Cosplay Done Our Way

Wolverine is one of Marvel Comics’ most beloved characters. Logan isn’t just a loner antihero, he’s a protective outsider, a gentle mentor, and a berserker all in one. Then there’s the short temper, the killer costume, and the adamantium claws. Guys like to see themselves in his beer-chugging, cigar-smoking swagger, but it’s really his IDGAF attitude that few can shake. Wolverine can smell trouble from miles off, and he never lets a baddie pass without at least saying hi. He’s run with the best and fought the rest; we’ve loved him for that since his 1974 introduction in The Incredible Hulk #180.

Now picture Wolvie with protruding mammary glands, fire-engine red lipstick, fake lashes, and a derriere that stops traffic. Imagine Weapon X in his classic brown uniform seated in a salon while a nail tech paints his claws in OPI’s Big Apple Red. That’s not a pin-up model sitting for a photoshoot, and it certainly isn’t X-23, Wolverine’s cloned offspring. No, sir, that’s a gender-bending cosplayer in action. And if that image turns your guts, read no further, because that’s exactly what this story’s about.

Gender-bending cosplay extends the pin-up’s claim to female self-authorship into live, embodied performance, trading the pin-up’s controlled, frozen image for the riskier work of self-transformation and hard-won safety. Through this medium of gender-bending cosplay, a player can shift the identity of a fictional character’s identified/canonical gender to more closely match the identity of the player.

Pin-up’s Claim to Self-authorship

Women have fought long battles to define themselves and claim agency. The movements—small and large, known and unknown—are too many to count, and the fight continues today. One particularly stubborn front has been the male gaze: film and television’s habit of framing women as sexual objects for heterosexual consumption. That fight has lasted centuries, but women have found ways to assert themselves in both moving and still pictures along the way. Pin-up photography was one of those ways.

In her 2006 book Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Maria Elena Buszek—scholar, critic, curator, and Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado, Denver—traces pin-up’s 150-year history and its ties to feminism. What’s most striking in her research is how often women appropriated the pin-up for their own empowerment, claiming and controlling their photographed images and profiting from them too. That entrepreneurial spirit lies at the heart of feminist self-autonomy. Even more striking is pin-up’s relationship to fantasy lore, which offered perhaps the earliest iterations of gender-bending cosplay.

“Most of those very early pinups were either fantasy illustrations of women or photographs of women as other characters,” says Buszek. Pin-up girl and American and European theater giant Adah Isaacs Menken illustrates the point: she gender-bent and cross-played before either of these terms was coined. “A lot of her earliest pinups were representations of her in character,” Buszek continued, “oftentimes as male characters, but in the roles of the characters that she was playing on stage.”

Though those recreations of the male characters Menken performed on stage, particularly the fantasy illustrations, had the power to render her invisible, that didn’t happen. Menken defied any self-imposed anonymity; her celebrity was too beefy for such an occasion.

“What was radical about those images was that she was at the same time Adah Isaacs Menken, famous celebrity actor,” says Buszek. “It was never an image that was sold or popularized simply because it was like, oh, look, that’s Mazeppa. It was celebrity woman in the character of Mazeppa.”

What Menken achieved in her pinups is what theorist Linda Hutcheon, author of A Theory of Adaptation, calls “palimpsestuous intertextuality,” her term for how we experience adaptations as texts layered over the memory of the original.^[1] Rebecca Turk, Assistant Professor of Costume Design at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, knows the concept well. In her dissertation, Costuming as Inquiry: An Exploration of Women in Gender-Bending Cosplay Through Practice and Material Culture, Turk employed Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, along with Play Theory, and Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity to explore the breadth of adaptations as it relates to cosplay culture.

“It’s like taking and shaping a clump of popular culture but you’re not recreating it,” says Turk. “Through interaction and creation, you’re making something new.”

Ajuan Mance, a writer and visual artist who teaches illustration at the California College of the Arts, stresses the importance of incorporating race in discussions about women’s empowerment as part of 21^st century conversations.

“If it’s going to be relevant to our next generations,” she says, “then it has to—in some way, shape, or form—it has to include race. It doesn’t have to center race, but you can’t decouple race from gender and sexuality.”

Before race enters the conversation, it’s worth letting the academics define, or at least delineate, cosplay’s and pinup’s differences.

Frozen Images vs. Live Bodies

Each of the scholars who contributed to this piece saw the relationship between cosplay and pinup differently. Buszek, for instance, locates pinup’s power explicitly in stillness and control.

“It’s about control, not loss of control,” she says. “It’s about hiding, not exposing. I feel like cosplay is much more exposed and that cosplayers get the potential of an immediate sense of community in the way that it functions, but that it also has great vulnerability. Part of the power of pinup was that it froze a moment and allowed it to exist outside of the person. That’s different than cosplay.”

