Queering Barthes - Science Fiction and the WWE

This essay was originally submitted as part of graded coursework at the London School of Economics on 15 May 2025 for which I received a distinction grade. It is one of the weirdest, most fulfilling things I’ve ever written.

Introduction: Queering and Cripping Wrestling Mythologies

The World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is a global sports entertainment programme which features live, fictionalised performances of professional wrestling storylines adapted to audience interests to generate viewership (Barrett & Levin, 2013). The focus of this essay is on one such storyline – the CM Punk vs. John Cena storyline from the WWE’s 2011 “Money in the Bank” match. Through analysing this cultural object, this essay will attempt to queer the WWE as a sports entertainment storytelling medium. The WWE is a unique media form in that it has historically blurred the lines between what is scripted and what is real, and it is in the middle of this blurring that audience engagement is at its maximum. Real life feuds often make it into the scripts, and the audience themselves, stylised as the “WWE Universe” are often treated as part of the story by the various wrestlers who act as either heroes or villains (in WWE parlance, “babyfaces” or “heels” respectively) (Goggin & Emmanouloudis, 2019). The wrestling performances are less about the sport itself, and more about spectacle, engaging in grand theatrical showcases of masculinised stereotypes of strength and weakness, anger and sorrow, forgiveness and revenge.

In my essay, I begin by queering Roland Barthes’ concept of myth (1972), showing how the Cena vs. Punk storyline destabilises the very signs that structure wrestling’s cultural narratives. Through queer and crip theory, I read the match not as a straightforward contest of dominance, but as a space where masculinity, ability and meaning itself become unstable. In this slippage, I argue, lie possibilities for alternative victories, ones rooted in vulnerability, refusal and performative excess.

To explore these alternative victories, I then analyse the aesthetics of the fighting body in media that is queer-coded. I do this by exploring the popular speculative science fiction works of Sonnie’s Edge from Love, Death + Robots (2019) and the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022). I suggest that the use of queer and posthuman tropes in science fiction offer new possibilities for how wrestling might represent bodies that are trans or gender non-conforming, cyborg, or otherwise in excess of conventional form.

Through my essay, I wonder (speculate) if there can ever be queer or crip bodies in the WWE, a historically hyper-masculine show, representing a historically hyper-masculine sport, and I wonder what those bodies might look like. I explore, most importantly, through Massumi (2002), how affect theory might act as a medium that enables this speculation. Alison Kafer’s work and Donna Haraway’s “Camille Stories” (2016) strongly inspire my essay in how I attempt to speculate a future grounded in queer and crip values that are not expressed in terms of heteronormative and able-bodied conceptions of time and space. Recalling Kafer, “In imagining more accessible futures, I am yearning for an elsewhere—and, perhaps, an ‘elsewhen’—in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral.”

Part 1: The Myth of the Straight Fight – Queering Barthes through Punk vs. Cena

In his 1957 essay, The World of Wrestling (in Mythologies, translated 1972), Roland Barthes famously argued that wrestling is not a sport but a moral spectacle: a theatre of exaggerated gestures where ambiguity collapses and meaning appears fixed. But unlike the wrestling Barthes wrote about, where performed aspects are portrayed as real, WWE does not hide its performativity, it embraces and thrives on it. What Barthes saw as hidden – the scripted, ideologically-loaded nature of the fight, is now flaunted. Terms like kayfabe (keeping the pretense that a fake performance is real), heel turns (portraying a wrestler as the villain), and babyface pushes (portraying a wrestler as the hero) have become part of the fan lexicon (Goggin & Emmanouloudis, 2019), circulated openly through online forums, fan discourse and social media.

But myth, for Barthes, is a distortion, not a lie. When something appears hidden, it is not. Myth transforms History into Nature, i.e. it takes something with a historical cultural origin (like gender roles, class dynamics, or in this case, hyper-masculine conventions of justice or heroism in wrestling) and presents it as if it were infallible truth. While it does not hide the “real” completely, it re-presents reality in a way that makes it seem an overwhelmingly indisputable reflection of reality.

But because this is a distortion (not a seamless illusion), the edges of the myth can be seen, and it reveals its own mechanisms, even as it tries to obscure them. This is the space where I argue that queer and crip theory can intervene. By not rejecting Barthes, but reorienting his mythic logic, I argue that contemporary wrestling and sports entertainment at large represent meaning in a way that is unstable, contested and open to disruption. The Punk vs. Cena storyline is an ideal example of this, where the myth is undone and remade in an unconventional way.

