Cosplay: An Introductory Essay
from Keywords for Comics Studies (NYU Press, 2021)
This essay was originally published in Fawaz, Ramzi, Shelley Streeby, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, eds. Keywords for Comics Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Reprinted by permission of New York University Press.
Cosplay
Ellen Kirkpatrick
Cosplay — a neologism of “costume” and “(role)play” — is one of several modes of embodied participation in media fandom. As cosplayer Vivid Vivka tells us, “It’s dress-up, yes, but it’s so much more.” (Linde 2014) American comics, notably superhero titles, are a perennially popular source of cosplayable characters. And yet female (and) minority representation within the mainstream Western superhero genre, and pop culture more generally, is notoriously problematic — on- and off- page and screen. With a few valuable exceptions, mainstream superheroes are straight white men, living in straight white worlds. Yet despite the absences, exclusions, and periodic hostility, the genre remains popular with minoritarian fans and cosplayers. Indeed (coverage of) female cosplayers dominates the scene. Through a broader discussion of cosplay, this essay suggests how minoritarian cosplayers resist and reform exclusionary, and often hostile, meaningscapes — text, lived, and fandom. (Borrowing from José Esteban Muñoz, “I use the term minoritarian to index citizen-subjects who, due to antagonisms within the social such as race, class, and sex, are debased within the majoritarian public sphere.” (Muñoz 2009, 56)) It also theorizes connections between cosplay and the superhero genre, alongside considering the mechanics behind transporting characters from boundless, fantastical textual realms to a bounded, mundane material realm.
As a diverse, global practice with a long-established history cosplay is subject to definitional complexity and fluidity, but its descriptions typically include: costume, dressing up, fan, identity, bodies, performance, transformation, boundaries, (fan) conventions, and community. The root of the descriptor “cosplay” (kosupure) is contested. For some it first appeared in print, written as コスプレ, in a photo-essay produced by anime exponent Takahashi Nobuyuki. The piece, published in June 1983 in the Japanese anime magazine My Anime, chronicles the costuming practices of manga and anime fans (see Jee 2008; Plunkett 2014). Whilst for others, pieces written by Takahashi in 1984 provide the origin point (see Bruno n.d.; Hlozek 2004; Gilligan 2011). Whatever the date, however, Takahashi used “cosplay” to express the concept of fannish masquerade witnessed at pop culture conventions such as WorldCon (est. 1939) and Comiket (est. 1975). But media fans throughout the globe were certainly dressing and performing as their favorite characters and heroes long before the 1980s (Winge 2006). Indeed, there is nothing spectacularly new about dressing up as one’s heroes. People have always used their bodies and clothing, in some fashion or other, to play at being other beings. Usually, but not always, more powerful beings. We might think of the costuming practices of classical antiquity where religious adherents would dress up as their favorite gods, Renaissance masquerades, or the totemic dressing practices of many Indigenous Peoples. But not only people, gods — so the myths tell us — also like to dress up and become, or appear as, other beings. The world’s mythologies are full of stories about the shapeshifting and costuming practices of gods visiting Earth to play at being human or animal. Just as the godlike Kal-El does when he becomes, or plays at being, the earthly Clark Kent. or as members of furry fandom do when they don a “fursuit” and play at being animals. What is spectacular today however is the sheer scale — range, texture, spaces, and variety — of costume play.
