Jessica Fontaine

Title: Instructor
Email: jes.fontaine@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:
Jessica Fontaine holds a PhD in Communication Studies, Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies from McGill University. Her doctoral research investigates the cultural and media industry practices of professional wrestling to argue that pro wrestling is an affective economy formed and fueled by the contingencies between affect, work, and kayfabe (the performance of realness). It takes an intersectional feminist approach to examine how participants, including wrestling, fans, promoters, and media makers, engage with these contingencies to shape the uneven material and social conditions of the industry. Jessica completed her MA in Cultural Studies: Texts and Culture at the University of Winnipeg, where her research focused on anti-colonial and Indigenous literature and media. She also holds a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia.

 She has taught courses on the history of communication, cultural studies, contemporary comics and race, women and gender studies, and academic writing.

Teaching Areas:
Media studies; feminist studies; cultural studies; comics, professional wrestling, popular culture

Courses:
W ENGL-3980-002 TOPICS IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

Publications:

Co-edited with Lowery A. Woodall III and Justin Garcia. Essays on COVID-19 and Professional Wrestling. McFarland & Company Publishing (Forthcoming).

Co-edited with Eero Laine and Michael J. Altman. Kayfabe: Working Theories, special Issue of Professional Wrestling Studies Journal 3.1 (2022). 

“Headlocks in Lockdown: Working the At-Home Crowd.” Popular Communication 20(4), 292-304, 2022.

“When Girls Walk: Mobilities of and Resistance to Affective Atmospheres Of Unwelcome.” Space and Culture 25(4), 633-644, 2022.

With Candida Rifkind. “Indigeneity and Intermediality in Will I See?” Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in The Americas and Australasia. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. U of Mississippi P, 2020. 34-60.

 “Illusion, Kayfabe, and Identity Performance in Box Brown and Brandon Easton’s Andre the Giant Graphic Biographies.” The Comics Grid 7 (1), 2017.