Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse
Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift
Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance. — bell hooks
The fight against bad English is not frivolous… — George Orwell
Cosplay is big news, today. And I’m not just talking about within the realms of fandom and fan studies; cosplay has hit the mainstream hard over the last few decades. A socio-cultural evolution seeing its meaning change in ways unexpected and not yet quite understood. Once describing a subcultural, niche fan practice, cosplay is fast becoming a metonym for all kinds of dressing up practices. Forget the subtleties of masking and costuming, masquerade, mimicry, fancy dress, dressing up, or just plain old dressing, it’s all cosplay now.1 As a natural aspect of evolving phenomena, semantic shifts are hardly surprising— that’s not the story here. Like seasoned seamsters, fans and scholars are always adjusting the meaning of cosplay, altering its pattern and form, letting it out a bit here, a timely tuck or hem there, and always embellishing our understanding of this art of making otherwise. Less important then is the idea that cosplay’s meaning is stretchable, it’s the origin, nature, and agents of this particular public amplification that I want to observe and consider, and its potential impact upon what’s rather magically called the “cosphere”.
Pinpointing when I first became aware of journalists using cosplay as shorthand for dressing up in western mainstream news and entertainment media reportage is tricky. I inappreciably felt the approaching storm before realising it, like catching the sweet whiff of ozone on the summer air. A quick search of newspapers suggests it couldn’t have been before 2021 because that’s when “cosplay” starts showing up in news headlines. In recent months, the trend has been gathering pace in the British news media, owing largely to the Conservative Party leadership election, in which both candidates — Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — were accused of cosplaying a variety of sources, from professions and trades to economic classes and past political figures.2 Well-heeled Sunak has, for example, “cosplayed” a soldier and “plays” at being a plebeian, rather poorly, it has to be said, and Truss too.3 Moreover, as a “walking embodiment of [the] union flag”, Truss — frequently dressed in red and blue colour blocks — is also thought likely to be cosplaying the Union Jack, the UK’s national flag, alongside dangerous concepts like nationalism and patriotism. (Following that line of thought, Thatcher herself arguably cosplayed as soldiers and Russians.)
This semantic shift has not gone unnoticed. Large parts of the notoriously irreverent British public are gleefully seizing upon the idea of cosplaying politicians— a garden-fresh stick to beat them with. Prior to this groundswell of usage, cosplay-as-dress-up was most often targeted at former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — infamous for dress up and play acting— and his “Cosplay Cabinet”: “A quick glance through their PR shots you will find top politicians dressed in camouflage, branded jumpers, hardhats, aprons, lab coats, police jackets, goggles and fishmonger hats.”
There’s nothing new in politicians dressing up to attract voters or to build their brand, of course. Appearing as or like another popular or public figure can help make the strange familiar, efficiently signalling political stances and continuities and so forth; a helpful tactic for “unknown quantities” wishing to amass public appeal quickly (and economically), as we’ll see later. And much like fan cosplayers, they draw upon a mix of sources, real life and fictional and specific and general.
JFK set a trend for Air Force bomber jackets, a vogue followed by every US president since, usefully tying into martial and hero mythologies.4 Vladimir Putin reinforces his alpha male image by dressing up as all kinds of “action men”, from soldiers and bikers to hunters, the bare-chested variety. Buffoons and clowns inspire Johnson and Donald Trump from their pantomime coiffures to their outsize clothing and grins. Johnson is regularly derided for his awful Churchill cosplay too.5 And when official campaign photos of the usually sharp-suited French President Emmanuel Macron showed him unshaven and wearing a black special forces hoodie, he was roundly "accused" of cosplaying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Election campaigns, however, see even the most sartorially challenged politicians dress up as something, anything to attract voters; in the US, it’s often cowboys, in the UK farmers, in Taiwan, it’s Squid Game players, and in Peru, to secure the “otaku” vote, it’s anime characters.
