On Saturday, August 01, 2015  I’ll present “Becoming Luchadores Exóticos: Ephemeral Evidence and the Joy of Intervening into the Present” at

Je me souviens – I Remember, ATHE 2015
July 30 – August 2, 2015
Montréal, Québec, Canada

Flexing Memory: Professional Wrestling’s Embodied History
August 1, 2015, 4:00:00 PM – 5:30:00 PM

SPONSORING FOCUS GROUP:
Performance Studies Focus Group

This panel explores professional wrestling as an embodied archive, in which contested ideas of race, gender, nation, and class are captured and (re)performed in a repertoire of tropes, characters, and scenarios.

Session Coordinator
Eero Laine, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

PARTICIPANTS:

Eero Laine, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Tapes and Legends: Replaying the Professional Wrestling Archive

Broderick Chow, Brunel University of London
Muscle Memory: Re-enacting the Strongman in Pro Wrestling and fin-de-siecle Physical Culture

Nina Hoechtl, National Autonomous University of Mexico
Becoming Luchadores Exóticos: Ephemeral Evidence and the Joy of Intervening into the Present

This paper focuses on luchadores exóticos (roughly, queer wrestlers) who have been part of lucha libre (Wrestling in Mexico) since the 1940s. They have challenged a space that is generally considered to be something that is centrally about masculinity – an ovation to machismo. Accompanying my presentation is a slideshow – an archive – of images of exóticos put together by myself and drawn primarily from lucha libre magazines. This visual assembling of the appearances, outfits, acts, poses and gestures that compose the exóticos’ performances helps to ask questions around the images’ potential to outline some of the issues in examining lucha libre as a form that is embodied, oral, visual and most of all ephemeral, and last, if not most importantly, to emphasize this arena as a space where alternate modes of textuality and narrativity might emerge.