Wrestling today exists in a hypermediated space: where the line between reality and fiction is not just blurred, but constantly re-negotiated in public. The result is a spectacle that is deeply aware of its own constructedness – a myth that knows it is a myth, but still functions as if it were true. Very often in WWE, attempted storylines fail, or are altered after they are conceived because the fans simply refused to be entertained by them.

Articles about these storylines are routinely published and read, and comment sections of YouTube videos uploaded by the WWE are rife with opinions of fans that approve or disapprove of turns a story has taken, all the time being aware that it is a story, but one they are able to embody and influence in ways that are different from other storytelling formats.

In this context, Barthes remains a useful, but insufficient theorist for understanding wrestling today. His insight that wrestling transforms History into Nature still holds, but the mechanisms through which the transformation occurs have shifted. The WWE, in the digital age, has embraced the artificiality of its narratives, creating layered performances in which authenticity is both staged and questioned. The myth is no longer stable or singular. It flickers, glitches, multiplies. And it is within this instability that the 2011 Punk vs. Cena storyline emerges as a critical site for analysis. Rather than rendering Barthes obsolete, this moment allows us to re-read him with queer/crip lenses – not as a theorist of stability, but as one who inadvertently reveals the cracks.

Part 2: Setting the Stage – CM Punk vs John Cena, 2011

On July 17, 2011, WWE’s Money in the Bank pay-per-view hosted one of the most iconic main events in WWE history: CM Punk vs. John Cena for the WWE Championship. At first glance, this might appear like any other scripted match within WWE’s sprawling entertainment machine. But the storyline leading up to this moment, and the match itself, signalled something more significant (WWE, 2011).

Kayfabe – the illusion of realism in wrestling is critical here. As a performative frame, kayfabe establishes the terms of engagement for both performer and audience (Goggin & Emmanouloudis, 2019). It signals that while what you are watching is fake, the stakes are real. Emotions, injuries, allegiances, all blend within this liminal zone of suspended disbelief. Punk vs. Cena complicates this concept in its narrative, where kayfabe and reality appear to collapse into one another – a Barthesian spectacle rewritten through aesthetics of rebellion, authenticity, and anti-corporate sentiment.

CM Punk (real name Phillip Brooks), cast as the rebel outsider, delivers what fans now call “The Pipebomb” – a promo (refers to a scripted or improvised speech delivered by a wrestler to build narrative tension, develop character or provoke an opponent) that breaks character, criticising WWE’s management, its formulaic storytelling and the commodification of wrestler’s identities (WWE, 2025). The promo blurs the lines between real and scripted, destabilising the viewer’s understanding of what is performance and what is truth. Towards the end of this rant, the network turns his microphone off. He stands up, screams into the camera and storms out of the building.

While Punk did have an approved script, he chose not to adhere to it and used it as an opportunity to say what he truly felt. “The thing with live television is, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” he said in an interview he gave after the fact (Taylor, 2021). In Barthes’ terms, Punk’s actions rupture the seamless myth, calling attention to the fact that what is usually masked (“the intelligibility of reality”) is now spoken aloud. He names the mechanics of the system from within the ring itself.

Barthes argues that wrestling converts ideological positions into spectacle, transforming what is a possible eventuality into inevitable reality. Punk’s character – and perhaps his real-life position – attempts to resist that. Yet even within this resistance, he becomes mythologised. WWE reabsorbs his anti-establishment posture into its own promotional material. The audience is encouraged to cheer for his rebellion while still buying tickets to see it. Punk, once the underdog critic, becomes the central figure of the WWE’s narrative universe – legitimised through the very institution he critiqued.

On the other side of the ring stands John Cena: the company man, the straight-talking face of the WWE brand, cisgendered-heteronormative, white, echoing slogans like “Hustle, Royalty, Respect.” In the moral binary of traditional wrestling storytelling, Cena is the babyface, the hero, and Punk is the unpredictable outsider. But Money in the Bank complicated these roles. The crowd in Chicago that night overwhelmingly supported Punk, booing Cena not for villainy, but for alignment with the status quo. Cena’s body, normally coded as virtuous, clean, and muscular: the archetypal American man – became a symbol of institutional conservatism. Punk’s thinner, tattooed, chaotic body was no longer the heel; it was the people’s hero. In the future, Punk would be successfully marketed as a “Voice for the Voiceless.” This reversal reveals how the morality of spectacle is not fixed, but negotiated – a negotiation that audiences participate in.