Though Mance didn’t fully agree with Buszek, she did recognize a murkiness in cosplay’s relationship to pinup.

“Pinup has its own lineage,” she says. “Cosplay may be informed by that but I don’t necessarily think those two things are always intertwined.”

The distinction Mance and Buszek both point to lies in what’s actually at stake between the two practices. Cosplay is about performance within communities, less about photographs or clips; pinups are frozen images meant for visual consumption, displayed like paintings or stored for occasional viewing. Rebecca Turk’s fieldwork echoes this from the performer’s side.

“Engaging in pinup is intentionally empowering, as is participating in gender-bending cosplay,” she says. “Both focus on the agency of individual fans and how they interact with and demonstrate their fandom.”

Both pinup and cosplay do similar work around empowerment: the ability to choose one’s performance and, within it, to highlight an element of a character’s identity that may or may not exist in the person wearing it.

“I definitely think that cosplay becomes a space that allows people to inhabit identities that are not the identities that they wear in their everyday life,” says Mance. “That’s one of the strengths of cosplay, that it allows people to break down the walls between presumed identities.”

As easy as it is to agree with Mance that cosplay invites the freeing of a person’s inner spirit, Turk complicates the idea, insisting there are layers to cosplay, if not a hierarchy between the person and the outfit, with one in service to the other.

“With cosplay in particular, the costume can be foregrounded more than the person,” she says. “It tends to be more about the craft and the idea, like how clever was their adaptation. The focus isn’t always solely on the player.” At the same time, the focus on character or character creation does not take away the agency or empowerment of the player because they in fact are an essential part of performing and creating the character. Ultimately, the focus on character can be more comfortable and empowering for some fans.

Maria Buszek argues that empowerment comes more from the individual—the performer—than from the observer.

“I feel like what cosplayers are doing in creating these images of themselves is very likely connected to that deep root of pinup history,” she says. “Especially in regard to its point of origin in the theater, where they were dressing as other characters, but making them their own, making sure they were foregrounding their own personality, their own twist on the character.”

Whether the gaze lands on the costume or the person, or whether a performer fully embodies a character, becomes moot when certain audiences are determined to objectify performers. Those audiences care little whether a character was embodied through performance or through costuming; the objectifying gaze is blind to everything but self-interest. Ajuan Mance states it plainly.

“For folks who want to objectify women, and who will always see women as objects, no amount of claiming subjectivity suffices; it’s an uphill battle to claim subjectivity and inhabit the role of the sexy person or the pinup.”

Object Versus Subject

Mance’s clear-eyed view of what cosplayers should expect from critics is complicated by Buszek’s read on the situation. Buszek insists that some cosplayers couldn’t care less about those who objectify them—that at heart, cosplay is about the cosplayer. She cites the late American art historian and performance artist Joanna Frueh, who said, “As long as I am an erotic subject, I am not averse to being an erotic object.”^[2]

It’s not a great leap to suggest today’s cosplayers may already meet Frueh’s condition—her if/then concession that she be seen simultaneously as both object and subject. Gender-bending cosplay certainly achieves this: the costume, as a wearable identity, creates another layer of interpretation of the wearer, while the choice to assume that identity gives the cosplayer the power to bend existing narratives and fan expectations.

“As long as I am an erotic subject, I am not averse to being an erotic object.” – Joanna Frueh

“What makes those efforts feminist is their [cosplayers] insistence on being sexual subjects, that they’re foregrounding their own pleasure, their own sexuality, and they may be inviting an audience to look at or engage with it, but that it’s not primarily created to conform to particular kinds of sexual practices, beauty standards, or societal expectations. They might overlap with them, but it’s coming from a place that is centering the self as a sexual subject.”

Rebecca Turk offers a more nuanced perspective on how cosplay is performed and received—something of a beauty-(and sexuality)-is-in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder claim, if not a can’t-we-all-just-get-along plea, almost a pacifist longing as she lays out the multiple perspectives at play.

“Everyone’s coming at stuff that they see or interact with [with] their own frames of reference. No matter what interpretation or adaptation someone comes up with, there’s going to be things that they recognize or don’t recognize, and that can be challenging and exciting. There’s not one right way to do it or to understand what you’re seeing or interpreting.”

Mance underscores the poignancy in Turk’s assessment and agrees there are multiple perspectives to consider and with the caveat that for Black women specifically, the state of affairs is often more complicated.

“When you talk to Black women about the notion of sex positivity, choosing to be an object but also then trying to invert that and inhabit your sexuality in a way that makes you the subject, not the gazed-upon object, that’s a challenging thing to do for African-American women.”

Careful not to dismiss the precarities that Black women navigate, Buszek concedes that Black women—most cosplayers, in fact—know exactly what they’re doing when they present themselves to a viewing public.

