Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part Two)
/Cosplay has had its hundredth monkey moment, for sure.[1] Once describing only a petit monde of media fandom, cosplay has shifted from “geek” descriptor to everyday parlance; an evolution shadowing its move from margin to center, the international limelight. Yet despite periodic and lively discussions within fan circles about the “future of fandom,” or as it’s sometimes phrased, the “end of fandom,” I’m not sure anyone could have predicted this spurious expansion in usage and meaning, still less think about what it means— but think about it we must for it’s a semantic shift gathering rather than losing momentum.
A question intrudes itself into my barely begun thoughts, one worth stating but not, I think, elaborately answering: Does mass adoption of the descriptor “cosplay” mark the end of cosplay? (Shortish answer: No. These new usages will not kill fan cosplay, just as photography didn’t kill painting, digital publishing didn’t bump off books, and Zoom hasn’t terminated face-to-face meetings— nor, alas, science done away with religion. But they might change cosplay’s meaningscape.[2]) More absorbing is its sister question: If anything and everything can (or cannot) be cosplay, then what is cosplay? And who gets to decide— Who makes meaning stick?
Change, of course, provokes questions; not all, as we’ve seen, worthy of answers, or leastways long answers.[3] But there are a few questions worth cracking open before closing.
Why the broadening out and uptick in popular usage— why now? What work is the descriptor “cosplay” doing in these new spheres of usage— from news and entertainment media to social media? What do these usages say about public perceptions of cosplay, of media fandom, more broadly? How do these newly described modes of cosplay fit or extend our current template of fan cosplay? Might they reshape it? What does, can, cosplay mean now? Moreover, might this popular semantic change, or charge, rekindle the definitional project, the not-so-small matter of defining cosplay?
Let’s start thinking then but without traditional expectations of arriving at a full, satisfying account of this phenomenon. Adopting principles of “low theory,” what follows is the beginning, or continuance, of an unplanned journey, one seeking not to arrive at a final destination or a clear-cut answer — an impossibility given the in-process nature of, well, everything — nor to adjudge a firm understanding of what’s happening but rather to happen upon other ways of understanding this unfolding phenomenon.[4]
But it’s not a solo journey.
It includes you, the reader and fellow meaning maker, unknown to me but doubtless full of thoughts on the subject at hand. Egalitarian, disordered collaboration is critical to developing new forms of knowing; sharing our motley thoughts and experiences allows us to build alternative knowledge-making communities, which are essential to becoming better acquainted with emerging phenomena and better prepared, as Jack Halberstam advises, to “illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life.”[5]
Artworks from “Dog Ear” series by Erica Baum
A few opening thoughts—
Looking into popular uses of “cosplay,” I’m immediately struck by how it trends towards the pejorative. Not always in the words chosen but invariably in tone. People on the left “larp around as a cosplay ‘Resistance’”; they’re “cosplay cowards,” “just cosplay activists.” Those on the right are “cosplay Stormtroopers,” “cosplay jackalopes,” part of an “incel-civil-war-cosplay crowd,” or even more jaw-breakingly, “talibangelical cosplay Rambo MAGA QAnon cultist traitors.” Antifa are “cosplay clowns,” a “street theater/cosplay platoon,” or some kind of generic “violence cosplay or kinda like Nazi furries.” A similar sneering tone is perceptible in news and entertainment media. Headlines and stories pushing a cosplay angle are laden with terms like “fake” or “faux,” “impersonating,” “ridiculous,” “acting out,” “farce,” “veneer,” and on and on.
In this scene, describing someone as cosplaying is far from complimentary. It’s an insult. Akin to yelling, “Oi! You’re a phoney!” at someone “masking” down the street.[6] An affrontous, textured charge of being duplicitous, counterfeit, superficial, dishonest, infantile, and relatedly, clownish. (Vastly different to the meaning operating within media fan culture.) A smear tying into escapism too, its negative connotation, that is— a topic for another day. People “accused” of cosplaying may well be all these things, but that cosplay has come to enfold such negative qualities — has become the insult du jour in the public imagination — is exasperating. More than that, it’s perplexing. Because to start using “cosplay” as scornful shorthand, there must be some sort of general agreement that it works as scornful shorthand, that the sheathed insult, like the ubiquitous velvet gloved fist, will be felt when it hits— otherwise, what’s the point? And yet that’s what’s happening, today, not only are everyday people choosing to now use “cosplay” invectively, they understand that it (works) as invective.