Dressing up like fictional secret agents — think James Bond, all dark custom suits and bespoke watches — is de rigueur amongst male politicians of all stripes, however. (Tellingly, Putin’s personal number plate is 007.) Like the imported trees in Belfast’s iconic “Palm House”, our idea of what powerful people look like — resolutely male and wearing business attire — is planted, deep-rooted, and out of place. Thus, women politicians too, sadly, often dress up like — or, today, cosplay as? — male politicians and tycoons, or spies. As Mary Beard writes, “we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.” Social progress, of course, brings the possibility of altering that template.
J’accuse!
But it’s not just politicians, journalists, or dissenters who are driving this semantic shift. Public discourse is awash with all kinds of people describing all kinds of other people as cosplayers, often in accusatory tones.6 Members of American far-right, neo-fascist, male organisations are frequently, and mockingly, characterised as cosplaying Nazis or soldiers, real and fictional (e.g., “Call of Duty”, Peacemaker, or Punisher). Antifa fighters, those black-clad activists known as the “black bloc”, are likewise described as cosplaying soldiers or ninjas or even — to tactically muddy the waters — MAGA devotees, that’s to say charged with cosplaying MAGA insurrectionists at the January 6th Capitol Riot. Frequently too, MAGA adherents denigrate Antifa activists as “cosplay activists”, those whose activism is performative rather than substantive.
Keeping with the rich MAGA theme, this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) not only played brazenly with fascist and Nazi symbolism and iconography but dabbled with performance art in the form of a tableau vivant. Whilst characterised on social media as cosplay, the “living picture” performance was closer to a cosplay skit— a short theatrical piece or performance. Hatched by pro-Trump influencer Brandon Straka, the skit’s surreality makes it worthy of description: a teary white male (Straka) wearing a fresh orange jump suit — and incongruously a red MAGA cap and conference badge — sits barefoot in a prop jail cell.7 A consolatory Marjorie Taylor Greene kneels at his feet, scarlet-clad, dollish ‘n’ doltish, and happy to play Mary Magdalene to his sideshow Jesus. Outside the “cell” a tepid hellfire “preacher” leads an offbeat congregation in prayer. (If you feel up to it, you can check it out here.) After the act, onlookers could either silently contemplate the weepy prisoner — surely parodying commemorative traditions of silent moments — or don a headset and listen to testimonies from those arrested on January 6th, getting an earful and an eyeful at the same time— a watery encounter promoting reflection, one hopes.
With everything noted so far, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve reached the limit of actions describable as cosplay.8 Not so. In the public imagination, such is the stretchiness of “cosplay” that countries may be described as cosplaying other countries, from other times: during a recent United Nations Security Council meeting, Sergiy Kyslytsya (Ukrainian ambassador to the UN) asked, “Why has the Russian Federation decided to cosplay the Nazi Third Reich by attacking the peaceful neighboring state and plunging the region into war?”
Note that, apropos behaviour, nothing is changing here; people are doing what they’ve always done, and countries; the only thing changing is how journalists and editors and everyday people are now choosing to describe those doings: what was once dress up, mimicry, pantomime, and so forth is now cosplay. A specialized media fan term is being publicly co-opted, in real-time; its meaning (potentially) altered as frequent misuse becomes standard. And, as we’ll get into later, adopting “fanspeak” allows lay users to tap into a wellspring of subordinate meanings, often nefariously; that’s to say, politicians readable as media fans, or “worse” — as far as flattening gender stereotypes go — as media “fanboys” or “fangirls”. The action of dressing up in the public sphere is itself undergoing something of a semantic costume change. And we must, as George Orwell advises, be ever watchful of language change — buzzwords, euphemisms, replacements, etc. — enacted by the state and its agents and adopted within public discourse, as we’ll also get into later.
Yet perhaps there’s good reason for the curious uptake of cosplay in news media and everyday parlance, and it’s not just a bad habit demonstrating muddy thinking. After all, the behaviours I’ve been cataloguing do share much with fan cosplay— as far as a meaning or definition of media fan cosplay can be pinned down, that is. But do they fall within what Theresa Winge usefully describes as the “cosplay continuum”?
Let’s take a closer look.
