‘The Scottish Warrior’ Drew McIntyre: celebrity-commodity, symbolic ethnicity and authenticity

Symbolic ethnicity

Gans (Citation1979, p. 9) conceived symbolic ethnicity as ‘a nostalgic allegiance to the culture of the immigrant generation, or that of the old country; a love for and a pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be incorporated in everyday behaviour’. This conceptualisation of ethnicity, as highlighted by Stone and Harris (Citation2017, p. 1397), prioritises identity (re)construction for immigrant groups who have been ‘through a process of assimilation and naturalization (i.e. becoming white) that presently allows them to not be seen as ethnic’. For white people in the United States, such identification is a voluntary and non-permanent modality, where the symbolic marking of ‘ethnic identification has continued to be an important aspect of American society’ (Leith and Sim Citation2016, p. 2564) driven by ‘a significantly increased desire by white communities to explore their heritage and to re-connect with their ancestral past’ (Leith and Sim Citation2012, p. 43).

Conceptually, nostalgia is framed as a phenomenon centred on facilitating a continuity of identity (see Davis Citation1979, Wilson Citation2005, May Citation2017, Sedikides and Wildschut Citation2018), and it is with this voluntary and non-permanent continuance that symbolic ethnicity seems most concerned. Within the wider framework of nostalgia, symbolic ethnicity can be located within Boym’s (Citation2001) restorative paradigm. In this paradigm, via the (re)construction of idealised monuments to the past, the performance of symbolic ethnicity ‘attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home […] not think[ing] of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition […] reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland’ (Boym Citation2001, pp. 41–42). That ancestral allegiance is, however, often fragile and marked by a ‘desire to return to some kind of imagined and rather sanitised past, conveniently cleansed of the complexities that accompanied them in the real past’ (Leith and Sim Citation2012, p. 43).

Expanding on the notion of fragility and revisiting his 1979 work on symbolic ethnicity, Gans (Citation2014, Citation2015) suggested that the early decades of the twenty-first century signalled the end of ethnicity, and by extension, the persistence of symbolic ethnicity, via the increasing dilution of ethnic identities in the United States. Yet, of late, Gans (Citation2017, p. 1410) has also proposed that ‘[t]he end of ethnicity could also be reversed, at least temporarily, by groups which try to reinvent it’.

Indeed, the continued persistence of symbolic ethnicity has been demonstrated by Leith and Sim (Citation2016) who use the context of Scottish clan identities within Scottish-Americans to argue that the phenomenon not only persists but moves beyond the symbolic, becoming hyphenated ethnicity, confirmed via the increasing accessibility of genetic confirmation. Viewed in this context, symbolic ethnicity could also be located within Boym’s (Citation2001, pp. 41–42) reflective paradigm of nostalgia. In this paradigm, reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once […] It loves details, not symbols […] cherishes shattered fragments of memory and […] reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another.

The symbolic ethnicity at play in this discussion, however, is that of an embodied character, Drew McIntyre, rather than the lived identity of Andrew Galloway. This is complicated by Galloway being a Scot (British citizen) by birth, who primarily works and resides in the United States. As such, the symbolic ethnicity deployed around Galloway’s performative alter, Drew McIntyre, is not necessarily an attempt by Galloway to construct a continuance of his personal Scottish identity now that he is removed from the context of Scotland. Rather, it is a negotiation between Galloway and WWE to reinvent a Scottish identity for Drew McIntyre; an identity cleaned of the complexity of contemporary Scotland, for a primarily non-Scottish audience. It is this commodification of Scottish identity that the forthcoming analysis of ‘The Scottish Warrior’ intends to explore, demonstrating that McIntyre’s identity is a constructed and symbolic ethnicity, conforming to Gans (Citation1979) original conceptualisation, which operates in the restorative mode of nostalgia to present a notion of Scottishness that is likely never to have existed.

Ethnicity and professional wrestling

Ethnicity, realised symbolically or otherwise, has long been a part of the performance of professional wrestling (Horton Citation2018). Historically, exaggerated ethnicity was a common mode of character development, appropriating commonly held (mis)conceptions to develop easily communicable characters (Webley Citation1986). Wrestling figures of the past, such as Bruno Sammartino or Ivan Putski, both first-generation immigrants to the United States, deployed and commodified their ethnicity to connect with the Italian (Sammartino) and Polish (Putski) identifying communities in the north-eastern United States. More problematically, ethnicities were frequently appropriated for similar commercial gain, such as with Joe Sacrpa, a self-identified Italian-American, who portrayed the Native American Chief Jay Strongbow without having any claim to Native American ethnicity.

