Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom
308
Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom
308eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783209576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 308 |
| File size: | 29 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Dr Paul Mountfort is Chair of the AUT Centre for Creative Writing where he has had a supervision role in over 40 postgraduate supervision projects. He is a founding member and Vice-President of PopCAANZ (Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand) and sits on the editorial boards of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (UK: Intellect) and IOFOR Journal of Asian Studies. His research interests include oracle-texts in popular culture, transmedia storytelling, street photography and cosplay.
Dr Anne Peirson-Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong. She teaches and researches fashion studies, fashion culture and communication, popular culture, advertising and branding and is currently researching the subject of Cosplay and youth fashion style in South East Asia with the aid of a Hong Kong Government funded research grant.
Dr Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who is Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, a Faculty of the University of Sydney. With twenty years of artistic practice, his video installations and performance-based works have been exhibited throughout Australasia, Asia and Europe to considerable critical acclaim.
Dr Paul Mountfort is an associate professor, hobbyist audiophile and street photographer. He is vice-president of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand, editor of The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (Penn State Press) and chair of the Auckland University of Technology’s Centre for Creative Writing. Author, with Adam Gezy and Anne Pierson-Smith, of Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (Intellect Books, 2018), he is interested in the intersection of popular culture and transmedia.
Contact: Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
Anne Peirson-Smith, Ph.D. is professor of fashion, School of Design, Northumbria University. She teaches and researches fashion marketing and sustainable fashion management and communication, with an industry background in branding and public relations. Anne’s research interests cover sustainable fashion management, marketing and branding; fashion marketing and public relations. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on marketing sustainable fashion and is associate editor of the Journal of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture (Intellect Books) and The Journal of Global Fashion Marketing. She co-authored Public Relations in Asia Pacific: Communicating Effectively Across Cultures (John Wiley, 2010); Global Fashion Brands: Style, Luxury & History (Intellect Books, 2014), Transglobal Fashion Narratives (Intellect Books: 2018) and The Fashion Business Reader (Berg/Fairchild Publishing 2019).
Adam Geczy teaches at the University of Sydney. He has written with Vicki Karaminas Fashion and Art (2013), Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (2015) and Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to Van Beirendonk (2017).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Cosplay as Citation
Cosplay commentators universally agree that cosplay involves fans donning costumes and performing as characters from popular media texts, such as comics, animated or live action films and television, games and other popular cultural media including music videos. As seen in the Introduction, particular indebtedness to Japanese popular culture sources such as manga, anime, gaming, otaku and idol culture is often stressed, though western source texts are equally common and cosplayers mix and sometimes mash-up their influences. This chapter is concerned with cosplay as a contemporary fan practice via the ways in which cosplayers commonly reference their chosen source texts. In this particular respect, cosplay can be regarded as a form of citation, with cosplayers collectively involved in performing myriad 'citational acts.' This somewhat abstract concept is easily made concrete if we picture walking through a convention space where cosplayers are in action. The thousands of costumes and accoutrements, such as weapons and other props, are, on one level, like trees in a forest of citation that link the cosplay back to the source text ('ah, look, there's San from Princess Mononoke. Do you think she made that dagger?'). The 'act' is in how the player embodies and performs their chosen character ('that Naruto's posing in Sage Mode!').