Countries aside, people are using modes of dress to play with their identity; in many cases, there’s a citation of specific sources (real and fictional); some parties make their “costumes” whilst others shop for them; costumes can be outlandish or “everyday”, the latter form mirroring developing trends within fan cosplay domains for less costumey modes of cosplay, such as Disneybounding or “stealth” or “closet” cosplay. As in fan cosplay, certain performances have more depth than others with some “players” perfecting idiolects, facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and so on. But it can go deeper. News media, for example, describe Truss as cosplaying Thatcher sartorially and ideologically; as with Thatcher, Truss cultivates a reputation for hard-nosed politics and an unbending leadership style.9 Over these last weeks, the British public has watched Truss (try to) forge herself as an “Iron Lady”; in keeping with technological advances, her robotic and despotic performance proves, however, rather more “Evil Robot Maria” from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
Does it seem fair then that people describe these behaviours as cosplay? Yes, perhaps. But for all the points of connection, something blocks me from affirming these kinds of happenings as cosplay. I sense a disconnect; deeper realities lie beneath surfaces. Encountering another mainstream headline or news story ballyhooing “cosplay” is like coming upon a cultural shadowland, offering a grimmer, soulless view or version of cosplay. Something is missing from these mainstream usages and practices, something vital, some vital things. To regain the missing things is to make sense of the disconnect.
Self-definition is one of those missing things. And relatedly, intention. Intention to cosplay, that is. (There are plenty of other intentions behind these usages and dress-up performances— courting voters, for example.) Like vegans, cosplayers announce themselves. That’s to say, they happily self-identify as cosplayers; they want you to know they’re cosplaying or are part of cosplay culture. Even those performing “stealth” or “closet” cosplay acknowledge their practice in some form, public or personal; enquiries upon it are not met with surprise, denial, or silence. Even cosplayer politicians — in the traditional fannish sense — like Taiwanese legislator Lai Pin-Yu proudly affirm themselves as part of the cosplay family. But the people involved in the opening examples are described as cosplaying; they do not recognise or identify themselves as cosplaying, nor indeed as dressing up; others label them so. Even today, politicians, say, may be unaware that “cosplay” is a thing, never mind a thing that they might do— such are the bubbles we inhabit.
Thus, whilst some politicians might be readable as cosplaying, they might not see it that way; they’re not trying to “be” or to “be recognised” as someone else; it’s accidental, coincidental, detrimental, if discovered. Stated otherwise, those “cosplaying”, or channelling the look or ideas of other national leaders, for example, would surely deny it. In their world, imitation is far from a sincere form of flattery (unless you’re the one being imitated, that is). Rather, it suggests fakery, unoriginality, and followership, as well as play-acting; when what politicians want, no, need is to be seen as the real deal, as trailblazers, as serious leaders, as themselves.
Is awareness a requisite of cosplay? To what extent must we know we’re doing it to be doing it? Must cosplay, like war or bankruptcy, be declared to be “real”? A curious question given cosplay’s deep bond to the imaginary, which brings me to my next missing thing— imagination.
Cosplay is an art of making things otherwise— the self, the text (in its broadest sense), the world. As Theresa Winge memorably describes it, cosplay is all about “costuming the imagination”.10 The word we have somehow settled upon — for the time being, things can always change in cosplay culture — to describe this diverse range of behaviours tells us everything we need to know; more than just “dressing up as”, cosplay combines costume and (role)play and is deeply bound to the imagination and invention and pleasure and desire. Even when the cosplayer means only to replicate their source text, it’s still an act of imagination, often lovefuelled.11 A worldmaking act illustrating a bondedness to the origin text and a wish to share and celebrate that bond with everyone, and to give and take pleasure in that sharing, in connecting with the source and with cosplay communities, real world and digital.
All this good stuff — creativity, pleasure, transformation, belonging, worldmaking — materializes from everyday encounters with the imagination. It’s hard to imagine cosplay without imaginings, and gloomy. Imagine: a wren without a song; a spring morning without its chorus— “a thousand blended notes”; a heart without cause to soar— “the freshness of the morning/ the dew drop on the flower”. The objects — bird, dawn, heart — remain in this imagining but lacking now the things that make them manifestly them.12 And that’s what I feel when I see what’s being reported as cosplay in mainstream news and social media. It looks like people (possibly) dressing up as other kinds of people, all surface and no heart. And I find that it doesn’t really look like cosplay at all.