Thus, what appears to be a straightforward match, a championship fight between two stars, becomes a field of dense semiotic play. The match ends with Punk winning the title and escaping through the crowd, never to return, after blowing a kiss at Vince McMahon, the manager of WWE (who also performs a character: a villain, the horrible capitalist boss “Mr. McMahon”). From the start of this storyline, fans have been made aware that Punk’s contract was expiring that year – but are unsure whether this is real or part of the story. As a Barthesian myth, the moment collapses the naturalisation of order. Punk doesn’t just win the fight, he symbolically ruptures the system. But as Barthes would remind us, this rupture is always temporary. Myth absorbs all rebellion. Punk returned to the company weeks later, his victory packaged into merchandise and marketing.

Yet the fact that audiences responded so viscerally – that Punk’s pipebomb felt “real” to so many – reveals the hunger for myth to shift. Punk vs. Cena represented not just a moral struggle, but a meta-narrative about wrestling’s own institutions. It asked whether myth can be hacked from within, and whether the spectacle can critique itself. Barthes may not have used the language of queerness, but his system hinges on readability and moral performance – both of which are sites of destabilisation in queer/crip theory. This moment queers not just wrestling, but Barthes’ own semiotic logic.

Part 3: Unscripted Bodies – Queering and Cripping the Wrestling Ring

“Autism is an ability and a disability: it is as much about what is abundant as what is missing.” This quote by Phil Collins in Stuart Murray’s 2013 essay Autism and the Posthuman, hints at how autism outhumans the humans, and “gestures towards a beyond, or a ‘post-,’ that represents a space of cultural enactment, and possibly agency, separate from any configuration of a human norm (Murray, 2013).”

While my essay is not about autism particularly, the second quote in the earlier paragraph, is relevant. Focussing on disability and queerness in general, Kafer (2013) and Halberstam (2005) have explored how it is fundamentally necessary that conceptions of right and wrong, success and failure, be conceptualised in contexts that are not able-bodied or queer, and in Murray’s essay, disabled bodies are framed as posthuman, specifically doing that. Thinking of queer/crip bodies in fighting contexts is not about putting queer fighters who are “strong” in the ring, it is about reframing what strength itself is.

Barthes’ myth relies on a semiological structure. Drawing from Saussure’s linguistics, Barthes conceptualises the “signifier” as the material form (word, image, gesture) and the “signified” as the concept it evokes. Together, they form the “sign” (Barthes, 1972, pp 106-126). In “myth,” however, this unity is reappropriated. Barthes’ structure distorts a pre-existing sign into something ideologically loaded. The original sign becomes a signifier in a new system, where the thing that is signified (some cultural form or idea) is presented as nature. Myth, makes the contingent seem inevitable. Which is why Barthes uses wrestling as his example: it is a form where moral narratives are communicated through exaggerated physical codes that appear self-evident, reducing historical complexity into a spectacle of clarity.

But it is in spectacle’s self-evidence that cracks begin to show. If myth aims to stabilise meaning, to collapse the distance between signifier and signified, then queer and crip theory thrive in the failure of this very project. Judith Butler (1990) writes about how gender is never a completed identity, but a reiterated performance, whose repetition is vulnerable to breakdown. Eve Sedgwick (1990) discusses how sexuality resists binary logics, existing in gaps between identity and expression. Robert McRuer (2006) argues that “compulsory able-bodiedness” is, very similarly to heterosexuality, propped up by normativity but always haunted by its own instability. There is always a potential for slippage (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 29) between meaning and body, word and flesh, identity and performance.

This slippage is what allows a queering (and cripping) of the wrestling ring. It is not just the rewriting or unsettling of the excessiveness of wrestling as a bodily performance. What happens when the ring itself becomes a site of semantic rebellion? What happens when the performers no longer play into clearly defined roles, but instead expose the fragility of the narrative system itself?

In this context, CM Punk’s feud with John Cena in 2011, and the “Pipebomb” promo can be read as a queering of the Barthesian myth. Punk’s disruption of kayfabe reveals the artifice of the spectacle, while simultaneously amplifying its emotional truth. He is both “in character” and not. Both heel and face. Both employee and critic. His body leaner, tattooed, “non-standard,” resists the coded legibility of the heroic figure in traditional wrestling stories. Cena, on the other hand, is an archetype – the average jock – muscular, straight, disciplined. A body representing moral virtue and institutional conservatism.

