Planet Cosplay

Adam Geczy, Anne Peirson-Smith, Paul Mountfort

Description

This book examines cosplay from a set of groundbreaking disciplinary approaches, highlighting the latest and emerging discourses around this popular cultural practice. Planet Cosplay is authored by widely published scholars in this field, examining the central aspects of cosplay ranging from sources and sites to performance and play, from sex and gender to production and consumption. Topics discussed include the rise of cosplay as a cultural phenomenon and its role in personal, cultural and global identities. Planet Cosplay provides a unique, multifaceted examination of the practice from theoretical bases including popular cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies and transmedia studies. As the title suggests, the book’s purview is global, encompassing some of the main centres of cosplay throughout the United States, Asia, Europe and Australasia. Each of the chapters offers not only a set of entry points into its subject matter, but also a narrative of the development of cosplay and scholarly approaches to it.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1: Critical Practice

Chapter 1: Cosplay as Citation

Chapter 2: Cosphotography and Fan Capital

Chapter 3: Cosplay at Armageddon

Part II: Ethnographies

Chapter 4: Cos/play

Chapter 5: Cosplay Sites

Chapter 6: Cos/creation

Part III: Provocations

Chapter 7: Proto-Cosplay

Chapter 8: Cosgender/Cosqueer

Chapter 9: Cosporn

Conclusion: Cosplay Futures

Index 

Sujets

• Gender Studies
• Popular Culture
• Performing Arts
• Dólar
• Australasia
• Performance art
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Fashion
• Creation
• Design
• Art
• General
• Asia
• Performance
• Cos
• US
• Mode (habillement)
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783209576
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Sentinel of Atlantis by Marko Stamatovic. Adobe Stock image no. 94559032.
Production manager: Matthew Floyd and Faith Newcombe
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-956-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-958-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-957-6
Printed and bound by Short Run, UK.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Critical Practice
Chapter 1: Cosplay as Citation
Chapter 2: Cosphotography and Fan Capital
Chapter 3: Cosplay at Armageddon
Part II: Ethnographies
Chapter 4: Cos/play
Chapter 5: Cosplay Sites
Chapter 6: Cos/creation
Part III: Provocations
Chapter 7: Proto-Cosplay
Chapter 8: Cosgender/Cosqueer
Chapter 9: Cosporn
Conclusion: Cosplay Futures
Index
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mark Lewis, James Campbell, Matthew Floyd and Faith Newcombe at Intellect Books for their invaluable support throughout the development of this book.
We would also like to thank all of the cosplayers who were interviewed and photographed during our many visits to Planet Cosplay, as it has allowed us to share their story with a wider community.
Introduction
C osplay, a portmanteau term derived from ‘costume + play,’ is both a highly contemporary phenomenon and also part of something quite venerable. Dressing up is fundamental to interpersonal relations, communication and socialization. In a sense, dressing is always dressing up, as it is central to the social performance of self. Nonetheless, dressing up in the specific context of cosplay is different from its historical, costumed precursors. It has its roots in the mid to late twentieth century cross-pollination between American and Japanese popular culture, and has gone global with twenty-first-century media convergence. Cosplay today reflects contemporary fandoms’ unprecedented modes of mass cultural engagement, on and offline.
While San Diego’s Comic-Con and Tokyo’s Comiket are famous, flagship cosplay events, with hundreds of thousands of ‘cosers’ dressed up for the occasion, cosplay runs the gambit of venue and convention spaces. A typical example of the niche cosplaying events that are proliferating globally has been recent Seattle Sakura-Cons, modest sized manga/anime conventions that see the streets, cafés and foyers of boutique hotels around the Washington State Convention Centre spilling over with masked participants in a surreal spectacle. Inside the halls, delegates are treated to exhibitions, merchandise, screenings and, of course, cosplay competitions. Outside, the hanging gardens of Freeway Park provide spaces that fans appropriate for displaying their costumes, meeting and greeting, staging more-or-less impromptu celebrations of popular cosplay characters, and setting up photo shoots against the Brutalist sculptural backdrop of this unique urban oasis. A visitor from another planet—or from some far-flung part of this one where cosplay is unknown—might wonder what kind of strange and wondrous species humanity is, so rich and diverse in its garb and many shades of costumed embodiment.