Where’s the intention, the creativity, the love, the community, the play?
A trail of questions returning me to my terminus a quo: Why are a great many people choosing to replace perfectly good terms — dress up, mimicry, costuming, copycat, and so forth — with cosplay? Beyond observing this surface change, what are we to make of it? What deeper realities lie beneath this semantic shift?
Cosplay has had its hundredth monkey moment, for sure.13 Once describing only a petit monde of media fandom, cosplay has shifted from “geek” descriptor to everyday parlance; an evolution shadowing its move from margin to center, the international limelight. Yet despite periodic and lively discussions within fan circles about the “future of fandom”, or as it’s sometimes phrased, the “end of fandom”, I’m not sure anyone could have predicted this spurious expansion in usage and meaning, still less think about what it means— but think about it we must for it’s a semantic shift gathering rather than losing momentum.
A question intrudes itself into my barely begun thoughts, one worth stating but not, I think, elaborately answering: Does mass adoption of the descriptor “cosplay” mark the end of cosplay? (Shortish answer: No. These new usages will not kill fan cosplay, just as photography didn’t kill painting, digital publishing didn’t bump off books, and Zoom hasn’t terminated face-to-face meetings— nor, alas, science done away with religion. But they might change cosplay’s meaningscape.14) More absorbing is its sister question: If anything and everything can (or cannot) be cosplay, then what is cosplay? And who gets to decide— Who makes meaning stick?
Change, of course, provokes questions; not all, as we’ve seen, worthy of answers, or leastways long answers.15 But there are a few questions worth cracking open before closing.
Why the broadening out and uptick in popular usage— why now? What work is the descriptor “cosplay” doing in these new spheres of usage— from news and entertainment media to social media? What do these usages say about public perceptions of cosplay, of media fandom, more broadly? How do these newly described modes of cosplay fit or extend our current template of fan cosplay? Might they reshape it? What does, can, cosplay mean now? Moreover, might this popular semantic change, or charge, rekindle the definitional project, the not-so-small matter of defining cosplay?
Let’s start thinking then but without traditional expectations of arriving at a full, satisfying account of this phenomenon. Adopting principles of “low theory”, what follows is the beginning, or continuance, of an unplanned journey, one seeking not to arrive at a final destination or a clear-cut answer — an impossibility given the in-process nature of, well, everything — nor to adjudge a firm understanding of what’s happening but rather to happen upon other ways of understanding this unfolding phenomenon.16
But it’s not a solo journey.
It includes you, the reader and fellow meaning-maker, unknown to me but doubtless full of thoughts on the subject at hand. Egalitarian, disordered collaboration is critical to developing new forms of knowing; sharing our motley thoughts and experiences allows us to build alternative knowledge-making communities, which are essential to becoming better acquainted with emerging phenomena and better prepared, as Jack Halberstam advises, to "illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life".17
A few opening thoughts—
Looking into popular uses of “cosplay”, I’m immediately struck by how it trends towards the pejorative. Not always in the words chosen but invariably in tone. People on the left “larp around as a cosplay ‘Resistance’”; they’re “cosplay cowards”, “just cosplay activists”. Those on the right are “cosplay Stormtroopers”, “cosplay jackalopes”, part of an “incel-civil-war-cosplay crowd”, or even more jaw-breakingly, “talibangelical cosplay Rambo MAGA QAnon cultist traitors”. Antifa are “cosplay clowns”, a “street theater/cosplay platoon”, or some kind of generic “violence cosplay or kinda like Nazi furries”. A similar sneering tone is perceptible in news and entertainment media. Headlines and stories pushing a cosplay angle are laden with terms like “fake” or (“highbrow” press only) “faux”, “impersonating”, “ridiculous”, “acting out”, “farce”, “veneer”, and on and on.