“My sense is that cosplayers are really good at that,” says Buszek. “That they’re choosing the characters that they’re performing, creating these elaborate costumes that they do precisely because it reflects some part of them as some kind of facet of their identity, and it might be sexual, it might not be. It’s a whole range of things.”

Race, the elephant in the room, haunts this conversation: privilege lifts constraints for others in ways it doesn’t for Black girls. Already objectified whether in costume or not, they compound the problem by layering another identity onto their Blackness, doubling their fight for subjectivity.

“There’s a lot at stake,” says Mance, “and it’s a different battle for Black women to be able to inhabit the world as sexual beings in the media—in movies, film, and music videos—and at the same time claim subjectivity. It can be done, but a lot of people don’t risk it in the same ways. There are some key strategies for subverting objectivity. Some people do it really well and are sexual in media in a way that refuses to let people treat them as objects. It’s a tough thing and very much debated when misogyny still exists, when violence against women and girls still exists.”

When Mance raises the issue of misogyny—prevalent among many women, and especially Black women—she points to a violence against women and girls that persists even on convention-room floors. Not even fantasy spaces, it seems, are safe from the need of some to dominate, control, judge, or berate others. Women, and women of color especially, bear the brunt of it.

Convention Hall Horrors

As innocent as they may seem, comic con spaces aren’t exempt from hostility. Disagreement frequently erupts around what some deem as cultural appropriation. Then there are the equally volatile issues around consent—intrusive gestures, unwanted physical contact—each with the potential to turn a purportedly family-friendly event into a fantasy-themed nightmare. Rebecca Turk has chronicled encounters like these in her scholarly work.

“Sometimes other attendees at events make assumptions that just because someone’s cosplaying a character that, of course, they want their picture taken. Often they do, but not necessarily,” she says. “Just because they’re in costume doesn’t mean they’re welcoming of intrusive gestures or physical contact.”

Ajuan Mance has attended every San Diego Comic Con since 2010 but one. She says conventions can be, and often are, pleasant spaces.

“I love seeing Black people at San Diego Comic Con doing cosplay because they seem to bring so much joy carving out a space, so that no matter what’s going on in the world, Black people claim the right to play and experiment,” she says. Asked about convention controversies over cultural appropriation, Mance turned the question around, noting that Black cosplayers are rarely the ones raising such accusations. “I’ve only seen Black characters done by Black people. But other characters—those who aren’t Black or non-human—people of all genders, all ethnicities, do those characters. It seems to be okay.”

Mance, who attends zine fairs and comic conventions across the country, is usually a panelist or vendor, and isn’t always privy to what happens in the halls. Turk, an academic and a cosplayer, on the other hand, has spent considerable time on convention-hall floors and witnessed plenty. Buszek has a child and students who cosplay actively. Both tell a different story from Mance’s.

“You’ll often see concern and alarm, especially around the massive Asian histories and cultures. The danger of cultural appropriation is there,” Buszek says.

Cyberbullying of cosplayers, especially Black women, is a related and serious problem beyond the scope of this piece. It’s harder to police than convention behavior.

“Nowadays, almost every convention I’ve gone to has policies in place,” says Turk. “Ten years ago, that was not really the case.”

While convention staff have moved administratively to curb breaches in decorum, at times, women have taken precautions of their own—among them, designing creep-resistant costumes that greatly reduce the odds of unwanted attention. Why have the problems reached a point where women design with creeps in mind?

“The same reason women walk to their cars with their keys in between their knuckles,” Turk says. “Life experience: what’s been passed down; how we’re trained to walk fast with purpose; to not make eye contact. Some people I’ve interviewed make sure they have a friend.”

Beyond safety, Turk further explained other motivations for cosplay and gender-bending, including the expression of creative freedom, feeling comfortable and confident in one’s body, the liberation and empowerment to play without limits or boundaries, the rejection of social stigmas, and the opportunity to advocate for non-binary presentations and expressions of gender.

“You’re foregrounding the costume,” she said. “You want people to be excited, but it’s not like you’re at your job. People aren’t owed a photograph. They aren’t owed physical contact.”

That “owing” concept is its own thing in convention circles. There’s something vaguely masculine about it, something transactional, and privilege-laced. It raises the question: what is the relationship between the male gaze and fantasy culture?

Cosplay’s Identity Flex

While the vast majority of superheroes tend to be male, both men and women have found ways to balance the scales.

“I’ve definitely seen Black women, women of all ethnicities, doing characters who are men in the comic books and just fully inhabiting those characters,” says Mance.

Turk points to the historical predominance of male illustrators and character designers at publishing houses and animation studios. Gender, it seems, drives much of how fantasy characters are sold and marketed.

“There are more choices,” says Turk, “but what were the choices women felt they had as far as characters they liked or identified with that didn’t have a canonically revealing costume or form-fitting costume? What felt comfortable for them to be safe, to be able to participate in person?”

