Over the past few days, I’ve been editing a formal essay on academia, cosplay, and me (forthcoming Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, June 2023). In it, I talk about the increasing corporatisation of academia and its wide-ranging impact on knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation, as well as its effect on me as a former cultural studies academic now working in the public sphere. Writing,
If, as I described previously, cosplay is a practice of un/making meaning—of self, of subject, of world—then my happy engagement with it has perfectly readied me to imagine the world of knowledge-making otherwise; rather than, as was mooted, damning me to a bankrupt future, cosplay—as an art of making elsewise—has perhaps saved me.
Re-reading the essay—written in early 2022—reminded me that despite my liberation from academia, much of my work is still locked behind academic paywalls, which even I, as the author, cannot breach. Of course, "reminded" is the wrong word because I never forget this sad fact. What I should have said was that re-reading the essay stoked my simmering discontent with academic publishing, leaving me in something of a blue funk.
Seeking to escape my mulligrubs, I took myself out for a walk, putting one foot in front of the other—whether running, walking, or climbing—has always helped me move forward, or upward. That day, I needed to breathe, to move slowly, to gather my thoughts—a tricky thing to do in a fit of pique; much like foraging for fungi in early autumn, there’s a knack to bypassing the toxic in favour of the nourishing, so I walked.
Stepping away from my screen and toward the strand, I savoured the sensation of moving in two directions at the same time; one step took me away from my hopeless imbroglio and another toward its solution, and—true to form—by the time I caught the whiff of sulphurous air, I had hatched a plan. I would liberate my work from fortress academia—well, as much as legally possible.
And that untrivial pursuit starts here.
Keyword: Cosplay
The first piece I want to unlock is a “keyword” essay on cosplay, a subject close to my heart. Appearing in Keywords for Comics Studies (NYU Press, 2021) this “short, user-friendly, analytical” essay traces the histories, contours, and debates shaping cosplay, a burgeoning and ever-evolving fan practice. Reaching beyond its target audience, this essay will interest anyone curious about cosplay, but also those intrigued by the workings of identity, power, participatory culture, counterstorytelling, and radical worldmaking, for as the book’s editors observe, cosplay “has extremely important links to key conceptual questions in cultural studies, including practices of appropriation, ‘camp performance,’ disidentification, reparative reading, and the production of counterpublics.” As I write,
Racebending cosplay is an embodied costuming practice that reimagines the (usually white) source character’s race and ethnicity. It illuminates, responds to, and confronts the white-centrism of Western media; a mediascape grounded in traditions of racebending and whitewashing. Racebending cosplayers insert themselves into an exclusionary text’s meaningscape (and an often equally clannish fan-space). Arresting visualities and performances make the invisible, visible, the unimaginable, real, and the personal, political.
That’s one reason I want to share this essay with folks outside academia, because thinking and talking about cosplay allows us to think and talk about lots of other concepts and concerns—limning cosplay offers a distinct vantagepoint on the world, and, as I discuss in my forthcoming essay, on the world of academia.
Take my recent essay on cosplay for The Break, for example. Using cosplay as a jumping-off point, Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse tells the story of a little-known semantic shift, exploring what happens when the mainstream co-opts a grassroots term. As I argue, no shift in usage is ever so niche as to go unminded: “As all herders of little things know, small oversights can cause big problems down the line—just ask a bistitchual about dropped stitches”.
But in drawing attention to my essay, I want to also draw attention to the rather brilliant book in which it appears. Published by New York University Press in 2021, Keywords for Comics Studies is edited by the equally brilliant Ramzi Fawaz, Shelley Streeby, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley.
Adopting the abecedarian form of a dictionary, this eclectic volume introduces key terms, research traditions, histories, and debates shaping comics and sequential art. Amongst fifty original essays, readers will find entries on ink, sequence, and gutter nestling beside archive, nostalgia, and documentary, as well as queer, diversity, and censorship, and of course, cosplay. Canonical characters and titles also appear, such as Superman, Watchmen, and Love and Rockets. Written and edited by a diverse set of accomplished contributors, one gets a sense here of the books expansive and inclusive scope. Needless to say, I am thrilled to be in such good company, and in a book that transcends its subject to speak directly and meaningfully to the political and historical dimensions of cultural production, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the stories underpinning visual culture.
Please click here for the full essay, and keep an eye out (or subscribe) for future releases on topics as diverse as superheroes and trans* and gender identity, the representation and realities of superhero fandom, representation and diversity in comics studies, and the surprising lessons of feminist dystopia in Bitch Planet (the awesome "prison-world" comics series by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro). I’ll also be sharing snippets from my forthcoming book, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds, which is slated for publication later this year by the brilliant punctum books. (Note: punctum books are an independent, open-access publisher “dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual enquiry”. An inspirational space in the world of academic publishing, I recommend everyone check them out and their exceptional and ever-growing back catalogue.)
But don’t worry, I'll continue to share my original writing here. I’ve already planned socially engaged essays on libraries, public art, knowledge-making, alternative comics, and the civic imagination in the burgeoning Irish unity debate, as well as a good selection of book reviews.
2023 is set to be a great year, I hope you’ll stick around!
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