Often, ethnicity was exploited by the heel (or villainous) characters who were presented as ‘foreigners’ or defectors to ‘foreign’ powers (Maguire and Wozniak Citation1987); a practice that would be most visible during periods of increased nationalism in the United States (Mondak Citation1989). Such ethnically derived characterisation demonstrates that historically (and to a lesser extent in the contemporaneous product), professional wrestling was (and is) not value free but used ritual and metaphor to construct a simple commentary related to a perceived set of ‘American values’ that responded to wider cultural and political context of the United States (Migliore Citation1993). For Rahmani (Citation2007, p. 87), such characterisation allowed audiences to come ‘to terms with the complicated political occurrences in foreign lands’. As such, the use of ethnicity in professional wrestling became a simple and effective way to elicit strong reactions, either positive or negative, from fans (Maguire and Wozniak Citation1987).

For Migliore (Citation1993), this use of ethnicity functioned as a framing device to curate fans’ interpretation of wrestler identities via the construction of moral commentary which emphasised the moral authority of the United States (Campbell Citation1996). Maguire and Wozniak (Citation1987), suggest that this ethnic stereotyping exploited underlying social and cultural mythologies that encouraged the (assumed United States national) consumer to reinforce their sense of personal and social order. In this way, real-world tensions could be explored through the processes of ethnic stereotyping and ritual metaphor (Migliore Citation1993), both of which offered an overly simplified view of the world (Mondak Citation1989). Non-United States nationals, or ethnic minorities, could therefore, be blamed for wider problems as experienced in U.S. culture.

Contemporary representations of ethnicity in mainstream professional wrestling, such as those presented by WWE, have mostly moved away from the explorations of devious ethnicities. Notable exceptions lie in militaristic, or pseudo-militaristic characters such as Commander Azeez, styled as a dangerous Nigerian imperial guardsman, or Gunther, styled as a pseudo-militaristic figure, drawing on pejorative conceptualisations of Austrian-German nationals of World War 2. The use of ethnicity as a marker of difference to assumed norm of the United States national is, however, still in widespread use. This returns us to the case of Drew McIntyre, who, via monikers such as ‘The Scottish Psychopath’ or ‘The Scottish Warrior’ or ‘The King of Claymore Country’, appears to have the primacy of his Scottish identity as a recurring and identifying theme.

Representations of scottishness

Representations of ethnic or national identities are a process of exchange, where meaning is embodied via social (or parasocial) interactions (Hall Citation1997). Such social exchanges normally involve the ongoing construction and negotiation of a performed self or selves (Webber Citation1998). Often, when Scottishness is constructed out with the context of Scotland (and at times within the context too), two discourses seem to surround and overwhelm these exchanges and performances:, kailyard and tartanry (Marmysz Citation2017).

Perhaps the most relevant to the study at hand, tartanry conjures a romanticised notion of Scotland and Scottish people that is often disengaged or isolated from the modern world (Marmysz Citation2014). Much of the blame for tartanry is put on Sir Walter Scott ‘whose search for the culture of Scotland resulted in creating a rather limiting view of the clan and kilt society originally relevant only to the Scottish Highlands’, which had a ‘tendency to present contemporary Scots as the re-creations of old Scottish heroes’ (Roebuck Citation2013, p. 194). Commonly dominated by masculine imagery (Brown Citation2010), tartanry emphasises the visage of the highland warrior, draped in tartan and roaming amongst the hills and glens of rural Scotland (Gomez Citation2008). Such depictions frame Scotland ‘as an insular, primal, primitive and clannish place’ (Marmysz Citation2017, p. 31) existing on the ‘periphery of civilisation’ (Marmysz Citation2017, p. 33). International cinematic interpretations of Scotland, such as Highlander (Citation1986), Braveheart (Citation1995) or Rob Roy (Citation1995), to name but a few, draw heavily on the aesthetics of the brave, yet defeated Scottish warrior, struggling against the odds, often in a class-related conflict (Brown Citation2010; Marmysz Citation2017). In a similar fashion, Balmorality, the exaggerated appropriation of the kilt and the castle initiated by Queen Victoria and continued by the contemporary British monarchy, constructs a highly visible but ‘superficial enthusiasm for Scottish culture, coupled with a douce, staid conservatism’ (Kelly Citation2010, p. 281) Simplified notions of Scottishness like these, reduce Scotland to an easily consumable unit of meaning and are amongst the most prevailing modes of the performed Scot (Hague Citation2014).