In this scene, describing someone as cosplaying is far from complimentary. It’s an insult. Akin to yelling, “Oi! You’re a phoney!” at someone “masking” down the street.18 An affrontous, textured charge of being duplicitous, counterfeit, superficial, dishonest, infantile, and relatedly, clownish. (Vastly different to the meaning operating within media fan culture.) A smear tying into escapism too, its negative connotation, that is— a topic for another day. People “accused” of cosplaying may well be all these things, but that cosplay has come to enfold such negative qualities — has become the insult du jour in the public imagination — is exasperating. More than that, it’s perplexing. Because to start using “cosplay” as scornful shorthand, there must be some sort of general agreement that it works as scornful shorthand, that the sheathed insult, like the ubiquitous velvet gloved fist, will be felt when it hits— otherwise, what’s the point? And yet that’s what’s happening, today, not only are everyday people choosing to now use “cosplay” invectively, they understand that it (works) as invective.
But I don’t remember getting my invite to the husting on repurposing the meaning of cosplay, nor my polling card. Do you? I’m being facetious, of course, but I’m curious about this semantic shift, by the idea that disparate publics have reached consensus on shifting cosplay’s popular meaning, imperceptibly and simultaneously. And it’s not just down to context. As we’ll see, a golden thread of (mis)understanding about cosplay, and media fandom more generally, strings this rattle-bag coalition of meaning-makers together.
And like watching a flock of murmuring starlings in the twilight winter sky, I wonder less about the why-of-it-all — that we may never really know — and more about the how. (Knowing too, somewhere deep inside, that looking at the how-of-things usually reveals something of the why, as illustrated below.) How has “cosplay” come to this place, so far from its source set of meanings? A question we can start puzzling out by looking at how people outside media fandom (mis)use “cosplay” as a descriptor. Usage rooted in partial knowledge and manifesting in one of two ways, both troubling, one more so than the other. Whatever the popular expression, however, the effect tends to be the same: derision.
Observing “cosplay” in the wild, a trio of words springs swiftly to mind: inattentive, imitative, and increasing. That’s how usages of “cosplay” manifest in public realms, mostly. Its uptick in public discourse speaks to its massification; that’s to say, over time, publics have developed a popular familiarity with the broad idea of “cosplay” but not the actual fan practice and/or scholarship, a scenario creating the perfect conditions for inattentive and imitative usage. Put otherwise: not comprehending the breadth and qualities enfolded into “cosplay”, everyday people may be simply unaware that “cosplay” means more than “dressing up as [x]” and thus might straightforwardly replace one term for the other. Seems a fair point. Moreover, cosplay is part of today’s pop cultural zeitgeist and so referring to it is a sure-fire way to sound culturally informed, relevant, and perhaps — given cosplay’s heterodoxy — a little edgy too. Another fair point. It’s worth remembering, however, that, and riffing off Orwell, language usage is never entirely neutral. Before getting into that issue, however, I should quickly qualify the idea of inattentive use. That’s to say, whilst folks outside media fan culture may not still be entirely clear on what cosplay is, they know enough to be able to exploit ancillary meanings. And thus, the utility of “cosplay” in popular discourse starts to raise its head, open its close-lipped mouth, and commence speaking softly to the why-of-it-all.
Take journalists, for example. Granted, at first, they may not know the full meaning of cosplay; after all, why should they, media fandom can be bewildering, from a mainstream perspective. But we can expect them to ferret it out, right? Isn’t part of their job, their joy, to find out what words mean before using them? To discover — through careful research and communing with experts (via experience and/or study) — the best words to use to describe unfamiliar phenomena and to share that knowledge, those stories, those words and worlds, with us, their readers. And if that isn’t a journalistic duty today then we have lost something without price, for it certainly was a prized feature of journalism in the past. How then do we explain their inattentive usage? Incompetence? Laziness? Indifference? General befuddlement?
But wait.
What if there’s something wilful behind journalistic usages of “cosplay”, something tactical. Not tactical in the sense of a shrewd misuse of the full, fannish meaning of cosplay. (That would presuppose an awareness of that meaning, and that, sadly, seems unlikely today.) It’s more that journalists are tactically deploying “cosplay” to quickly tap into a range of secondary meanings, associations, and stereotypes. Whilst inattentive, replacing “dressing up” with “cosplay” might not always thus be a lousy habit, a sign of lazy thinking, or an imitative utterance; it may be calculated: one small, sharp word can do the bladework of many.