Queer theory’s insistence on non-normativity helps us read Punk’s character, and body, as a challenge to dominant ideologies. In a Barthesian sense, the match is still mythic – it is a narrative of resistance being naturalised. But it fails, or at the very least, is complicated, because the meanings on offer are not unambiguous. The myth glitches. The audience cheers for the anti-hero. Punk’s rejection of the system is absorbed into the system, yes, but not without leaving something affective behind. This disturbance lingers. I will come back to this later in the essay.

Crip theory depends this analysis. McRuer (2006) critiques how compulsory able-bodiedness is upheld by capitalist culture, a logic that Kafer (2013) expands into the temporal realm through the articulation of crip (and queer) time, specifically with respect to how expectations of speed and productivity are disrupted by non-normative bodies engaging with space. This resonates with how Punk resists the scripted rhythms of WWE storytelling. He refuses to follow the beat. Even in the physical register, his body doesn’t “perform” wrestling the standard way. His very aesthetic thrives on unpredictability. Crip theory exposes how spectacle depends on smoothness, predictability and able-bodied assumption. Punk’s refusal to play by those rules marks a bodily resistance to the normative narrative.

Furthermore, the crowd that cheers Punk and boos Cena doesn’t merely respond to the script. Audiences refuse the moral binary, resisting the narrative. Punk’s myth is unstable because it is co-produced by those who do not align with its original message. What we witness is a form of communal queering – an audience excited by friction, contradiction, irony and improvisation.

While this reading may stretch the boundaries of what is considered queer, I am less interested in labelling the event itself as queer and more invested in how audiences in the WWE find themselves increasingly drawn to non-normative, unstable narratives. As dominant storylines (myths) are reproduced to the point of exhaustion, their original meanings begin to distort. This slippage opens space for reinterpretation where communal reception becomes an act of queering – whether intentional or not.

The failure of myth to fix meaning is not a shortcoming of Barthes’ theory – it is its most queer potential. His work anticipates this: myth is always at risk of being read against itself, turned inside out. This is even more clear in his later work, especially in The Death of the Author (1997), where he writes that meaning doesn’t come from the author’s intention but from the reader’s interpretation. Barthes may not have written in the language of queerness, but the instability he identifies, the gap between signifier and signified is fertile ground for queer and crip reading. Myth can never fully naturalise because it relies on performance. And all performance, as Butler teaches us, contains the possibility of failure, of deviation, of drag (Butler, 1990).

This essay does not reject Barthes, it queers him. Wrestling is not simply a stage on which myth is performed – it is a battleground where myth falters. What is at stake here is not whether wrestling can still be read through Barthes, but how Barthes’ theory can be extended through queer and crip thought. Punk’s body, his unscripted speech, his mythologised rebellion all offer an invitation to revisit the semiotics of the spectacle. We are not beyond Barthes. We are taking his concepts and dragging them through the ring, letting them sweat and slip and shatter. In doing so, we don’t abandon myth, we wrestle with it.

The 2011 match between Punk and Cena is not a tidy allegory of rebellion. It is a layered field of political, aesthetic and bodily tension. It thrives in what Sedgwick (1990) might call an epistemological uncertainty of performance. Queer and crip readings, here, are not only possible, but necessary.

Part 4: An Affective Edge – Cyborgs and Monsters as Prefigurative Myth

What stands out most effectively in the Punk vs. Cena story is that while it unsettles semiological structure, it retains something innate to the story – the way audiences are made to feel. This section will analyse the storyline from the episode, Sonnie’s Edge (Wilson & Pennacchioli, 2019) from Love, Death + Robots (2019) and the characters from the show Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Jaki & Pondsmith, 2022). While Sonnie’s Edge originated as a short story in Peter F. Hamilton’s A Second Chance at Eden (1998), this essay focuses on the animated adaptation which radically intensifies the affective experience of the narrative.