Where tartanry celebrates the highland hero, the kailyard construction of Scottish identity draws upon an idealistic nostalgia for an imagined parochial existence centred around the rural communities of the Scottish Lowlands (Nairn Citation2003, Newton Citation2005). The original kailyard movement emerged in the Scottish literature of the 1880s during a time of transformation and disruption of traditional Scottish hierarchies. Walton (Citation2015, p. 141) suggests that ‘kailyard’s veneration of Christian values of forbearance and contentment with one’s lot suggest that the genre’s popularity lay in offering evasive fantasies and consolation to readers for whom such social harmony was by no means social reality’. Once more an often-masculine dominated mode of representation (Nash Citation2007), ‘kailyard has come to mean any attempt to equate Scottish identity with a view of the past (and present) which is inherently conservative and can be quite mawkish at times’ (Miller Citation2004, p. 164).

The celebrity-commodity

For Marshall (Citation2021, p. 164), the commodification of the self is a ‘natural province’ of the celebrity which involves varying forms of ‘persona construction for the attention economy’. Such performance of the self is ‘a critical component of any public figure’s identity’ (Marshall Citation2010, p. 39). This considered construction of the identity of public figures exists within a context that Marshall (Citation2010, p. 38) describes as ‘presentational culture’. In this presentational culture, it is common for the studios or other media corporations with which a celebrity works to participate in the construction of a persona that is ‘highly conscious of a potential audience as much as it is a careful preening and production of the self’ (Marshall Citation2010, p. 40).

Turner (Citation2014, pp. 57–8) frames this corporate interaction in the development of the celebrity persona as media production companies finding ‘new and effective strategies for controlling the images they produce’, where ‘rather than being merely the end-user of celebrity, they can produce it themselves’. It is at this juncture where notions of authenticity become pronounced. For Marshall (Citation1997, Citation2000) this produces a tension between the authenticity of the persona and the industrial manufacturing process that (co)produced that persona, resulting in a dissonance of authentic-inauthentic within that persona. Furthermore, the nature of that authenticity is subjective. What is authentic to one consumer can be inauthentic to another. This creates a complexity that moves beyond the binary of authentic-inauthentic where the interpretation of authenticity is dependent upon the experiences and understandings of the consumer.

Bell (Citation2010) further unpacks this convergence of the self, the celebrity persona, and the processes of commodification. For Bell (Citation2010, p. 100), popular culture and commodity are fundamentally connected to each other via the construction and interpretation of the celebrity as ‘disposable, intertextual, and fetishized commodities, [that] represent both social and economic capital exchange’. Rojek (Citation2001 cited in Bell Citation2010, p. 2) provides three categorisations of celebrity that codify such exchange; ascribed, attributed, and achieved, where ascribed celebrity is derived of biological descent, attributed celebrity relates to the ‘concentrated representation of an individual […] by cultural inter-mediaries’, and achieved celebrity is the celebrity of accomplishment via talent or skill. Bell (Citation2010, p. 3) further posits ‘that there is room to define a hybrid of achieved and attributed celebrity that is particularly tied to modern mass media’.

It is at this intersection of attributed and achieved celebrity that the persona of Drew McIntyre exists. Galloway is widely regarded as an exemplary professional wrestler, who is a skilled in-ring performer, verbal communicator, and athlete. There is little argument that Galloway’s rise to prominence as Drew McIntyre in the world of professional wrestling is predicated on his professional wrestling abilities, and as such, he can be codified as having achieved celebrity. Yet the persona of Drew McIntyre is also disposable, as demonstrated when Galloway was released from his WWE contact in 2014. Out with the media ecosystem of WWE, and unable to use the Drew McIntyre persona, which remained the intellectual property of WWE, Galloway’s celebrity was diminished. It was not until Galloway was rehired by WWE in 2017 that he achieved his greatest celebrity, where ‘the concentrated representation [of Drew McIntyre] as noteworthy or exceptional’ (Brown Citation2010, p. 2) by the media machinery of WWE imbued him with a powerful attributed celebrity.