As an evolving branch of fandom research, early cosplay studies understandably foregrounded the idea of cosplay as fans dressing up within convention settings and role-playing fictional characters; this frequently ethnographic work often documented practice and explored motivations (see Winge 2006; Gunnels 2009; Lamerichs 2010; Rahman, Wing-Sun and Cheung, 2012). Bakhtin’s idea of “carnival”, Goffman’s “performance”, and Butler’s “performativity” (and work on drag) were popular conceptual lenses during this time, and still are today. Discussions crisscrossed through concepts of performance (Lamerichs 2010; Gunnels 2009), identity and embodiment (performance and politics), notably around gender and sexuality — at this time often discussing “crossplay” performances (e.g. when a self-identified female cosplayer cosplays a male identified character) (Leng 2013; Bainbridge and Norris 2013) — and affective fan labor and/or gender (Norris and Bainbridge 2009; Scott 2015). Alternative modes of costuming practice, such as digital cosplay (Booth 2015) and “real-life superheroes” (Kirkpatrick 2013) also received some limited attention. Recent studies have however also started to explore these kinds of concepts against less costumey, “everyday” modes of fannish dress. often dubbed “stealth” or “closet” cosplay, including fan fashion and couture (Lamerichs 2018) and Disneybounding (dressing as contemporary versions of Disney characters in daily life (Brock 2017)). The idea of “bounding” is currently evolving to include other media texts, such as “Potter bounding” (referencing J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) and, more generally, “fandom bounding” (ibid.). Other overlooked modes of cosplay, such as intergenerational cosplay (Pett 2016), are also now being examined.
Fan responses and mainstream coverage of cosplay track these trends and themes, as well as contemporaneously highlighting and confronting rampant sexism within cosplay culture and broader fan cultures (i.e., the “fake geek girls” slur). 2010, for instance, saw the first flashes of what became the “Cosplay is not Consent” movement and the anomalous and trailblazing “Geek Girls Exist” panel at San Diego Comic-Con that blossomed into the grassroots Geek Girl Con (est. 2011). (By 2013, the radical spirit of “Cosplay is not Consent” had morphed into a global awareness-raising intervention; one making substantial progress in speaking out against — stamping out sexual harassment within anime, comic book, and pop culture conventions (see Culp 2016)).
Yet, as within other branches of fan studies, intersections of race, ethnicity, disability, class, and age were often noted in cosplay studies but received no substantive attention. This is slowly changing (see Pande 2018; Warner 2015; Kirkpatrick forthcoming 2019). Fan-instigated movements and activism, such as the Twitter hashtag #28daysofblackcosplay founded by “blerd” (black nerd) cosplayer Chaka Cumberbatch (Broadnax 2015), “Indigenous Comic Con”, “Texas Latino Comic Con”, and the budding “CosAbility” (cosplay for people with disabilities) movement, were critical to this awakening. Mainstream events, such as San Diego Comic-Con, are also spotlighting the often-overlooked diversity within comics and fan cultures by hosting awareness-raising sessions, such as the 2017 panel, “We Are All Heroes: The Changing Landscape of Comics, Geekdom, and Fanboy Culture”.
The increased amount of work engaging issues around marginalized identities and an exclusionary mediascape frequently points to racebending fanwork as disidentificatory work; in this way, racebending cosplay becomes theorizable as an embodied mode of disidentification and/or resistive or reparative enactment. Racebending refers to practices that rework the race and ethnicity of source characters. It has two expressions: 1) the whitewashing practices — representing minority source characters as white — of the mainstream media (see Lopez 2011; Reid 2017; Bravo n.d.) and the subsequent grassroots advocacy and activism against these injurious practices (see racebending.com), and 2) those fan practices that diversify exclusory and culturally appropriative texts by representing white source characters as people of color, such as “Racebent Disney” and the racebending practices of factions of Harry Potter fandom (Seymour 2018). Racebending cosplay is then 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. In creating alternative images and new ways of looking – at both the original image and the new image – this kind of remediative play transforms not only the look of the present but how we view the past and (re)imagine the future. Racebending performances are often sites of empowerment, resistance, and activism. Racebending cosplayers can effect change on a range of intersecting levels: textual, civic, fandom, and personal. It must be stressed, however, that whilst conventions and “geek” culture can provide safe spaces for queer or minoritarian cosplayers, it is not always so (see Figa 2015a; Figa 2015b; Micheline 2015; Gooden 2016). Women of color cosplayers are vulnerable to a particularly virulent and brazen strain of abuse that intersects through race and gender (Cumberbatch 2013). “Flame Con”, NYC’s first queer comics convention provides a much-needed guaranteed safe space. Social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr can similarly provide invaluable safe spaces, support networks, and community building opportunities, and not just amongst cosplaying communities of color (see, for example, (Jackson, Bailey and Foucault Welles 2017).
