Relocalizing wrestler: performing texts across time and space

In this paper, I examine the textmaking potentials of the popular cultural resources of professional wrestling, including its modes of textual expression, as performed by Kyle, a boy in the middle years of elementary school. Kyle remixed wrestling, and its performative affordances, style and textmaking potentials across time and space. Using a spiral as metaphor, I explore how practices, texts and identities travel across particular moments by tracing the trajectory of a textual resource in new texts that Kyle made. I focus on how hybrid textmaking practices can be viewed as productive, creative and playful through Pennycook's concept of relocalization, which recognizes the roles of time and place in hybrid forms. This examination of textmaking and popular culture points to transformative possibilities in educational practice.