An example: wishing to negatively critique erstwhile UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a few British journalists took to describing him as a cosplaying statesman. Doing so, our errant wordsmiths were able to disparage Johnson subtly and effectively in a way that touting him as “dressing up” could never do.19 Cosplay gave them cover, a disguise. Having recourse to its masked meanings — childish, bogus, mendacious, unserious etc. — allowed mainstream journalists to communicate messages that would likely not have reached page or screen had they been said directly. (To say nothing of saving word counts.) Messages that were, despite the subversion, all too clear to readers, somehow already versed in “cosplay” as invective, as observed earlier. The morpheme “play” too makes the descriptor “cosplay” irresistible low hanging fruit for those wishing to suggest some behaviour is mere trumpery— a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollick.20 A smear spreading easily to the one so behaving; Johnson thus becomes readable as a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollicker. And so it goes.
When tactically used, “cosplay” works efficiently as a motely slur by tapping into ugly and persistent perceptions of media fandom. For despite increasing and positive visibility, media fans can still fall foul of adverse stereotypes in public imaginaries. Y’know what I’m talking about here: media fans presented as puerile losers and loners and nerds— think “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons. Or worse, as “crazy”, “obsessed”, “freakish”, “rabid”, and “unhinged”— think of Annie Wilkes from Misery, if you dare. Exactly the kinds of people you don’t want running — or ruining — your country. Like lazy bakers going to the larder for a packet of bread mix, loafing journalists pull these stereotypes off the shelf for their shake and bake “cosplay” news stories. And whilst it’s grand that journalists found a way to satirize a “Teflon” leader in a partisan press, it’s not so great that they had to find an artful way of doing so, such is the state of the British press. Moreover, as a cosplay aficionado, it’s disheartening that cosplay proved the sacrificial lamb in this political roasting.
Untangling the threads weaving through this example, we see a combination of usages produce cosplay’s piercing effect. Ditto for popular usages. Yet there is much still to discover. For as is becoming clear, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of this popular if niche semantic shift, and given the power of words, language, and stories to reflect, to illuminate, to manifest, and to transform — for good and ill — this unfolding trend is one to watch.
A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language. — Noam Chomsky
Before closing I want to dig lightly into some of those subterranean goings on. To think a little more and a little more broadly about why this localized semantic change matters; that’s to say, why we should notice and care about conflicts between grassroots — here, media fan — and mainstream meaning-making practices.
Unlike Athena, cosplay did not appear fully formed from the head of one creator. Like all grassroots movements, practices, and words, it emerges through time, people, and place. Media fans spun the cosplay idea from lived experience, hand-weaving the festooned fabric of this global practice and culture through decades of love-entangled encounters with media texts, all too often exclusionary and hostile. That’s to say, the cosplay idea materialized from us. We are its mother-tongue. Our minds, bodies, histories, imaginings, realities, and localities collectively shape its meaning, its protean definition. And definitions are, like maps with blank spaces, to be treasured not feared. Not interned in dictionaries, splayed in showcases, nor pinned to boards in dusty museum drawers like specimen butterflies, lying still, wings no longer flittering, no longer capable of changing worlds, but instead fannish definitions beat through us and our communities, always fluttering, wild, on the tips of our tongues.
Yet — arguably more influential — non-native speakers are now mediating the meaning of words, of worlds, we have made; indeed, words and worlds we are still making; in public squares, they’re translating the language we dream and play in.21 Modern transmogrifiers, compromising the possibilities, the promise of cosplay in public imaginaries— will this corrupted meaning sprout still more wings and take off in other yet unimagined directions? Will it beat its way into fan imaginaries too?
Cosplay = what lies await?