In Sonnie’s Edge (2019), audiences watch as genetically engineered monster-like bodies engage in fighting matches, bodies controlled by their human owners who stand outside the ring. Sonnie pilots one such beast. She has never lost, and she is also the only female fighter. The twist in the story is that Sonnie’s consciousness is inside the creature (unlike the other fighters) and her human body is really a robot. She is not controlling the beast, she embodies it. If the beast dies, she dies too. And so, she fights through this monstrous other-body, but unlike the other fighters who are safe outside the ring, controlling their monsters remotely, Sonnie fights for her life. But to complicate this even further, she fights not merely to survive but also to exact revenge. We learn she was a survivor of sexual violence, and her physical body doesn’t exist anymore. She chooses to channel her violence through the body of a literal monster, whose grotesque strength enacts revenge on a system of violence she never opted into. As a narrative, Sonnie’s Edge is a classic tale of revenge, but the difference is, it is a woman who fights for herself, and with each subsequent fight, exacts revenge on the men who violated her.

Affect, as Massumi (2002) describes, is not what something means, but what it does. Unlike emotions like sadness or anger which are already coded and socially legible, affect exists as a bodily intensity, despite language. A revenge story is recognisable not just in its plot beats, but in the cathartic bodily response it produces. In Sonnie’s Edge, this affective response is preserved even as the narrative is queered, cripped and estranged. Sonnie’s real body was mutilated beyond recovery. She does not want to be “fixed,” because she physically cannot be, but by embodying this monstrous other-body, she is powerful, and she does not lose. Her revenge is not mediated through a normative masculine hero figure who will save her, yet the viewer feels the pulse of triumph when the abuser is harmed. The narrative signifiers have shifted, but the affective payload remains intact. This suggests, very importantly to this essay, that affect – unlike narrative – can survive radical reconfiguration. It is less a structure and more a charge, a shock that leaps across signification. Barthes hints at the affective potential of signs when he talks of the “message without a code” specifically when he writes about photography (Åker et. al., 2024).

Queer/crip theory has long troubled the logic of “overcoming.” Kafer (2013) critiques the temporal frameworks that define disabled people as recovering from something that needs to be cured – to live in a way that they are surviving despite their disability, measured over periods of time (longevity). McRuer (2006), similarly identifies compulsory able-bodiedness as a cultural myth – one that crumbles under its own contradictions. Sonnie’s refusal of restoration echoes these insights. Her body is not a site of pity, but of strategy. Her “edge” is not the condition of her victimhood, but the terrain from which she reclaims agency. In this way, Sonnie’s Edge queers the fight itself. It displaces the fantasy of able-bodied dominance with an erotic, feral, posthuman rage. Her monstrosity is not a deviation from the human, but subverts what the category of human has historically excluded.

Similarly, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) is an anime set in the universe of the popular video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), based on the work of board and video game designer Michael Pondsmith. The anime presents a world in which bodies are endlessly modifiable, and identity is shaped by one’s capacity to interface with cybernetic enhancement. David, the protagonist, increasingly sacrifices pieces of his organic body in the pursuit of power, protection and purpose. His transformation is gradual, but devastating. By the series’ end, he is no longer recognisably human. His enhancements affect his brain, causing him to go “over the edge.” He is a tragic figure, not because he “loses” his humanity, but because he is consumed by a system in which enhancing his body is the only way he will be able to live the life he wants to – his class position making it impossible for him to climb the socioeconomic ladder any other way. His downfall, therefore, is not cybernetics, but the capitalist logic that demands their constant escalation.

Within this setting, Edgerunners also shows us, through its large set of characters – alternative embodiment. Characters like Rebecca – short, brash, heavily modded and carrying an enormous array of machine guns; or Dorio, the female character with a non-normative gender presentation reminiscent of butch/queer iconography – these characters are not failed versions of a masculine ideal, they are their own signs. They interrupt the fantasy of the sleek, perfect cyber-body and replace it with a chaotic aesthetic that is unpredictable, uncontainable and queer. These characters hint at Halberstam’s “queer art of failure” (2011). These are bodies that succeed not by conforming but by refusing the terms of success altogether.

In response to theories that frame information as disembodied or purely patterned, Murray (2013, p. 68) insists on the importance of “presence” – referring to the material, embodied reality of “being.” That there is value and power to being, even if that being doesn’t make sense to normative systems. Reading Murray and Massumi together, they foreground my argument of how non-normative bodies, like those in Sonnie’s Edge or Edgerunners, matter not because of what they signify, but because of what they do, what they feel like, and how they rupture scripted meaning.

In both these media, the fighting body is no longer legible through binaries of strong/weak, hero/villain. It is a site of excess. Myth has always relied on fragile foundations, sustained through repetition, but as Butler reminds us, repetition is inherently unstable.

