“Wrestling is fake(?)”– The pragmatic (co-)construction of epistemic authority and kayfabe in sports entertainment

Professional wrestling (or sports entertainment) occupies a unique space in contemporary media culture, one that challenges traditional notions of sport, narrative, and audience engagement. Fans are frequently confronted with the question: “You know wrestling is fake, right?” The typical response of “I know” or even “That’s the point” reveals a paradox at the heart of wrestling’s appeal. If the outcomes are predetermined, what is the point? Yet, wrestling’s enduring popularity suggests that its value lies not in the authenticity of its competition, but in the pragmatics of its fiction: the ways in which its constructed reality is negotiated, maintained, and contested by all parties involved. 

By focusing on the notion of epistemic authority, this project will contribute not only to our understanding of professional wrestling but also to broader debates in the pragmatics of fiction, particularly in media environments where the lines between reality and performance are increasingly blurred. Beyond its academic significance, this project offers insights into the broader negotiation of truth in society. In an era marked by the proliferation of fake news and the rise of artificial intelligence, understanding how audiences engage with constructed realities is more critical than ever. Sports entertainment, with its explicit and negotiated fiction, serves as a microcosm for examining these processes. 

While professional wrestling has received attention from fields such as media or drama studies, its linguistic dimensions remain underexplored. This research project addresses this gap by examining how epistemic authority is co-constructed in the context of kayfabe, the industry term for the willing suspension of disbelief. Epistemic authority, understood here as context-dependent and relational, is not merely imposed by producers but co-constructed through the dynamic interplay between wrestlers, promoters, and audiences. Roland Barthes famously conceptualised wrestling as a spectacle, which underscores a critical aspect of wrestling’s reception: despite widespread awareness of its scripted nature, fans actively participate in sustaining kayfabe, not as passive consumers but as co-creators of its (un)reality. 

The tension between wrestling as both sport and spectacle raises fundamental questions about the nature of ‘truth’ in wrestling. This makes wrestling a rich site for exploring how epistemic authority is linguistically and multimodally achieved. Kayfabe can be seen as a constitutive aspect of the communicative context in the pro wrestling mediascape, actively maintained through language and other semiotic means. Unlike traditional fiction, where audiences generally accept the suspension of disbelief as a given, wrestling’s fiction is performatively constructed and continuously renegotiated. Fans do not merely suspend disbelief; they selectively engage with it, choosing when to believe, when to question, and when to play along. Different genres that exist within the mediascape, such as wrestlers’ promos (scripted monologues) and the unique participation structures involving live crowd reactions, and even the framing of matches by commentators, all contribute to the construction of a reality that is simultaneously acknowledged as false and treated as true.