Cosplay is, of course, a growing plurality; an umbrella term sheltering many meanings and modes, and many words to describe those vogues. Indeed, media fans are eminently creative when it comes to language and to coining new words and phrases to describe their fandoms and practices; the arrival of a new mode of cosplay is almost always accompanied by a new or compound expression— think: crossplay, cosability, photocosplay, hijab-cosplay, Disney- or Potter bounding, ishoku-hada (body paint cosplay), stealth- or closet- cosplay, and so forth. But the expressions — action and usage — I’ve been discussing are emerging outside cosplay culture, outside media fandom, and within the cultural dominant. Representing too a new, and leastways to my mind, unexpected evolution in cosplay’s ontology. So, what to do? How will cosplay communities respond to this semantic encroachment, especially given its deleterious roots and nature?
Perhaps there’ll be a sharp inhale, a pause, to wait for the bluster, the trend, to pass, as media storms often do. Or no inhalation at all, the moment observed but unmarked. Maybe there’ll be a rush to shore up the meaning of cosplay; a struggle to establish boundaries between fan and non-fan cosplay or between “real” and “fake” cosplay. From such turbid times might not a new word for “cosplay” emerge, like a lotus flower rising from muddy waters?
This all remains to be seen.
What can be said is that cosplay, today, is coming to represent ideas other than it once did. Those self-same outside forces are readjusting its meaning, shifting its “nature and direction”, nebulously fabricating a new cosplay idea in which cosplay is not only synonymous for all kinds of dress-up practices but for all kinds of duplicitousness, and who knows what else will follow.22
[Breathing mark: I could enfold the former amplification into my cosplay idea, perhaps, but the latter, I simply cannot; how can I write the sum that makes cosplay = fakery? I know too much about this imaginatory practice to see those qualities in it.]
Cosplay’s definition seems up for grabs. Having caught the mainstream’s eye, is it now becoming victim of its own success? Like punk, or other counter-cultural movements or practices defanged by massification and commodification. But we don’t need to go that far back to see why it’s troubling when the mainstream coopts a grassroots word or phenomena; just look at what’s happening today to “intersectional” or “graffiti” let alone “feminism” or indeed “fandom”. A custom word — cosplay — is here not so much losing its definition as undergoing a process of translation but coldly done, and inexpertly.
Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. — bell hooks
A struggle for meaning is afoot.
A struggle rather than, say, a war, for this inchoate semantic change is to many people imperceptible and, to many more, irrelevant. For really, isn’t it such a little thing, this shift, this desiccation of meaning; not even a whiffet amidst the winds of change besetting our calamitous age. True. But it is also true that this soft wind is part of the raging tempest battering the integrity of language usage today, as in past times. And thus, as Orwell famously observes, battering the integrity of thinking and worldmaking: not only does slovenly language prompt foolish thoughts and vice versa, it prohibits clear thinking, the “first step towards political regeneration.”23 (Indeed, the contrived decline of language really helped blow us over the brink and slap bang into the sixth mass extinction.24)
Look all around: voices silenced; writers assaulted; journalists murdered; words repurposed; books banned; news commercialised; lives surveilled; laws undone; futures rewritten and unwritten. One unifying plotline is detectable through all these disparate tragedies: in the matter of worldmaking, words matter.
Language remains a “place of struggle”, and no word or shift in usage is ever so small nor so niche as to go unminded.25 As all herders of little things know, small oversights can cause big problems down the line— just ask a bistitchual about dropped stitches.26 Moreover, each co-option, adaptation, euphemism, equivocation tells its own story about power, control, domination, if we but take the time to look. Looking, or confronting, is a critical step towards social action.27 But what does examining the co-option of cosplay reveal? A glance before closing allows us to point to a few revelations, for example:
(i) not as much progress has been made on rehabilitating public perceptions of media fans as we (involved publics) might hope.
(ii) the partisan nature of mainstream British media culture, today, excessively commercialised: to critique troublesome political figures, journalists must resort to code words and hidden messages rather than clear and direct language.
(iii) the utility of distraction: focusing on the spectacle of cosplaying politicians distracts publics from the real and immediate issue of corrupt, inept political figures.
(iv) power relations: political figures are so out of touch with everyday people that they feel our jobs, our lives, are entertainment, are whimsical worlds that they can dip a boneless toe into, like old Greek gods stepping down from Mount Olympus to play at being a worker or being poor.