The crux of the argument is this: the myth of the strong body, like the myth of the “straight fight” begins to unmake itself through its own excesses. The more it is performed, the more its signs (babyface, heel, hero, monster, machine) collapse into one another. What once signified dominance now signals instability. As WWE demonstrates, when fans reject the moral narrative they’re offered, when they cheer for the heel and boo the babyface, the signs start glitching. The myth queers itself, while the affect remains the same or is made more visceral.

Media like Sonnie’s Edge and Edgerunners show us that audiences are already engaging with non-normative bodies in fighting narratives. They already enjoy them. Even when these bodies are framed within traditional arcs of sacrifice and tragedy, they crack open new possibilities for meaning. They make space for other kinds of power, other “edges.” They are not just texts to be analysed, but futures being rehearsed.

While it is tempting to read these texts as entirely subversive, I argue that as they still remain affectively legible, they are just as effective as what they subvert. These works don’t queer and crip intentionally, they do so by rewriting the signs, rather than reinventing them, which is why audiences of all kinds are able to enjoy them. The viewer still feels the revenge in Sonnie’s Edge, still mourns David’s fall in Edgerunners. These affective arcs are recognisable, even when narratives have been radically rearranged. This is crucial. As Massumi says (2002), “belief has waned, but not affect.” We may no longer fully trust the classic revenge arc or the tragedy of the noble hero, but we still respond to the shape of those intensities. These stories trade in familiar feelings, even though they scramble their causes. They offer a kind of affective déjà vu. This opens the possibility for myth not to be destroyed, but to be recharged – queered through affective continuity.

Part 5: Conclusion – Wrestling Entertainment in a Posthuman Future

What might wrestling look like in a world that no longer pretends to be neutral? What if the bodies in the ring, once sculpted around fantasies of masculinity, whiteness and able-bodied dominance were glitchy, uneven and unruly? Would the audience still cheer? Would the story succeed?

Haraway (2016), specifically in Camille Stories, what she calls a “speculative fabulation,” reminds us that “staying with the trouble” requires imagining otherwise – speculative worldings that are not utopian but grounded in complexity. Kafer (2013) similarly calls for accessible futures that centre disabled lives not as problems to fix, but as frameworks to reimagine the world. The core idea for this essay originated in my wondering if the WWE could have trans bodies, or disabled bodies, and the more I read about the WWE, many stories like Punk vs. Cena caught my eye as being complex, postmodern reinterpretations of what wrestling used to be. What if I were to take the bodies from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, or a storyline like Sonnie’s Edge and run it in the WWE Universe?

What if CM Punk was an AFAB trans fighter (I am going to call her Punk.exe) with a body threaded through with neuroplastic wiring, an aesthetic of asymmetry, mess, glitch? What if her being a “survivor” of sexual assault was a part of her real-life backstory? What if her story was in a world where the original Punk vs. Cena had already happened?

What if John Cena (or some other name, like Jack Vega) was a white, muscular, state-sponsored hero figure, but what if he had prosthetic legs? Or, since I’m taking creative liberties anyway, some sort of cybernetic rollerblades for legs, rolling through the ring with kinetic elegance? Would he still be the “face of the company,” or would his posthuman body be too unreadable for traditional kayfabe?

What if this story was a recursion of the Punk vs Cena storyline, re-coded through bodies that had already failed to conform? What if the WWE had implemented layers of algorithmic oversight to prevent another unscripted promo, but Punk.exe found a way to speak to audiences anyway?

None of these scenarios are narratively coherent, and perhaps they shouldn’t be. But they allow us to ask: how much of narrative’s power comes from the story, and how much from the affective charge of the bodies that inhabit it?

Speculation, then, is not an escape – it is a commitment. A way to hold open the contradictions spectacle tries to seal. This essay has argued that wrestling, specifically in the Punk vs. Cena storyline – offers a mythic stage where normativity is both reinforced and disrupted. Through queer and crip theory, I have read these ruptures not as accidents, but as slippages – produced by the overuse of mythic signs. Through speculative fiction, I ask what new myths might form when queer and disabled bodies take centre stage. What would a myth look like if it didn’t centre perfection, but excess; if it didn’t embolden clarity, but prioritised affect instead; if it didn’t incentivise restoration, but made a spectacle of the refusal to need restoring? Perhaps a future cannot exist until it is imagined.

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