It may seem strange to use the term citation in this context, as it is typically employed in scholarly settings to describe how academic texts reference each other. Some commentators are critical of the textual metaphor due to the highly visual and performance-orientated nature of cosplay. This occurs against a backdrop of alleged 'textual bias' in discussions of cosplay, which risks downplaying other, performative dimensions at work in the practice. However, a type of referentiality similar to text-based citation occurs in other media, and is widespread in popular culture. Quentin Tarantino's movies, for instance, are full of references to earlier films and film genres, from spaghetti westerns to Samurai classics, which they pay homage to, cheerfully parody and otherwise pillage. In the present context, it is the cosplayer's costumed body that becomes the text or site that references another text — that is, the specific source media that the cosplayer chooses to perform. This embodiment includes not just costume but theatricalism, including pose and gesture. While there may be limitations to analogies between cosplay and citation, investigating the practice, on one level, as a system of reference between texts helps us differentiate it from other forms of dressing up and acting-out. After all, where cosplay differs from dressing up more generally — including fashion subcultures that are sometimes part of the milieu but not strictly cosplay, such as steampunk and Lolita — is in its specific indebtedness to source media on which it is heavily reliant. Cosplay also differs from dramatic performances for the theatre or screen in that cosplayers do not seek to realize an entire script in a sustained performance but smaller or 'parcellized' portions of an original, seldom longer than short skits. Due to these complex factors, descriptions of the ways in which cosplayers cite their source materials veer between textual and more performance-orientated metaphors. Commonly employed terms include modelling, textual performance, translation, transportation, actualization, identification, intertextual or transmedial process and, indeed, 'embodied citational acts.'
It is also important to recognize the political dimension to cosplay's citational practices. A term that is useful in unpacking cosplay from this perspective is détournement. Associated with the Paris-based social revolutionary group of intellectuals and artists of the 1950s known as the Situationist International, it remains in use in critical theory today and resonates well with cosplay. Détournement literally means 'to reroute' or 'to hijack' and for the Situationists was linked to the 'ludic,' or purposive play. Unsurprisingly, many commentators have framed cosplay in terms of the ludic, but the Situationist détournement goes beyond mere playfulness to encompass the subversive, and included pranks designed to undermine authority and social hierarchy, political and aesthetic. Crucially, it involved a type of deliberate plagiarism whereby authoritative books, maps and other texts were cut and pasted along polemical and aesthetic lines. Détournement is useful for framing cosplay as not simply a form of fandom, but as a critical practice. Of course, for cosplay to work successfully for both player and audience, the minimum quotient of fandom, familiarity with the source text or at least its storyworld, is a required passport for entry to this play community. But while most cosplayers are fans, this does not mean they lack a critical faculty in relation to the franchises they choose to reference, or are necessarily cheerleaders for the characters they dress up as. Material and social concerns such as a player's body type, the cost of garments, and their collaborative role within a cosplay group may be just as important. Cosplayers also frequently mess with their source material, employing 'parody, pastiche, satire, burlesque, and caricature.' Thus cosplay's particular form of détournement is a 'recontextualization' of sources which aligns it with other mixing and mashing practices, such as fanfiction and the making of anime music videos (AMVs) rather than simply dressing up or acting out a part. Cosplay also often subverts gender, as 'crossplay' — where female fans dress as male characters and vice versa — demonstrates, and the representation of race is often fluid, too.
However exactly we frame its particular form of referentiality, cosplay citation is, in the first instance, inherent in the choice and subsequent appropriation of a source. When a cosplayer executes the intention to dress up as a particular character, citation of that source text is implicitly taking place, if in no one else's eyes but the coser's own, as they adjust garments and put the finishing touches on in front of the mirror. However, it is one thing to wear a lightsabre on your belt and another to come out with it swinging. In other words, it is possible to be in costume but not 'in part,' to be dressed up but not acting out the character role, as when we glimpse 'Batman' in a convention cafeteria incongruously stuffing his mouth with a hotdog. By contrast, when cosplayers perform their character role on the social stage of the competition catwalk, collaborate on a skit or pose in the convention hall or adjacent studio spaces for a photograph, they will play their chosen part in specific ways, especially through pose and gesture. It is thus only situationally that the performed identity is actualized in the eyes of an audience, where the reference becomes a performance, or, in the present terminology, the citation a citational act (pun intended). Such categories are of course fluid and readily flow into one another. Cosplayers can snap into or out of character in an instant, especially when cameras appear. Furthermore, invisible to the spectator are the moments of internal transformation of the cosplayer, the powerful and uncanny affect by which desire transports us into our fantasy selves, at least for an instant. Frenchy Lunning has framed this in terms of Félix Guattari's notion of a traversal moment or 'display of multiple identity eruptions.' Cosplayers often express this internal transubstantiation as one that thrills or, conversely, brings a sense of calm or empowerment, even as a zone to which one is transported. What takes place over a sustained period of cosplaying, then, is a constant elision between alternating states of mind and ways of being in the world.