(v) that nothing changes (unless we, the people, act to bring about progressive social change). Take the popular idea that Truss is cosplaying Thatcher, for example. This message works to reassure Tories of a continuation of, arguably more extreme, neoliberal policies, as noted. Yet, the observation also alerts the British public to this continuance. Truss’s Thatcher cosplay reveals that despite cries of a fresh start and new beginnings, things are not going to change under Prime Minister Truss. Coming face-to-face with this zombie Thatcher, gives us a heads up. We don’t have to wait to see what happens; we know what’s going to happen. We can strike, now, before it’s too late. Like survivors in zombie apocalypse stories, the first zombie might well catch us off guard but not the second.
But it’s not enough to simply observe language change, particularly top-down change; we must confront it robustly and those triggering it. Our observation and struggle against the co-option of “cosplay” — and other fan terms, such as fanfiction — into dominant discourse becomes thus part of a bristling ancient howl against the corruption of words, of language, of stories and thus against the reactionary forces currently straightening the progressive arc of history— “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!”28
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A semantic shift synonymous with the wider mainstreaming, or massification, of media fandom.
Labour Party leader Kier Starmer described Liz Truss as indulging in “Thatcherite cosplay”, while he himself was accused of engaging in “Blairite cosplay”. (Note: “Thatcherite” refers to previous UK (Conservative) Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and “Blairite” to previous UK (Labour) Prime Minister, Tony Blair (1997-2007).
Notorious and odious right-wing British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg is routinely identified in news and social media as cosplaying a “toff” (a member of the British “upper-class”), particularly “Lord Snooty”, a character from the iconic British comic, Beano. For a fascinating broader discussion of class, mimicry, and British politicians, see “‘The Beano's’ Lord Snooty” (Part 4 of 4) by Dave Miller. CEOs and celebrities also tap into this kind of class cosplay, billionaire “tech bros” wearing priceless jeans and hoody combinations etc.
JFK refers to former US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963).
Referring to former UK Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (1940-1945, 1951-1955).
The selection of examples included here are drawn from social media searches and offer only an illustrative sample of how “cosplay” is being used within public spaces and discussions.
Straka was himself convicted on misdemeanour charges after the Jan 6th attack.
I’ve been sticking to political realms but similar expansions in cosplay usage may be observed in other spheres, such as business, technology, climate industries, creative industries, and so forth.
Thatcher too, famously, lowered the timbre of her voice and adopted “mannish” mannerisms to match dominant ideas of what powerful people look like, as discussed earlier.
See, “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga Cosplay” by Theresa Winge (Mechademia, 2006).
Or “coser” as is popular within China’s cosplaying communities; a term gaining international traction, you see how language shifts and bends. Interestingly, note that this contraction drops the “play”— a discussion for another day.
Fragment from “Lines Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth. Lines from “My Heart Soars” by Chief Dan George.
A new behaviour, idea, or phrase inexplicably spreads from one group to all other groups rapidly.
Note, for instance, my clarification of “fan cosplay” suggesting other non-fannish kinds of cosplay, a fresh development in cosplay discourse.
Questions prompt troubling notions of answers and whilst there will be answers of a kind in this essay, they’ll not take the form of pronouncements, conclusions, or solutions but rather comprise observations, considerations, reasoning, and thoughts.
See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017).
See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017, p. 17). And, of course, all other modes of intellectual activity (e.g., visual, musical, crafting).
Here, to “wander aimlessly” (OED).
The monopolised mainstream British press is fervently right wing and supportive of any Tory leader, as long as they do as they’re told.
Interesting too, though a tad speculative perhaps, is remembering that “‘cos” is shorthand for “because”, “cosplay” thus becomes readable as a childish explanation of a behaviour. Question: “Why are you dressing up like [x]?” Answer: “‘cos play”.
That’s to say, more influential in terms of making “official” meanings stick within public domains and dominant discourse.
See, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks. (Boston; South End, 1990. 145-53).
See, “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, Horizon, April 1946.
E.g., euphemism, adaptation, co-option, and so forth.
See, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks (Boston; South End, 1990).
First-rate knitting slang: someone who knits and crochets.