While cosplayers may be readily identifiable at habitual sites of performance such as fan conventions, cosplay is a deceptively complex practice that defies neat description and ready categorization. An uncontroversial definition would be that cosplay refers to people dressing up and performing as characters from popular media, including comics, animated or live action films, television, games and other pop culture sources such as music videos. A particular indebtedness to the science fiction and the superhero genres, along with Japanese sources such as manga, anime, gaming, otaku and idol culture is often stressed. However, even this broad definition conceals tensions and shifts that have taken place among cosplay scholars—and cosers—over time. Early commentators such as Theresa Winge linked cosplay specifically to the Japanese otaku (hardcore nerd, geek) practice of wearing ‘detailed makeup and elaborate costumes modelled after their favourite anime, manga and related video game characters.’ 1 When occurring outside of Japan, cosplay was consequently seen as the assumption of character personae from Japanese source media 2 or an opportunity for ‘fans to dress up for playing their favourite characters from sources such as animation, mangas, video games, science fiction stories, and fantasy.’ 3 Despite recognition that cosplay today has become a truly global phenomenon it is still commonly claimed to have started in Japan, largely because the term was coined there in 1983. 4
In fact, the backstory of cosplay provided in this book shows how cosplay’s immediate progenitor, costuming, started in the United States, which had at least equal influence alongside Japan during the formative phase of its development from the late 1960s through to the 1990s. Media texts from these countries, two of the world’s largest cultural producers, still dominate cosplay culture two decades into the twenty-first century, but today, anything is fair game from music videos to Internet memes. Many scholars consequently opt for broader definitions, referring to the more general ‘practice of adopting the appearance of fictional characters from popular culture’ 5 or ‘dressing up and posing in a visually recognizable way as characters from popular media.’ 6 Instead of revolving around Japan alone, cosplay is widely acknowledged as part of a ‘global practice of building costumes and performing as characters’ from popular media sources ‘whose narratives have produced characters that have developed a fan base.’ 7
Fans dressing up for dedicated events in fantastical garb from popular media may at first sight appear to be a relatively straightforward phenomenon. However, as this book will demonstrate, this surface impression conceals many subtleties that need to be approached from multiple perspectives in order to be progressively unmasked. These range from the material, including the physical construction of costumes, to the aesthetic, such as the affective responses they provoke. 8 Critical issues implicated in cosplay include the citation of specific source texts, photographic practices circulating around (and shaping) their costumed embodiment, and the performative intersection of these textual and visual dimensions at cosplay events. There is the particular form of play alluded to in cosplay to be considered, the mapping of cosplaying sites, physical and virtual, and the creative element of this community of practice beyond ‘mere’ technical craft. Resonances with past performance arts involving mask and masquerade abound, along with considerable bending of gender and identity, (real or projected) associations with the erotic and—provocatively—the pornographic. Cosplay is an affect-laden practice, but one whose psychology is only truly activated in the social sphere. Philosophically, it chimes with our posthuman, virtual and networked selves. Correspondingly, the title of this book refers both to cosplay as a global practice and the fact that it constitutes a world of its own, referred to below as the ‘cosphere,’ 9 in which fans forge and contest identity.
For cosplay is, above all, the acting out of a hybridized identity that has been described as ‘akin to performance art, taking on the habitus of a particular character through costume, accessories, gesture and attitude; it is therefore not simply “dressing up” but rather inhabiting the role of a character both physically and mentally.’ 10 In the words of Matthew Hale, the term
describes a performative action in which one dons a costume and/or accessories and manipulates his or her posture, gesture and language in order to generate meaningful correspondences between a given body and set of texts from which it is modelled and made to relate. 11
A performance requires an audience, and as Ellen Kirkpatrick notes of the role of spectators, cosplay is ‘a simultaneous performance—as source character and as member of the cosplaying community.’ 12 This community is itself a double-edged sword that can mete out approval or condemnation, not to mention the wider audience of online commentators and self-appointed opinion makers. Like all performers, cosplayers find themselves in a hall of specular gazes, not all of them welcome.
What perhaps above all distinguishes cosplay from earlier performance practices, such as carnivals, masques, masquerades and theatrical forms, both eastern and western, is its dependence on source texts from popular new media. Given that these were non-existent prior to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it must inevitably be seen as a product of modernity, postmodernity and even what has been dubbed the posthuman. The birth of comic superheroes and popularization of science fiction coincide with a period that was only beginning to recover from the Depression, and which faced the very real threats of both fascism and Stalinism. Created in the year that the Nazis came to power in 1933, Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, Batman a year later ( Detective Comics #27, May 1939). As if anticipating historical events, Captain America was born in March 1941 and would be ‘every boy’s’ nationalist hero once the United States entered the Second World War in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor eight