ABSTRACT
In Kristoffer Díaz’s widely celebrated and award-winning The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, audiences are double-whammied with an introduction to the world of professional wrestling and a critique of American neoliberal capitalism. The ring, central to Chad Deity’s action, belongs to the Wrestling, operated by Everett K. Olson, the white, racist boss who is mostly interested in capitalizing on racial stereotypes. The portrayal of wrestling in Chad Deity reminds us of Althusser’s description of the Ideological State Apparatus as a repressive power apparatus. This chapter offers a few ways that the queer wrestling promotions take up the disidentificatory aesthetic articulated in Chad Deity, and should be seen as a bourgeoning network of actors building an infrastructure of a new social world that offers minoritarian subjects a “space to situate in history and thus seize social agency,” to again borrow a formulation from José Esteban Muñoz.
