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Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence , by Frenchy Lunning

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

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.8.1.0138

2380-7687

Paul Mountfort,

Digital Games and Media

Frenchy Lunning is deeply implicated in the rise of cosplay research and scholarship. She is the founding editor in chief of Mechademia, a journal which practically introduced the specialized study of Japanese popular culture into culture studies, as the title’s amalgam of the giant-robot genre of mecha with academia suggests. Its 2006 inaugural issue, Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, contained a seminal article, Therèsa Winge’s “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Manga and Anime,” which offered one of the first theoretical accounts of cosplay.1 Cosplayers’ nomination and performance of their chosen character was based not simply on fannish infatuation but on research and study into a source text, leading to an “interpretation that takes place by reading and watching.”2 Valorization of the fan as what we might now call a cultural prosumer (cough) was in the air, with Henry Jenkins famously arguing that same year in Convergence Culture (2006) that fans were critical readers and (re)writers of cultural texts.3Mechademia is also the banner under which conferences have been staged annually from 2001 in Minneapolis—and now biennially across Asia—just as the journal has concomitantly expanded its remit, in a “Second Arc,” from focusing on Japanese popular culture to that of East Asia more generally since 2018.4 Commentators have noted the resemblances between popular sci-fi, comics, and fan conventions (most of which include cosplay) and academic conferences. This crossover is perhaps nowhere more evident than at popular culture conferences. Mechademia website’s own conferences page boasts, below a photo of assembled speakers flanking two Asian cosplayers, that:This is epistemologically significant insomuch as the reciprocal flow between scholarly and theoretical accounts of pop-cultural phenomena, on the one hand, and an, albeit measuredly, “fannish” approach to popular culture research, on the other, make for exciting lines of flight.6Lunning has concerned herself with cosplay on several occasions prior to the current monograph. She provided the “Cosplay” entry for the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2011), where she discusses such issues as sexual cosplay, draggish “cross-play,” Japanese otaku (extreme fan; geek) culture, western media sources, the rise of conventions, costume design, and performative dimensions of the practice.7 A chapter that same year, “Cosplay, Drag, and the Performance of Abjection,” in Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World (2011), introduces a theme that Lunning returns to in the current work: that “cosplaying starts with a desire to find community for the abject individual.”8 This is also where Lunning first associates cosplay with Félix Guattari’s notion of “the transversal moment,” which she glosses as “a display of multiple identity eruptions [that] begins precisely as the costume is put on and the subject encounters another otaku.”9 Discussing the relationship between fetish and fashion in Fetish Style (2013), Lunning references the “potential liberation though expansion and play of identity formations that currently fuel the rapidly expanding costume play revolution.”10 While the term “costume play” is ambiguous in this context, Lunning previously linked “sexual cosplay” to the fetishization of anime and comics characters, with obvious applications to cosplay more generally. These approaches were to be brought together and extended in her flagged monograph Cosplay: Fashion and Fandom (2016) but the work does not seem to have entered into circulation, as far as I can ascertain.11In other words, Lunning has considerable form and is a formative voice in cosplay research and scholarship. Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022) is, moreover, a product of her visits to Japan in 2007 and 2012, the first with a research focus on manga and the second on cosplay, including visits to cosplaying events, photo studios, and interviews with cosplayers.12 A major theoretical underpinning for the book coalesced in part through her engagement with Étienne Souriau’s The Different Modes of Existence (1943), on which Lunning’s title riffs, providing a key provocation: How and why do cosplayers and other fans fall literally and profoundly in love with fictional characters? This combines withAnother formative influence is Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), itself in part a response to Souriau, though Lunning goes on to cite a range of critical theorists from across disciplines.While acknowledging formative “anthropological studies” on cosplay, including Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith, and Adam Geczy’s Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (2018), Brian Ashcraft and Luke Plunkett’s Cosplay World (2014), Nicolle Lamerichs’s article “Stranger Than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay” (2011), and Emerald King’s chapter “Sakura ga meijiru—Unlocking the Shōjo Wardrobe: Cosplay, Manga, 2.5D Space” (2019) as helpful, Lunning suggests that hers is “instead a meditation on U.S. and Japanese popular cultures as