Source media: Texts and pretexts
There is some debate about whether cosplay originated in the United States, in which, as the next chapter discusses, fannish 'costuming' goes back to the early twentieth century, or Japan, where the portmanteau term was first used in 1983. However, this chapter locates cosplay's origins more contextually in the emergence of media and fan cultures in the latter half of the twentieth century. While dressing up in fantastical garb is evidenced in science fiction conventions from the 1940s and 1950s, it was the late 1960s when cosplay's contemporary shape began to form. Arguably, what distinguishes cosplay, even if it was not yet named as such, from the earlier craze for costuming discussed in Chapter 2 is not so much a matter of kind than of context. That context involved what Fredric Jameson referred to in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) as the post-Second World War 'psychic break' with wartime shortages and a cultural, as opposed to merely economic, turn in late capitalist sensibilities. Following new media interrelationships and forms of business organization from around the mid-century mark came the crystallization of what Raymond Williams called a new 'cultural structure of feeling' with its 'reshuffling of canonical feelings and values' in the 1960s and 1970s. While sci-fi and superhero figures had been subjects for public masquerade well before this time, these were the decades in which new media began to coalesce across once discrete boundaries and modern (or, rather, postmodern) fandoms formed. In terms of popular culture, this was predicated on 'the penetration of culture itself by [...] the culture industry, and of which the media itself is only a part.' By the same token, the iconoclastic tenor of the period meant that such fandoms often took up irreverent postures in relation to their source materials, laying the foundation for what would later be recognized as a range of fan-based critical practices. By the late 1970s and early 1980s cosplay was partaking in the cultural circulation between North America and Japan. These decades, characterized by Jameson in terms of the 'conquest of the discursive hegemony' by Thatcherism and Reaganism's economic dogmas, set the stage for cosplay's increasing globalization in the 1990s. From the turn of the twenty-first century, it has undergone increasing massification and now draws on multiple media sources at the various converging streams of transmedia storytelling.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish fact from anecdote in cosplay's early phase of formation (recalling the jibe that ifyou remember the Sixties you weren't there) but one pivotal moment occurred when 'the Trekkies discovered Worldcon' in 1967, with at least seven attendees reportedly costumed as Mr Spock. Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69) was a trailblazer in the emergence of modern fan practices. The first dedicated Star Trek Convention, as distinct from more general sci-fi conventions, was held in 1972, and trekkies have remained a staple of cons ever since. The show essentially spawned the genre of 'media fanzines,'with Spockanalia from September 1967 marking a milestone in the development of modern fanfiction, a practice whereby fans conscript (or 'détourner') existing media content in the creation of new, non-canonical narratives. Fanfiction can be viewed as a writerly parallel to the embodied practice of cosplay and can range from anodyne homage to the aggressively disruptive. An example of the latter is the slash genre, named after the forward slash (/) that appears between the initials of characters paired in this way. K/S fanfiction, in which the ostensibly straight characters of Kirk and Spock are brought together in homoerotic fashion, debuted soon after the show first aired and is reckoned by Henry Jenkins to be the earliest example of the genre. As we will see, related forms of such double deviancy — in which intellectual property is not only summarily appropriated but fundamentally subverted — occurs in cosplay as well, especially in relation to gender and race.