Cosplay almost always concerns more than simply dressing up in the likeness of fictional (or self-created) characters; though that is definitely large part of its pleasure. For many, cosplay is also about capturing the spirit, or “habitus” (Bainbridge and Norris 2013), of an often-beloved character. As cosplayer Katrina Meowsir comments, “I get to bring my favourite characters to “life” so to speak” (McIsaac 2012). Cosplay does not, however, always signify such fannish devotion. Character choice is a rich and complex process. Some cosplayers perform one character repeatedly, whilst others perform many (Rahman, Wing-Sun and Cheung, 2012). And whilst most feel a connection to the source character, some simply like the look of a character’s costume (Winge 2006) or base their selection on a character’s “trending” popularity or share a character’s body type. But choosing a source character is just the first step of a cosplayer’s journey. The next is to (re)create the costume, another idiosyncratic process. Cosplay costumes and props may be lovingly handmade or crafted, commissioned, or “shop-bought” — or a blend of these possibilities — and involve body modification (e.g., contact lenses, dental prosthetics). For dedicated cosplayers, cosplay is not just about the material costuming of the body but the material performance of the body; devoted cosplayers learn signature poses, facial expressions and even dialogue to fully render their cosplay (see Winge 2006; Rahman, Wing-Sun and Cheung 2012). But these mimetic modes of cosplay involve intricate movements as the cosplayer endeavors to transfer the — often fantastical — source character from the page or screen to the more mundane human bodyscape. I theorize this kind of cosplay as embodied translation and a mode of embodied reception (see Kirkpatrick 2013; Kirkpatrick 2015). (I describe translation as a continuous, fluid, and unassured meaning-making process and cosplayers, as translators, as empowered meaning-makers.) These concepts are proposed as a way of theorizing connections and repetitions between diegetic superhero costuming practices and cosplay and the transference of the fantastic to the mundane.
Cosplay and the Superhero Genre
Characters from anime, manga, and tokusatsu, dominate the cosplay scene, but cosplayers also frequently draw inspiration from other pop culture media. Fans today cosplay celebrities, musicians, and film directors. Witness Jessi Chartier’s Patty Jenkins — director of Wonder Woman (2017) — cosplay at Chicago’s Comic & Entertainment Expo (Hale-Stern 2018). Amongst these other sources, the mainstream American superhero genre proves incredibly popular — a genre rooted in American comic books. (For whilst the superhero genre flourishes outside the comics medium, comics remains its homeland.) The genre’s popularity within cosplay culture is perhaps not that surprising given its ubiquity in today’s mediascape and that American comic book fandom is “one of the most dedicated, active fandoms.” (Perren and Felschow 2018, 309) Notions of cosplay also feature routinely in superhero stories, either directly or indirectly (Kirkpatrick 2015). But, I suggest, connections between the superhero genre and cosplay culture run much deeper than that. Both are — through their preoccupations with concepts of “becoming” via experimental identity-play, transforming bodies, and, of course, masking and costuming — in deep dialogue. The origin story created for the second rendering of the Flash, Barry Allen (1956), illustrates several moments of juncture between superhero comics and cosplay performance.