Return to WWE

McIntyre found himself in the voluntary (re)appropriation of specific and romanticised markers of Scottishness. Rehired by WWE in 2017 for their developmental NXT brand, McIntyre deployed these markers to develop meaningful individuation within the wrestling world and gain widespread celebrity.Footnote¹ Repackaged as the embodiment of the highland warrior, McIntyre’s symbolic ethnicity was now written prominently across his body. Clad in tartan, specifically via a kilt, often contemporary or hybrid in nature, and with or without sporran, McIntyre was now adorned with additional symbolic markers of an imagined Scottish past, such as a bespoke coat of arms for his McIntyre clan, metal vambraces (wrist guards), and latterly, a large claymore sword. Describing this cocreation of his revised persona, Galloway stated:

This romantic and hypermasculine imagining of the historical Scottish warrior is best exemplified by McIntye’s post-2017 ring entrances. A notable example occurred during the 2017 NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn III (Citation2017) event. McIntyre’s entrance into the arena was foreshadowed via the live appearance of a marching pipe band, the NYPD Pipes and Drums.Footnote² At the conclusion of a short introductory performance, the NYPD Pipes and Drums performed a live mash-up of McIntyre’s entrance theme (which already featured bagpipes within a rock context) and accompanied him to the ring. McIntyre supported this performance with stern gazes and wistful glances off into the crowd as he slowly and purposefully walked towards ringside.

WWE had redrawn McIntyre as a serious character with a singular motivation related to wrestling success, rather than rock stardom. Furthermore, in doing so, the WWE had directly attributed an increased status to McIntyre within the professional wrestling hierarchy. This allowed fans to read the spectacle of McIntyre’s ring entrance in opposition to other performers who had not been attributed such as the complex process of signification. This demonstrated the careful planning and financial investment that WWE implemented in the hope of growing and cultivating an increased celebrity status for McIntyre as a commodified product for exchange.

A significant change in the construction of McIntyre’s visage was also prominent in his return to the WWE universe. Now wearing his beard and prominent body hair, McIntyre added a notion of cragged maturity to his persona. Like the highland warriors of tartanry lore, he was now framed as an individual who had experienced trauma and hardship and had emerged from this experience stronger than before. Gone were the more animated, loose and youthfully naïve characteristics of his 3MB persona, replaced by a grimmer yet determined persona, anchored in the rich symbolism of his Scottish heritage.

This mode of ring entrance functioned, therefore, as a pronounced ritual of symbolic ethnicity through which WWE attributed celebrity to Drew McIntyre by investing in spectacle of his presentation. WWE simplified the complexity of Scotland and used it to commodify McIntyre as a specific brand that could be quickly communicated to, and understood by, their audience. This mode of entrance was subsequently and repeatedly redrawn and expanded upon at further WWE events, becoming a spectacular hallmark of McIntyre’s participation in ‘big’ events, demonstrating a continued investment in the growth of McIntyre as a valuable WWE commodity.

So complete was the attributing of tartanry as a persona producing device for McIntyre, that his performance of ‘The Scottish Warrior’, with its overtones of doomed or tragic heroism, seemed to be a literal articulation of Richards’s (Citation1997, p. 186) definition. ‘Tartanry – the deployment of clans, kilts, pipes and claymores – centres on the sacred “lost cause” of Scottish independence. The cause, of course, involves war and rebellion but the war and rebellion are safely located in a romanticized past’. While seemingly simplistic on the surface, in reality, in this revised symbolism of McIntyre’s body, the prominence of his hypermasculine physique functions as a specialised communicative device operating on multiple levels.