Cosplay is often associated in the popular imagination with comic book superheroes, who certainly populate cons globally in large numbers to this day. An early recorded instance occurred in 1969 when Kathy Bushman (née Sanders) performed the character Vampirella from the eponymous comics album at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in St Louis. Superhero comics provide a kind of implicit model for cosplay, in that like Clark Kent and Diana Prince cosplayers don costumes and transform into their (albeit imagined) caped crusader avatars. However, while such popular comics date approximately to the Second World War — Superman and Wonder Woman, for example, debuted in 1938 and 1941 respectively — the rise of costumed heroes at cons only really seems to have taken off following the success of screen adaptations. Photographic evidence suggests the cosplaying of Superman as early as the 1940s but it is commonplace by 1974, 'by which time Worldcon "masquerades" had grown to more than 100 participants per year.' Wonder Woman was in evidence by at least 1977, closely tracking with the rise of popular television and movie adaptations. As the venues at which these events took place suggest, the period also saw the birth of a new type of mass comics convention, as distinct from the older dedicated sci-fi conventions, with Comic-Con inaugurating in San Diego in 1970. This subject is discussed in more depth in the next chapter, but in brief cons of this kind would proliferate globally in the decades that followed to provide what James Paul Gee calls 'affinity spaces' for cosplayers to congregate, and where their performances are normalized in relation to their subcultural communities of practice or taste cultures.
The 1975 release of the film adaptation of the musical stage production, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is also sometimes seen as a milestone in the rise of what would soon be tagged cosplay. A parodying tribute to B-grade movies of the times, its titular reference to the horror genre evokes the film's camping up not only of the atmosphere but sets and props from Hammer Film Productions, famous for their 'Hammer Horror' films of the 1950s-1970s. Attendees of the original midnight-movie screening were asked to don suitable costumes, with Tim Curry's character Dr Frank N. Furter rapidly becoming an iconic instance of drag and establishing an early genetic link between cosplay and the gender-bending practice of crossplay, if not indeed the notion of cosqueer discussed in Chapter 8. However, in the mid1970s sci-fi continued to enjoy pride of place in convention culture, with the original Star Wars (1977) providing wildly popular material, as did television shows developed from sci-fi films, such as Logan's Run (1976; 1977–78). Moving into the 1980s, Star Trek: TOS continued to be a popular source as were Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), with wizened Yodas and bikini-clad 'Slave Leahs' much in evidence. In synopsis, then, modern fandom, including fanfiction and bustling cons, grew out of the mass audience spectatorship that crystalized around popular television shows and movies in the 1960s and 1970s, especially science fiction and superhero genres. Cosplay evolved in tandem with these general developments as a related expression of popular fandom in the age of transmediation.
There are also accounts of attendees costumed as characters from imported Japanese anime in the United States by the late 1970s. Anime first arrived in the west in the form of Astro Boy (Tetsuwon Atomu) (1963-66), which premiered in 1964 and continued to be re-run in fan circles such as the 1978 Worldcon in Phoenix. This exposure remained, of course, incredibly niche. Craig Norris and Jason Bainbridge claim that for 'many westerners — in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia — their first exposure to the possibility of cosplay would be a diegetic (textual) one: in the late 1970s anime series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (better known as G-Force or Battle of the Planets in the West).' Given the history of costuming at western cons and the fact that the term 'cosplay' had not yet been invented, this conflation of the practice with Japanese popular media is dubious. However, they would contribute an important element. By the legendary 1979 Comic-Con 'several anime characters in the Masquerade' from the series Star Blazers (1979), an American adaptation of Space Battleship Yamoto I-III (Uchu Senkan Yamato) (1974–75), and Space Pirate Captain Harlock (Uchu Kaizoku Kyaputen Harokku) (1977–79) had escaped page and screen to take to the convention floor. Patrick W. Galbraith notes that, meanwhile, in Japan 'cosplay had become a part of sci-fi and fanzine events from the mid-1970s. During this decade, sci-fi fandom in Japan overlapped with the fandoms surrounding anime, which was coming into its own as a challenging medium worthy of attention.' Indeed, some have claimed cosplay originated 'with a parodic performance' of a manga or anime character played by Mari Kotani in Japan in 1978, then a fan and later a notable critic and author, though by other accounts it appeared earlier, in the inaugural 1975 Comic Market (Comiket) founded by Yoshihiro Yonezawa.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
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