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Letter from the Editor

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.8.1.0001

2380-7687

Paul Mountfort,

Crafts, Textile, and Design

Like many of its youthful participants, cosplay scholarship is effectively in its teens, with academic approaches only really dating back to the mid-2000s. Prior to this, most publications on the subject both off- and online were fannish contributions or generalized texts. Examples include Michael Bruno’s pieces for Glitz and Glitter newsletter in 2002, Takako Aoyama and Jennifer Cahill’s Cosplay Girls: Japan’s Live Animation Heroines (2003), and Robert Holzek’s “Cosplay: The New Main Attraction” (2004).1 Though still mined as useful sources by researchers to this day, they lack methodological and theoretical foundations. Then the first academic articles began appearing, including Therèsa Winge’s formative “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Manga and Anime” in the first volume of Frenchy Lunning’s flagship journal of Japanese popular culture studies, Mechademia (2006).2 Articles rapidly followed on cosplay’s relationship to gaming and conventions, the motif of the doll, and site-specific studies in the United States as well as Taiwan, with the first published photographic monograph, Elena Dorfman’s Fandomania, appearing in 2007. Since then the initial trickle has turned into a slew, with myriad aspects of cosplay practice being essayed in article, chapter, reference, and monograph form.Despite having come of age in recent years with the publication of a series of academic monographs—Winge’s Costuming Cosplay: Dressing the Imagination (2018); Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith, and Adam Geczy’s Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (2018), and Lunning’s Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022)3—this current issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture is, to my knowledge, the first journalized special issue dedicated to cosplay. Given these significant book-length contributions, the aim of this collection is less to define and survey the field, and much less to come up with a Grand Theory of Everything (Cosplay-Related), than it is to explore paths less followed, neglected angles, and future directions.Winge’s “Making the Fantastic Real: Exploring Transmedial Aspects of Cosplay Costumes” is focused on the intersection of the materiality of costume and the liminality of the cosplay moment. Drawing on theory such as Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding of liminality and the fantastic, Steven Shaviro’s “tactile convergence,” and Sarah Gilligan’s “tactile transmediality,” she sets out to demonstrate how the real-world qualities of cosplayers’ costumes cross between the fictional imaginative space of the story and the lived material body. As with her Costuming Cosplay, Winge’s insights are hard-won through ethnographic engagement stretching back some two decades now, including participant observation such as judging in cosplay costume competitions. This fine-grained knowledge allows her to delineate specific actions and gestures performed by cosplayers during such events, such as posing and twirling for the cameras. The need for accurate costume design within cosplay’s many fandoms is mediated by other concerns, such as a nondiscriminatory approach to issues of gender, ethnicity, body size, and so forth—though, as Winge addresses, each of these presents their own problematics and complexities.Having coauthored Planet Cosplay with Anne Peirson-Smith and the founding coeditor of the JAPPC, Adam Geczy, my own involvement in cosplay scholarship has been intensively collaborative. My interest in the monograph was in fans’ affective attachment to characters from popular media texts, fan cultures more generally, the tension between détournement or deviant appropriations of such texts verses cosplay’s récupération into late capitalist spectacle, the photographic practices circulating around cosplay, and how these and other factors come together in the convention space and other online and offline spaces, from websites to photographic studios. Identity was a crucial axis for this project. However, my contribution to this special issue, “‘Becoming-Animal’: Cosplay as Sorcery through Deleuze and Guattari’s Tenth Plateau,” aims to open up a non-identarian avenue of inquiry by providing a Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis based on the longest and most infamously difficult of plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980): the tenth plateau, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible.”4 The article asks the question of the extent to which cosplay can be understood as “an affair of sorcery” involving a pact with a demonic character, passing “by contagion” into becoming with an animal pack, and a second alliance with a new human group, effecting a further and dynamic contagion of the human and animal.Emerald King is another researcher with considerable form in cosplay scholarship. The locus for her “Gotta Sew Them