Jessica Fontaine

Jessica Fontaine (she/her) is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship holder and a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University (supervisor: Will Straw). Jessica holds a Master’s of Arts in Cultural Studies from the University of Winnipeg (2016), where her research focused on anti-colonial and Indigenous resistance in Indigenous literature and media. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the cultural and industry practices of American and Canadian professional wrestling participants to examine how professional wrestling operates as an affective economy that generates lived material and social effects.  

Projects

Killing the Business: Affect, Work and Kayfabe in Professional Wrestling (doctoral dissertation, ongoing) investigates the cultural and media industry practices of American and Canadian professional wrestling participants, including wrestlers, company owners, media makers, and fans. Through ethnographic research and close analyses of professional wrestling media, performance, and material objects, it maps an affective economy networked between local independent wrestling promotions in Montréal, Winnipeg, Chicago, and the New Jersey region, and the transnational company All Elite Wrestling. It argues that the professional wrestling media industry and culture is formed and fueled by the contingencies between affect, work, and kayfabe (the illusion of authenticity), and it takes an intersectional feminist approach to investigate how participants engage with these contingencies to shape the uneven material, cultural, and social conditions of professional wrestling.  

Publications

Jessica Fontaine. (forthcoming). “When Girls Walk: Mobilities of and Resistance to Affective Atmospheres of Unwelcome.” Space and Culture. 7000 words.  

Candida Rifkind and Jessica Fontaine. (2020). “Indigeneity, Intermediality and the Haunted Present of Will I See?,” Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in The Americas and Australasia. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Jackson: U of Mississippi Press, 340-360. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/G/Graphic-Indigeneity  

Activity

“Unsettling Possibilities: Decolonial and Affective Listening to A Tribe Called Red’s ‘Woodcarver’” presented at Balancing the Mix: A Conference on Popular Music and Social Justice. University of Memphis. 30 March 2019.  

Containment and Intimacy Interdisciplinary Symposium 2020 (canceled due to COVID pandemic). An interdisciplinary symposium to attend to ways that colonialism operates through cultural and ideological techniques of categorization, sorting, and containment.  
http://containmentandintimacy.ca/index.html  

Potentials of Ecocriticism Symposium. An interdisciplinary symposium that took place at McGill University on February 8-9, 2019. Presentations investigated artistic and media practices engaged with the realities of resource extraction, climate change, and human displacement.