Ajuan Mance has considered Turk’s question too, but asks it on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. For her, LGBTQ+ folks are already well-practiced in navigating gender identity and need little handling when it comes to cosplay’s gendered options.

“You’ve already given yourself permission to be anything but what you’re expected to be,” she says. “You’ve carved out a space in which you get to write gender as you want it to be already; you live that every day. Now you’re just applying it to your favorite character.”

“You’ve already given yourself permission to be anything but what you’re expected to be.” – Ajuan Mance

Given how central identity is in cosplay circles, there’s little room for micromanaging or helicoptering anyone’s costuming choices. Unfortunately, some people have elected to play antagonist anyway.

“Some people want to be very specific sometimes,” says Turk. “They’re gatekeepy about being representational. For these fans, if it’s a movie costume, then it must look like the movie.”

As unfortunate as this costume policing might be, others would rather track down a cosplayer’s supplier or seamstress than any fault with wardrobe miscalculations. And then there are those who skip the design-craft hoopla altogether.

“I have to imagine that a lot of folks just buy these costumes and don’t make a stitch of it, that they just enjoy the final product,” says Buszek. “But it does seem like a powerful comment on class when the cosplayer is foregrounding their own labor.”

This foregrounding is a significant part of the cosplay experience—demonstrating one’s work process in YouTube videos and on social media.

“They make videos, reels, photographs of that process, which strikes me as very feminine, femme coded,” says Buszek.

Just as there will always be a need to showcase one’s craft, there will always be bad seeds—people who want things their way, or whose insecurities push them to objectify others. It’s on us to leave them to their issues and keep immersing ourselves in the joys of fandom culture, mutually celebrated. That convention planners have instituted policy around certain behaviors means our voices were heard, that there’s awareness threats exist on convention-room floors, and that prevention has been put into practice. It’s hard-won safety, but it’s safety nonetheless. And that’s cause for celebration.

Cosplay Sunny Side Up

Whether we’re speaking about cosplay in general or gender-bending cosplay specifically, there’s something for everyone to enjoy. We can’t let others ruin or inhibit our fun, our innate ability to amuse ourselves.

“It’s called cosplay,” says Turk. “Sometimes it can be taken too seriously, but it has play in the word. It’s about playing and experimentation, in trying something different. It’s supposed to be fun.”

“It’s called cosplay. It has play in the word.” – Rebecca Turk

With the range of characters to choose from in that umbrella arc called fantasy lore, the possibilities are almost endless. We can become whomever we dream of becoming. We’re only limited by our access, our time, and our imaginations.

“Women have a lot of options,” says Mance. “They can enter this as a hobby and as something quite remunerative, often setting the terms.”

While it’s remarkable that many have found ways to profit from what might’ve been a pastime or social hobby, cosplay also offers benefits to mind, body, and soul. Turk reminds us that cosplay can remedy things we’re short on, or rarely express emotionally.

“It’s about passion for the characters,” she says, “finding something within the character that you connect with or think is really cool, special, or awesome.”

Maria Buszek sees fandom as a conversation piece, a way to grow closer to others.

“I’m a fan above all else,” she says, remarking on how cosplay is a conversation that never stops giving. “That’s something I find myself talking about a lot.”

Cosplay offers a cornucopia of talking points—nearly endless. There’s the pride one feels in designing or simply wearing a custom costume, the craft behind it, the attention to iconic detail. There’s the joy of being recognized by someone who knows the character. And whether an outfit cost thousands or under a hundred dollars, the recognition and appreciation from others can create memories and long-lasting friendships—all of it, Turk suggests, is a boost to self-esteem.

“It affects you,” she says. “You feel different. You can still be you. It’s your body, but you’re putting on another body. You feel better, stronger, faster.”

As tribute to creative freedom, Ajuan Mance sums it up best.

“These characters are meant for you to make them your own,” she says. “Whatever it takes for you to enact your super fandom is all good.”

Making our favorite characters our own is one thing; holding our ground in convention spaces is another. That’s where Wolverine’s IDGAF attitude would serve us cosplayers best, especially against culturally biased, condescending, or entitled con-goers who take issue with our costumes or the craft behind them. As a mutant, Wolverine wouldn’t tolerate that kind of noise—at least not until someone pushed their luck. Women cosplayers should follow suit. Wolvie would give it to them straight, no chaser: women and girls owe those characters nothing, no photos, no patronage, no performances. Any intrusive gestures or unwanted physical contact should go straight to on-site security, but anything beyond verbal jabs deserves serious attention. Snikt!

Notes

[1] Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation.London and New York: Routledge, 2006, 21.

[2] Joanna Frueh, Erotic Faculties (University of California Press, 1997): 4.