part of a global phenomenon taking place in the cultures of young people in particular.”14 While characterizing some of these works as anthropological is debatable (Part 2 of Planet Cosplay, for example, is ethnographic but is bookended by sections that are critical-theoretical and philosophical, respectively), this does serve to delineate her synthesis-seeking approach. Here, Lunning adopts a Japanese term, mitate, to describe her methodology as “a structure, usually a garden structure, made of elements that have been borrowed, adapted, or transposed to produce an illusion.”15 This accords with the trend towards mixed- or post-methodological research, in Lunning’s case, drawing on scholarly writings, interviews, participant observation, and a range of critical-theoretical engagements. These include, in addition, such well-known theorists as Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, and Timothy Morton, along with a host of scholars of Japanese popular culture, cosplay, and related areas.Along with the expected introduction—but no conclusion as such—the book comprises five chapters. The introduction opens with a quote from Latour on “entities of fiction,” which do “not direct our attention toward illusion, toward falsity, but toward what is fabricated, consistent, real.”16 This sets the scene for a wide-ranging discussion that begins by focalizing on the United States’ cosplay experience and goes on to consider, in particular, dimensions of convention culture, such as masquerades, cosplay troupes, and discussion panels. Lunning provides contrast with the Asian experience via discussion of Comiket and the World Cosplay Summit, along with sections on urban cosplay spaces and photographic practices. While she raises critical issues around these foci that reverberate throughout the following chapters, the tone here is largely narrative-driven and descriptive, with a considerable amount of anecdote in the participant-observer style, along with quotations from those involved in cosplaying communities and associated communities of practice.Lunning’s ability to marshal a large body of information and communicate it personably from a semi-insider point of view chimes well with her focus on the communitarian—if implicitly competitive—dimensions of cosplay she is essaying here. This is not to say, however, that critical issues (such as restrictions on where costumes can be worn at Japanese cons or surreptitious photographic practices worldwide) are skated over, and the chapter is rounded off with a provocation to more theoretical consideration via a pertinent quote from Guattari:It will be the job of subsequent chapters to unpack and substantiate such claims in relation to cosplay.The first chapter, “Cosplay: A Social History of Mass Culture and Identity,” nonetheless follows the introduction in providing a largely descriptive social history, presaged by a quote from Marshall McLuhan on history as a collection of fragments. The fragments that Lunning nominates under this chapter’s subheadings encompass a wide range of considerations. Her historical account begins with discussion of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emergence of mass or popular culture, leaning into cosplay’s precursors—early-to-mid-twentieth-century science-fiction conventions where fannish costuming took place—and from there the formative midcentury period of the 1960s and ’70s, ultimately culminating in the exploding present-day scene. This chronology has been rehearsed in a number of studies, but Lunning addresses several less-traveled side alleys and backstreets, such as the historical emergence of British and European cosplay, the gargantuan East and Southeast Asian convention scene, and the online sites and associated fan cultures that constellate around them (among other things, think the much-misunderstood furries). She also follows some lines of investigation around the specific emergence of terms and practices (masquerades, the “costume-ball,” the term kosupure, etc.) in forensic detail, filling in, or alternatively at least identifying, some missing links.Chapter 2, “The Lure of the Mask: Identity, Expression, and Embodiment,” is where the theory really kicks in, as signaled by a covering quote from Latour, who is perhaps the most thoroughly mobilized theorist in the book. Here Lunning is concerned with frames and definitions, and she provides some scoping of prior cosplay literature, including Mountfort, Peirson-Smith, and Geczy; Sebastian Domsch; and Rie Matsuura and Daisuke Okabe. Into this mix she imbricates theorizations by Latour, Souriau, and Hans Belting to explore issues of identity. Lunning suggests cosplay involves the play of at least four: “the founding identity of the subject’s understanding the self as self, the self as actor, the performing self as the masked character in the act of cosplaying, and the character itself as enacted identity,” though she goes on to note that “There may be even more internal identities in play.”18 Aware of the need to navigate the complexities of a post-subject understanding of self, she notes that a preferable term might be “modes of existence” or being, “a multiplicity of founding identities that support and direct—in the theatrical sense—this play of identities that are called forth as personas in the performance of a character.”19This focus, following Latour, on the “different ways the being has of altering itself,”20 is potentially