Hello Reader! This time on WWE Confessional Stories 2001-2019, we have the interesting case of AJ Lee (real name April Mendez Brooks). Interesting because, during this time period – her first run in the WWE – she resisted actually ‘confessing’ on-screen. What I’m specifically talking about here is Lee’s Bipolar II diagnosis, which she only publicly revealed shortly before the publication of her 2017 memoir Crazy Is My Superpower (not published by the WWE). In fact, this diagnosis was also hidden from her colleagues in the WWE. And yet, much of the AJ Lee character 2011-2015 is focused on over-the-top portrayals of mental instability. This may suggest a tension between the company and Mendez Brooks, or even an internal tension within Mendez Brooks. She spoke about this on The Sessions with Renee Paquette podcast in 2022:
“I felt like I did a disservice to my mental health community by hiding in plain sight for so long, but I was proud of the fact that along the whole way, even though I was hiding, and it was a secret, anytime there was something I felt uncomfortable with, I very much spoke up and was like, we need to take this more serious, and it needs to be creepier, and she needs to be a darker character and not make fun of it and make light of it … And so I really fought for that, but it did feel like hiding in plain sight, and so I felt like I kind of owed my fans and my mental health community … They’re going to always call things crazy, but I can take that word and twist it and use it as power.”
So, she still expresses a need to confess, even if it comes from an external place (fans and mental health community) rather than an internal one. But she insists on ownership of her confession in a way that both Lita and Jeff Hardy, for example, did not, or perhaps could not. In the case of the 2005 Love Triangle, I spoke a lot about how the boundaries between Amy Dumas (star) and Lita (character) were broken down, to create a rebellious authenticity. But on this subject, Mendez told Paquette:
“… one of the things that’s always maintained my mental health is keeping a separation between AJ Mendez and AJ Lee, this character, and knowing that I’m playing a character on a TV show, and that’s why I can be bold and brash and a dick, because I know it’s fake. But in wrestling the lines do blur and people take a lot of stuff personally. I think I saved my own life by not being that way, and being able to be like, okay, that character is retired. I’ve seen a lot of people lose their way because they don’t know that separation, and they’re like, who am I without this?”
It appears here that Mendez Brooks is not overvaluing opportunity, stardom and money at the expense of her mental health. This overvaluation appears to be common in pro-wrestling, and, I believe, goes beyond the individual. As I’ve said previously, the WWE’s monopoly status at this time was a big factor here, along with pro-wrestlers’ employment status as non-unionized independent contractors (see Chris Smith’s and David Cowley’s work). Academic Brian Jansen, via Wendy Brown, talks about ‘responsibilization’ — neoliberalism offloading responsibility for making ‘correct’ decisions onto the workers themselves. Put simply, for pro-wrestlers, their working rights are not sufficiently protected and their personal agency is an illusion. That’s why Mendez Brooks is so interesting. Though it could’ve been to the detriment of her short-term mental health, she kept her diagnosis hidden, even when participating in angles such as these:
And, it could be argued, this allowed her to confess on her own terms in Crazy Is My Superpower, which I urge you all to read. Indeed, in the book she reveals that in 2012 she was due to take part in ‘a series of goofy skits in which this nutter [Mendez Brooks’ character, AJ Lee] revenge-kissed a leprechaun and danced with dinosaurs from outer space’ (226). However, she considered this disrespectful and refused to participate, therefore ‘was taken off television for two months as punishment’ (227). Along with Lita’s revelations about her role in the 2006 Live Sex Celebration, we’re seeing a pattern of company coercion towards female performers. But by resisting this, Mendez Brooks was able to reclaim the word ‘crazy’ in her book. And then she could eventually return to the company without ‘crazy chick’ being so fundamental to the AJ Lee character.
As I did for the Jeff Hardy piece, you can find a very rough, vague academic thesis chapter plan for AJ Lee below. I’d love to know your thoughts!
My final chapter will focus on AJ Lee (AJ Mendez Brooks) and the WWE’s depiction of her mental health issues during her company run of 2011-2015. Given Mendez Brooks withheld her Bipolar II diagnosis during these years, and thus refused to confess, I argue Mendez Brooks serves as an example of a high-profile WWE performer resisting a specific kind of intrusive emotional labour, as defined by Arlie Hochschild in her work The Managed Heart (1979). Though Hochschild’s work has previously been used in pro wrestling scholarship by R.T. Smith in ‘Passion Work’ (2008), his focus on an independent promotion means emotional and physical labour are not considered on a high-profile storyline level as they are here; also, when neatly separating independent promotions from the WWE, Smith fails to adequately consider WWE’s monopoly position and its trickle-down effect on the industry. Drawing on Mendez Brooks’ confessional memoir Crazy is my Superpower (published outside the WWE) along with various podcast appearances, I argue for pro wrestling’s potential to promote scholar Celia Hunt’s idea of confession as ‘transformative learning’.
More in this series, WWE Confessional Stories 2001-2019:
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