Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Queer Cosplay in Israel

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/mech.13.1.0171

2152-6648

Afriat,

Digital Games and Media

Queer Cosplay in Israel Liron Afriat (bio) LGBTQ culture in Israel as portrayed in mainstream media holds a unique dual nature. On the one hand, Israel has produced an abundance of LGBT-themed movies and TV shows over the past two to three decades, and the city of Tel Aviv has been voted one of the world's gay-friendliest cities for many years in a row. On the other hand, Israel is a country where religion and government are unequivocally linked, and it is not rare to hear of clashes between LGBTQ advocates and religious institutions. It is against this unique and contradictory backdrop that a cosplay subculture began forming in the early 2000s as part of a larger social media-based anime and manga subculture. This new subculture later transitioned into smaller online forums dedicated exclusively to discussions about cosplay. The country's first-ever public cosplay meetup took place in 2003 in Tel Aviv's Ha'Yarkon Park, where over twenty cosplayers gathered together for the first time and formed what is widely known today as the Israeli cosplay community. Since then, the cosplay scene in Israel has grown exponentially, in part due to the 2007 founding of Anime Manga Association of Israel (AMAI), an organization I have been involved in since the beginning. AMAI institutionalized anime conventions in Israel and has organized a large number of cosplay-themed events. Based upon my observations as a founding and ongoing member of the organizing committee, as well as a convention attendee since its founding, I estimate at least a half of the approximately 4,000 attendees of AMAI's flagship convention, Harucon, held each year over the Purim holiday (in February or March), attend the convention in full or partial cosplay. The largest Israeli cosplay-dedicated Facebook group, Israeli Cosplay, currently has around 2,600 members.1 As a result of the relatively lenient cosplay rules at Israeli anime and manga conventions, as well as the proliferation of boys love (BL) anime and manga on Israeli social media, a new hybrid between cosplay and queer Japanese popular culture began to emerge in the mid-2000s. This is when some cosplayers began engaging in casual cosplay—namely, cosplay worn not for the sake of a competition. Instead, cosplayers began cosplaying also in the context of friendly [End Page 171] meetups and conventions based specifically on queer Japanese manga, anime, and games, primarily BL and its female-female counterpart, yuri, in increasing numbers. This practice later expanded to cosplaying of Western queer content as well. The queer works of creators such as Saito Chiho (Revolutionary Girl Utena [Figure 1]), Ikuhara Kunihiko (Sarazanmai [Figure 2]), CLAMP (X, Cardcaptor Sakura), and Nitro+Chiral (Togainu no chi, Dramatical Murder) were some of the most cosplayed works in the Israeli cosplay scene from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s. Demonstrating how the cosplay community does not limit its focus to Japanese works, media from other places, such as Jennifer Doyle's webcomic Knight Errant (Figure 3), were also popular. Yuri works in particular are still widely cosplayed in both casual settings as well as in competitions, the apex of which may be observed in the participation of Israel in the World Cosplay Summit (WCS), held annually in Nagoya, Japan since 2003. At the summer 2019 WCS, three of the five official cosplays worn by the Israeli representatives were yuri cosplays inspired by these works. It must be questioned, then, how and why queer cosplay has become so mainstream in the small Israeli cosplay community. One explanation can be attributed to the strong link that exists between subcultural communities in Israel. For such a small country, Israel is home to an impressive number of extremely active LGBTQ organizations, which operate in a similar manner to the cosplay community, each with an online presence through which public meetups and events can be easily and efficiently organized, facilitating participation across communities. As such, there often exists an overlap between events of different communities. One example is Icon Festival, a general sci-fi and fantasy convention that hosts a large number of events relating not only to cosplay but also to drag, queer literature, and other forms...