useful in mediating between an ontology of being and that of becoming as found in Deleuze and Guattari’s joint work, whom Lunning will also engage, if somewhat sporadically, throughout the book, even though this frisson is not addressed head on. Further subjects under consideration in a section titled “Cosplay Behavioral Codes” include class, ethnicity, age, and otaku and weeaboo (western fan of Japanese popular culture) cultures. With regard to the latter two the argument is that they have led to new modes of existence that have rippled out into mainstream culture more generally to define a new kind of postmodern subject.21 The remaining sections sustain discussion of the mask in and around cosplay practice, ranging from classical through early modern, to Japanese theater and performance theory (with particular reference to William Grimes’s “concretization,” “concealment,” “embodiment” and “expression”) around such enactments. Mikhail Bakhtin’s interest in the carnivalesque reversals of governing structures provides an analogy between cosplay events, carnivals, and the like. A key term introduced here is instauration, from Souriau, meaning “to build, to construct, to create a work of thought.”22 Mention here of otaku as “an abject group” prefigures a major theme of the following chapters, that of the Kristevan abject who find a new kind of home—or at least community—through cosplay.23The third chapter is, correspondingly, titled “Overcoming Abjection: From Ambiguity to Becoming.” A quote from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror prefigures the approach to cosplay undertaken here, where the subject, “weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.”24 While Lunning makes a strong and subtle case for fandoms as constituting a category of the abject, especially in the historical context and in societies such as Japan, which habitually marginalize outsiders of many kinds, one wonders if (in keeping with Lunning’s own thesis about cosplay prefiguring the emergence of a new postmodern kind of subject) this is necessarily still the case. Games are now the largest single consumable cultural product by market share, manga and anime fandoms are increasingly mainstream, and engaging in cosplay activity on- and offline is arguably not socially marked in the way it once was. Coding cosplay as abject, akin in this sense to the position of, say, queer, trans, and fetish communities in recent cultural history, can therefore ring a bit hollow. While Lunning mentions the ravages of neoliberalism for context and thus players’ “impulse to create an imaginative home in a neoliberal desert,”25 the implicit question of whether—on certain levels, at least—cosplay itself has become complicit as a desiring machine within late capitalism is left hanging.Lunning deploys the Deleuzo-Guattarian terms of the machine/machinic, desire and assemblage in various combinations, but there are some problems. For example, talking about the way in which abject characters in certain manga and anime genres mirror the abjection of cosplayers, she argues,This suggests that deterritorialization is a negative or disintegrative dynamic, akin to alienation, while reterritorialization is a positive, integrative one, conferring communal hope. However, this confuses Deleuze and Guattari’s intentions, where, within the architecture of an assemblage, deterritorializing is juxtaposed with “territorial closure.”27 In fact, in terms of the new kinds of postmodern subjects Lunning espouses,In other words, deterritorializing is in no way implicitly negative and can in fact effect just the kinds of ruptures and eruptions Lunning espouses.Within deterritorialization there is also a crucial distinction between “actual” or absolute (e.g., philosophical/conceptual) and “virtual” or relative deterritorializing (i.e., as effected by capitalism).29 For example, Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-woman,” and by implication becoming-minoritarian more generally, from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia30 is deterritorializing in the best way: a “coming undone” that produces change, a breakdown of the molar into the molecular.31 Deterritorialization is, in other words, far from automatically the enemy; “actual” deterritorialization involves a contusion of forces and planes necessary for becoming. Hence commentators have warned thatReterritorialization, by contrast, is often the effect of the reassertion of the molar, such as “reterritorialisation as a uniform space of Crown land centred upon the figure of the sovereign,” albeit after being deterritorialized by the colonizer.33 My intention is not to pick holes in Lunning’s overall argument based on obscure distinctions, but to suggest there are places where greater care could have been taken with the deployment of some terms (the above uses are replicated throughout the book).Chapter 4, “In the Theater of the Cosplayer: Improvisations, Innovations and Masquerade,” doubles down on a theater/performance-centered approach to cosplay with reference to Julian Olf, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Morton’s hyperobjects as ways into complex cosplay phenomena. Along with the theatrical concerns with actors, masks, and personae, there is a focus on the performative domains of Japan’s Comic Market mega-cons, virtual (as in online) photo-sharing sites, associated media such as YouTube mash-ups, and 2.5D theater as exemplifying “modes and masks.” Here Lunning is concerned with “the interplay among subject, identity, character, costume, performance, mask, and modes of existence.”34 Mention of the subject and identity leads to an interesting discussion of being when defined as “a singular location of an amalgamation of physical, emotional, conceptual, and spiritual aspects” as opposed to its “constellation of all sorts of different properties” inhabiting “multiple modes of existence.”35While the discussion is fine-grained and nuanced, there is an unresolved tension in foregrounding being, even when understood as polyphonic, or even within Latour’s object-oriented ontology, alongside a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of becoming. Some discussion of these competing ontologies might have been helpful as opposed to the kind of synthesis of terms Lunning presents here, with the danger being that of an erasure difference in conceptualizing the ur-ground of subjective experience. It is hard to imagine, for instance, a more problematic juxtaposition than that of a key quote from Harman (“To be real is not to have an effect on something outside oneself, but simply this—to unify [these elements]. . . . Being is a real predicate”)36 and the Deleuzo-Guattarian Body without Organs, which is emphatically not grounded in being as a predicate disconnected from effects outside oneself. To be clear, Lunning assiduously undermines static conceptions of being with polyphonous ones. It is more that the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of reconciling the terms and terminology of a being-versus-becoming-oriented ontology could have been addressed directly rather than indirectly. While her gloss of the Guattarian notion of transversal as “multiple identity eruptions” arguably provides a kind of pivot between these discourses, this is not discussed or made explicit, and is itself problematic.This leads to a point about the fifth and concluding chapter, “Fandom and the Fictional Mode of Existence,” which provides a kind of synthesis of the foregoing. The chapter ranges from discussion of fandom to subjects and objects, transversal locations, modes of existence, instauration, and, finally, Souriau’s “surexistence.” While grounded in some discussions of cosplay practice and cosplayers’ experience, there is a bit of a “life, the universe, and everything” feel to this chapter, with topics from the epistemological construction of disciplinary knowledge to quantum physics and chaos theory popping up. While the body of theory and its integration within a wide-ranging discussion is impressive and will no doubt provide jumping-off points—or lines of flight—into further theorization, the dervish of terminology, which reaches a fever pitch in the final sections, risks overburdening the materiality of cosplay practice and perhaps due justice to the elusive circulation of affects within the cosplay experience. Here, a more grounded ethnography, such as Winge provides in her Costuming Cosplay: Dressing the Imagination (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), a major contribution which Lunning does not cite, would have helped. Such an approach allows cosplayers more of their own voice, terminology, and thus agency, and might ultimately have been more compelling than the rhetorical reverberations suggested in passages such as the following, where fannish dressing-up becomesWhether one accepts the quasi-universalist rhetoric, after a string of sentences of this kind the analysis begins to feel somewhat freighted by the transcendental and unanchored from the concrete and perceptible.In this respect, reproduction of images from cosplay events presumably taken by Lunning and from other sources, such as Eron Rauch’s photographic pieces for Mechademia, are welcome punctuations within the densities of text, though they could have been explicitly integrated into the discussion.38 Their subject matter also often contradicts the tendency Lunning has to default to description of cosplay as principally concerned with Japanese popular culture when, in fact, its immediate precursor—costuming—is much better evidenced in the United States, and it makes more sense to locate the evolution of the practice in an interaction between the world’s two largest cultural producers and exporters.None of this should be understood to diminish the achievements of Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence. This is a compendious, thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and timely book that takes a generous-hearted view of cosplayers and seeks synthesis and rapprochement between existing bodies of cosplay research and critical theory. In part, its weaker moments are a byproduct of its strengths. Cosplay is arguably the most complex of all popular cultural practices insomuch as it bundles fandom, media culture, commerce, costume, performance, affinity groups and spaces in a complex array of material and more conceptual planes and forces. As such, it is hard to resist the temptation to treat it as the site for a culture studies equivalent of the Grand Theory of Everything. Such attempts are inherently fraught. But from its origins in the pages of Mechademia in 2006, and following on the heels of the 2018 monographs Planet Cosplay and Costuming Cosplay, Lunning’s account helps cement the coming-of-age of cosplay scholarship, along with providing multiple vectors for future lines of flight.