As O’Neill (Citation1974, p. 110) proposes ‘[t]he human body is the dialectical place of expression and concealment; it is the instrument of transcendence and togetherness as well as the seat of our withdrawal and sorrow’. In this way, the deployment of McIntyre’s body is archetypal in his construction as a wrestler, but also specific to his revised identity as battle-hardened highland warrior. This latter mode is another site of complex signification that ‘idealizes the hypermasculine muscular body, a visual spectacle and gendered text that reasserts a threatened male hegemony’ (Gillett and White Citation1992, p. 358). The threatened male hegemony present in the construction of McIntyre’s identity is, of course, the tragic highland warrior, prominent in the imaginings of the romantic tartanry, but now lost to an idealised past of a Scotland which likely never existed. As such, it is possible to infer that it is irrelevant to WWE whether McIntyre accurately represents Scottishness. What appears to matter most to WWE is that the identity they are constructing and promoting around McIntyre is easily communicable to its audience.

This tension of concealment is common in professional wrestling. It is needless to say that Galloway is not an ancient Scottish warrior, or even a warrior in general. Rather Galloway, from urban Ayrshire, is a versatile professional performer in the theatre of the wrestling world, inhabiting a carefully crafted and commodified celebrity-persona. Yet, even with this concealment, authenticity remains key to McIntyre’s embodiment. Throughout wrestling history, many performers, both Scots and non-Scots, have used a Scottish ‘gimmick’. Perhaps, the most notable of whom, was Rowdy Roddy Piper, the urban Saskatoon born Canadian, Roderick Toombs, who, without any clear lines of Scottish heritage, became the best-known celebrity Scotsman of professional wrestling fame.

Indeed, long before McIntyre, WWE (then WWF), along with other promotions, frequently commodified the pipe band, kilt and pseudo clan coat of arms as an attributing function of Piper’s celebrity identity. While physically, Piper did not embody the pronounced hypermasculinity of the highland warrior that McIntyre does, and while he made no attempt to utilise any form of Scottish accent or linguistic trope, he could, however, play the bagpipes and often did. Accordingly, Piper’s symbolic ethnicity appears on its surface to be an articulation of Gans (Citation1979) notion of the second-generation immigrant reclamation of identity, although this is tempered by the fact that the cultural heritage he aligned himself with is commandeered rather than inherited. It is from this context of open inauthenticity, in which Piper appropriated Scottishness as a commodified function of his celebrity, that Galloway has brought authenticity to the commodifying of Scottishness as a product for exchange (Marshall Citation2021).

WWE champion

In the lead-up to the Wrestlemania 36 Citation(2020) event, a prominent pre-recorded promotional vignette demonstrated perfectly this intersection of authenticity, constructed symbolic ethnicity and the commodification of McIntyre as a celebrity product. Produced by BT Sport, the principal UK broadcast partner of WWE, for the purposes of the domestic and international marketing of the event, the vignette depicted McIntyre training for Wrestlemania 36 (Citation2020) in the Scottish Highlands. Discussing the genesis of the concept in 2020, Galloway, who described the film as ‘Braveheart Rocky’ stated:

In the vignette, the empty, mountainous, and windblown landscape of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs features prominently. This setting is at the core of the film. This is romantic Scotland. Dislocated and isolated from the nearby Central Belt, the most heavily populated and urbanised area of Scotland, the film depicts Scotland as a desolate, hard place, inhabited by hard men. While this is clearly a constructed notion of Scotland that is far from the lived experience of everyday Scots, and entirely absent of women, the tartanry featured is, nonetheless, incarnate. The Scotland commodified is not a recreation using a proxy location, but actually Scotland. The film, by design, exists within a nexus of inauthenticity-authenticity.

The narration, delivered by an older Scotsman dressed in a Barbour style jacket, tweed suit, shirt, and tie, who in part, is depicted as riding a tractor, discusses the environment as non-forgiving and locates McIntyre as a warrior who resides in its shadows. Here, the notion of the kailyard enters the discourse. The father-like figure, who guides McIntyre through his training, is adorned with prominent markers of Scottish rural life and farming. His delivery is slow and considered, his words pragmatic. In this way, a dynamic of Scottish masculine identity is introduced, with the older man representing the pragmatic father of the lost kailyard.

At the core of these sweeping vistas is McIntyre. McIntyre tells us that he has come home to prepare for his destiny, and even though he is from urban Ayrshire, is seen braving the elements in his ‘natural’ environment – the Scottish Highlands. Dressed in his wrestling attire and a t-shirt, McIntyre carries out feats of hypermasculinity involving objects symbolically significant to Scotland, such as carrying two whisky barrels up a hill, raising a lifting stone above his head, pulling an antiquated tractor, and singlehandedly defeating a team of bekilted Scotsmen in a tug of war. In this way, McIntyre can be read as a tartanry opposition to the kailyard father-figure, with both coming together to simplify the complexity of Scottish culture.

