full Project Description:

Kayfabe as Method develops professional wrestling as a theoretical and methodological resource for studying contemporary religion, politics, and digital media. Professional wrestling offers an unusually rich vocabulary for understanding worlds in which performance is openly constructed, audiences possess uneven forms of knowledge, and emotional investment persists alongside awareness of staging.

Kayfabe refers to the shared maintenance of wrestling’s performed reality: the conventions through which characters, rivalries, conflicts, and outcomes are treated as meaningful within the world of the spectacle. Its force depends on more than a performer successfully deceiving an audience. Wrestlers, promoters, commentators, media producers, and spectators participate together in sustaining a world whose constructed character may be widely understood without becoming emotionally or culturally insignificant.

The project draws particular attention to the audience categories of the mark, smart, and smark. A mark is conventionally understood as a spectator who becomes immersed in the performance and responds to its characters and conflicts within the terms of the story. A smart recognizes the backstage labor, conventions, and institutional structures through which the spectacle is produced. A smark—or “smart mark”—possesses this knowledge while remaining deeply invested in the performance, often evaluating booking decisions, character development, authenticity, and the relationship between a performer’s public persona and perceived backstage self.

These terms are historically situated, unstable, and frequently used as insults within wrestling culture. Kayfabe as Method therefore approaches them as flexible interpretive positions rather than fixed kinds of people. The same audience member may act as a mark in one moment, a smart in another, and a smark in another. People may become absorbed in a narrative, step outside it to critique its production, and then return to emotional participation without experiencing those positions as contradictory.

This framework complicates the tendency to organize audiences through simple divisions between belief and disbelief, sincerity and irony, knowledge and manipulation, or authenticity and performance. Digital audiences frequently recognize that an influencer’s home, testimony, political persona, or spiritual revelation has been carefully framed for public consumption. That recognition does not necessarily weaken the content’s appeal. Insider awareness may create new forms of intimacy, expertise, pleasure, suspicion, and attachment.

The project applies this framework to religious influencers, digital TradWife culture, conservative political spectacles, online spiritual communities, conversion testimonies, and other mediated worlds in which authenticity is continuously performed and evaluated. Creators may disclose parts of the production process, respond to accusations of inauthenticity, deliberately provoke skeptical audiences, or incorporate criticism into their public personas. Followers, critics, fans, and hate-watchers become participants through comments, reaction videos, memes, reposts, duets, investigative threads, and repeated interpretation.

Professional wrestling is especially useful here because it shows how visibility of construction can become part of the attraction. Audiences may know that a persona is shaped for the camera while continuing to care about what it expresses. They may debate whether a creator is “really like that,” whether a conversion is sincere, whether outrage is manufactured, or whether a political performance has crossed from spectacle into conviction. These debates rarely settle the question of authenticity. They become one of the primary ways authenticity is produced.

Kayfabe as Method also reorients how scholars approach religious belief. Asking whether a participant “really believes” can flatten the shifting ways people inhabit religious worlds. Individuals may participate through trust, experimentation, aspiration, aesthetic attraction, communal loyalty, strategic self-presentation, partial doubt, or emotional identification. The language of marks, smarts, and smarks offers a way to examine these positions without requiring belief to appear as a stable interior state.

The project therefore treats audiences as active collaborators in the production of religious and political meaning. Audiences recognize genres, anticipate familiar narratives, reward certain performances, expose inconsistencies, and teach one another how content should be interpreted. Even opposition can strengthen the circulation of a performance by providing attention, conflict, and new material for creators to absorb into the story.

Kayfabe also clarifies the relationship between performance and authenticity. Performance does not automatically reveal an identity to be false. Repeated gestures, visual styles, testimonies, rituals, and interactions can make a persona feel coherent and true. Authenticity emerges through the ongoing relationship among creator, audience, platform, and narrative rather than residing solely inside the person performing.

By bringing wrestling studies into conversation with religious studies, media studies, performance theory, and audience studies, Kayfabe as Method offers a vocabulary for analyzing the unstable boundary between knowing and feeling. It asks how people remain invested in worlds they understand to be mediated, how suspicion becomes a form of participation, and how performances become socially real through the collective labor of those who create, watch, critique, and circulate them.