All—A Case Study of Pokémon Legends: Arceus Trainer Costumes and Historical Plausibility” is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Pokémon Red and Green in 2021, marked with the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus. This new contribution to the franchise is set in a specific time and space: Hokkaido around 1869, during the colonization of the northern island, with the vaguely steam-powered technology and costuming hinting at a Victorian or Meiji (1868–1912) time period. While initial promotional shots for the release had fans speculating, based on their garb, that the characters Akari and Rei might be members of the Japanese indigenous northern Ainu people, King demonstrates that they are in fact representatives of invading Japanese colonizers, this being the period in which Hokkaido’s frontiers were assimilated to the dominant culture and administrative regimes of the southward islands. This opens up space for discussion around a whole raft of issues that takes critical consideration beyond the context of fandoms’ sewing and making of garments and into the realms of the ethics of representation. Depiction of “race” is complex and mercurial in cosplay, but in some contexts it may be less emancipatory than it is akin to black- or yellowface.Tets Kimura is one of this issue’s newcomers to cosplay scholarship; his “Roles of Imitation Seifuku School Uniforms in Japan: A Case Study of Students at Uniform-Free Schools and the Iconic J-pop Performers of AKB48” is, however, grounded in interdisciplinary research in art/cultural history, fashion, and Asian studies. His article also represents an extension of the understanding of what constitutes cosplay: here, the focus is on students in Japan who attend no-uniform schools but wear uniform-style garments as fashion statements, as expression of desire for status and identity, and as grounds for retrospective nostalgia for the days of one’s youth. In effect, these students are cosplaying students who do wear uniforms, and there is indeed a micro-industry in Japan catering to such sartorial fetishes. In an interesting feedback loop, some of these designers have subsequently been commissioned by schools to design authorized school uniforms. As the title suggests, the whole phenomenon is partly fueled, as many things are in Japan, by the adoption of such garb by J-pop bands such as AKB48, providing a tie-in to cosplay’s ubiquitous links to aidoru (idol) culture more generally, especially in East Asia.Casci Ritchie is a fashion studies researcher and author of a monograph on Prince whose “‘I like the way I’m dressed and besides that’s what Prince likes’: Dressing for Paisley Park, Fandom, and Clothing” is a rare example, for the JAPPC, of the primary autoethnographic mode. Cosplay scholarship is profoundly inflected by the autoethnographic turn, whereby researchers triangulate their own experience and affective engagement with other data streams to provide often intensely personal accounts of the cosplay experience. This “fanthropology” takes many forms, from relatively straightforward accounts of the experiencing of playing, say, Batman at Comic Cons to the broad church experiences of various dimensions of the cosphere (judging, photographing, etc.) provided by authorities such as Winge and Lunning. As in the previous articles in this issue, Ritchie expands the definition of cosplay by including within its bounds sartorial homages by Prince fans visiting the fabled Paisley Park estate. Especially since his death, central among their almost votive acts of devotion is the choice of outfits considered appropriate to the context of entering his home and studio spaces—though, as Ritchie observes, honoring Prince may occur in the breach as much as in the breeches (or garters).The second section of this issue, Essays and Reviews, seeks to further expand the conversation around cosplay beyond the typical academic article format. In keeping with cosplay’s young, outsider status within academia, many commentators are “independent scholars”—which is arguably just a euphemism for those in the ever-growing precariat who orbit elliptically around the collapsed stars of higher education institutions. Ellen Kirkpatrick’s by turns impassioned and anguished account of life on these outer rims, however, will also chime with many an established academic, whose workplaces have been subject to extreme retrenchment in the wake of COVID-19. In the Cosplay Roundtable I interview three researchers who range from seasoned to fresh voices in cosplay scholarship: Nicolle Lamerichs, Suzanne Scott, and Julie Escurignan. They provide fascinating responses to questions on how they came to the subject, its critical issues, COVID-19’s effects on the cosphere, new directions in cosplay scholarship, and the future of the practice itself. Finally, I review Frenchy Lunning’s 2022 monograph, Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence, the latest in a tranche of substantial monographs on the subject by a veteran researcher that demonstrates, once again, that cosplay scholarship has truly come of age.