Moreover, as McIntyre swims in Loch Lomond, literally immersing himself in the symbolism of Scotland, the narration discusses a battle of the resurrected, at the end of which, McIntyre emerges from the loch as the ultimate (re)incarnation of the highland warrior. Such investment in a complex international location shoot further demonstrates WWE confidence in, and commitment to, investing in McIntyre’s symbolic ethnicity as a means though which to elevate his celebrity, and in return, generate further revenue from their product.

The diegetic discourses surrounding McIntyre, particularly match commentary, function similarly to commodify Scotland in his persona construction via WWE attributed symbolic ethnicity. When referring to McIntyre, commentators often use direct epithets such as, ‘The Scottish Warrior’ or ‘The Scottish Psychopath’ or ‘The King of Claymore Country’ as well as frequent references to him as a Scotsman, being from Scotland and deriving his abilities from his Scottish context. WWE sells McIntyre to the world as the embodiment of the ideal Scotsman. The nomenclature of McIntyre’s move set also fulfils this function, with his signature manoeuvres correlated in the commentary with prominent Scottish places and symbols, such as the ‘claymore kick’ or ‘Celtic cross’ or ‘Glasgow kiss’. McIntyre’s celebrity, which is directly connected to and constructed by WWE, is steeped in his authenticity as a Scot and the inauthenticity of the Scottishness that he projects. Since 2017, WWE has purposefully ascribed and (re)ascribed, in an ever-widening deployment of symbolic ethnicity, the notion at McIntyre is noteworthy and exceptional because of his Scottishness. In April 2020, McIntyre was pushed to the most visible position within the global reach of WWE, the WWE Champion, their superstar amongst superstars, giving him the unfortunate task of leading the company through the difficult early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the perceived commercial failure of McIntyre’s ill-fated runs as champion, further heightened his sense of the tragic highland warrior battling against the unfair odds, leading to a further commodification of McIntyre’s Scottish identity.

Showcased to the world, via the multiple media platforms of WWE as the best they had to offer, McIntyre represents what Turner (Citation2010, p. 13) described as the discursive effect of celebrity that is, those who have been subject to the representational regime of celebrity are reprocessed and reinvented by it. To be folded into this representational regime – to be ‘celebritised’ – changes how you are consumed and what you can mean. The discursive effect of McIntyre’s celebrity, and the hypermasculine symbolic ethnicity through which he operates, is, therefore, ‘more the consequence of the mediating (or, more accurately, the production) process than of the recognition of the particular qualities of each individuated self’ (Turner, Citation2010, p.14), despite Galloway being a British citizen, a Scotsman, by birth. In this way, the actuality of Andrew Galloway is, on the surface diegesis of the WWE universe, mostly replaced by ‘The Scottish Warrior’ as a commercial product for exchange.

As such, Drew McIntyre is a WWE-owned celebrity commodity of which Andrew Galloway is a major stakeholder. At its heart, the discursive effect of McIntyre’s WWE ascribed celebrity, which is supported by Galloway’s achieved celebrity, is that he fulfils this function of a commercial product that ‘can be manufactured, marketed and traded […] so it can repay investment, development, strategic planning and product diversification’ (Turner, Citation2010, p. 14). In the production of Drew McIntyre, WWE drew heavily on symbolic ethnicity as a mode of commodification and used its considerable media resources to ascribe celebrity to Andrew Galloway so that ‘rather than being merely the end-user of celebrity, they can produce it themselves’ (Turner Citation2014, p. 58).

Ultimately, for WWE, their ‘superstars’ are internally constructed celebrity-commodities whose personas serve an ‘attention-getting, interest-riveting, and profit-generating value’ (Rein et al. Citation1997, p. 15). Thus, WWE are actively involved in the processes of celebrity ‘persona construction for the attention economy’ (Marshall Citation2021, p. 164), exerting ownership of the personas they create at the expense of the individuals who embody them. In WWE the celebrity is the principal commodity, and the best celebrity-commodities for WWE are those wholly owned by World Wrestling Entertainment Incorporated.