Just like comic book readers reading Showcase #4 (1956), Barry Allen, the new Flash to be, was shown reading an old issue of the Flash. This image not only nods to the changing demographics of comics readers and opinions on comics readership; it also indicates Allen as both a reader of comics and a fan of the Flash — a rare representation. (It functions too as an example of the real-life superhero costuming trope.) But the transformative accident endowing Allen with “super-speed” allows him to take his pleasure in his childhood hero a step further than most fans; it allows the fulfilment of his desire to become the, or a, Flash. It is not enough for Allen, however, to possess the Flash’s powers; he wants to be seen as the Flash. Allen adopts his hero’s code-name, modifies his costume, and replicates his crime-fighting behavior. Allen does not have to: he chooses to. This origin story knowingly and deliberately plugs into the desires of many superhero genre fans and cosplayers. Similarly, sometimes it is not enough to know oneself as a fan one must demonstrate it. Cosplaying a favored character publicly displays the cosplayer as a fan and allows them to become, be seen, for a moment as that beloved character. For superheroes and cosplayers, costuming creates another way of reading visually and thus another mode of being.
Cosplay, especially perhaps superhero cosplay, transfers the fantastical — and, regarding racebending cosplay, the often invisible — into the realm of the mundane and much is lost, and gained, in translation. Cosplay is, I suggest, in this sense more about translation than transformation. Cosplayers of fantastical source characters, including superheroes, rewrite the ontology of these characters. Superhero cosplayers will never, unlike their heroes, become a “real” superhero by changing their mode of dress. The idea of delimited superhero performance speaks to the mode of costuming and identity-play performed by a growing, and not unproblematic, subculture of social activists known as “real-life superheroes” (Kirkpatrick 2017). The superhero genre is a major source of inspiration for these civic-minded citizens, from its costuming practices to its moral code with many “heroically” working for the benefit of, and to protect, their local communities. Curiously, although deeply invested in superhero ontology, aesthetics, and morality the lack of fannishness in their performances and surrounding discourse is notable. The bounded performances of superhero cosplayers and real-life superheroes demonstrate that superheroes can only really exist in the genre’s imaginary realms — cosplay eliminates the “super” from the superhero. Embodied translation speaks to the processes involved in performing the “extraordinary” within the limits of the “ordinary”: it is “uniquely enacted within the frame and bounds of the material body of the cosplayer. Thus, in translating an established character, cosplayers are implicated in a process of (re)creation, they produce simultaneously a new character and a revised version of the original.” (Kirkpatrick 2013, 64) But, and remembering that there are few minoritarian source characters to draw from, transgressive cosplayers perform an additional layer of imaginary work. Through their performances they deliver the “extraordinary” idea of minoritarian superheroes from their imaginations, via genre tropes, into the material realm. Superhero cosplay creates the idea of a Superman who cannot fly and a Spider-Man sans “Spidey-Sense” but its transgressive modes also, critically, reveal the possibility of a Black, disabled Superman or a Muslim, female Captain America. Each in their own way, a radical reimagining — embodied translation — of the superhero as portrayed in the largely white hetero-patriarchal genre. As with transgressive cosplay, real-life superheroes disrupt mainstream Western superhero ideology, ontology, and aesthetics, and display the idea of the superhero as a rallying figure for change in personal, political, and even perhaps textual realms. This disruptive quality is not localized to the superhero cosplayer or the superhero genre but touches all types of cosplay involving fantastical source characters.
Like cosplayers, the meaning of cosplay is experiencing a transformation. It is expanding beyond one-off fan-centric events and out into everyday spaces. And, although you perhaps wouldn’t think it — given the hegemonic biases and privileges historically stifling fan studies — cosplay is performed by majoritarian and minoritarian fans. The challenge facing those mapping cosplay culture today is to decolonize cosplay studies by undertaking remedial work that documents and theorizes the motivations and practices of minoritarian cosplayers. It is also, more broadly, to reveal the transformative potential of cosplay, on all (intersecting) levels: seen and unseen, desired and unsolicited, personal and political, ludic and activist, textual, material and fannish. Doing so will allow the emergence of a more nuanced, expansive understanding of cosplay; one that accounts not only for cosplay in other spaces but performed by “other” kinds of fans.
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