But I don’t remember getting my invite to the husting on repurposing the meaning of cosplay, nor my polling card. Do you? I’m being facetious, of course, but I’m curious about this semantic shift, by the idea that disparate publics have reached consensus on shifting cosplay’s popular meaning, imperceptibly and simultaneously. And it’s not just down to context. As we’ll see, a golden thread of (mis)understanding about cosplay, and media fandom more generally, strings this rattle-bag coalition of meaning-makers together.
Photo: Starling Murmuration by Søren Solkær, from his book Black Sun.
And like watching a flock of murmuring starlings in the twilight winter sky, I wonder less about the why-of-it-all — that we may never really know — and more about the how. (Knowing too, somewhere deep inside, that looking at the how-of-things usually reveals something of the why, as illustrated below.) How has “cosplay” come to this place, so far from its source set of meanings? A question we can start puzzling out by looking at how people outside media fandom (mis)use “cosplay” as a descriptor. Usage rooted in partial knowledge and manifesting in one of two ways, both troubling, one more so than the other. Whatever the popular expression, however, the effect tends to be the same: derision.
Observing “cosplay” in the wild, a trio of words springs swiftly to mind: inattentive, imitative, and increasing. That’s how usages of “cosplay” manifest in public realms, mostly. Its uptick in public discourse speaks to its massification; that’s to say, over time, publics have developed a popular familiarity with the broad idea of “cosplay” but not the actual fan practice and/or scholarship, a scenario creating the perfect conditions for inattentive and imitative usage. Put otherwise: not comprehending the breadth and qualities enfolded into “cosplay,” everyday people may be simply unaware that “cosplay” means more than “dressing up as [x]” and thus might straightforwardly replace one term for the other. Seems a fair point. Moreover, cosplay is part of today’s pop cultural zeitgeist and so referring to it is a sure-fire way to sound culturally informed, relevant, and perhaps — given cosplay’s heterodoxy — a little edgy too. Another fair point. It’s worth remembering, however, that, and riffing off Orwell, language usage is never entirely neutral. Before getting into that issue, however, I should quickly qualify the idea of inattentive use. That’s to say, while folks outside media fan culture may not still be entirely clear on what cosplay is, they know enough to be able to exploit ancillary meanings. And thus, the utility of “cosplay” in popular discourse starts to raise its head, open its close-lipped mouth, and commence speaking softly to the why-of-it-all.
Take journalists, for example. Granted, at first, they may not know the full meaning of cosplay; after all, why should they, media fandom can be bewildering, from a mainstream perspective. But we can expect them to ferret it out, right? Isn’t part of their job, their joy, to find out what words mean before using them? To discover — through careful research and communing with experts (via experience and/or study) — the best words to use to describe unfamiliar phenomena and to share that knowledge, those stories, those words and worlds, with us, their readers. And if that isn’t a journalistic duty today then we have lost something without price, for it certainly was a prized feature of journalism in the past. How then do we explain their inattentive usage? Incompetence? Laziness? Indifference? General befuddlement?
But wait.
What if there’s something willful behind journalistic usages of “cosplay,” something tactical. Not tactical in the sense of a shrewd misuse of the full, fannish meaning of cosplay. (That would presuppose an awareness of that meaning, and that, sadly, seems unlikely today.) It’s more that journalists are tactically deploying “cosplay” to quickly tap into a range of secondary meanings, associations, and stereotypes. While inattentive, replacing “dressing up” with “cosplay” might not always thus be a lousy habit, a sign of lazy thinking, or an imitative utterance; it may be calculated: one small, sharp word can do the bladework of many.
An example: wishing to negatively critique erstwhile UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a few British journalists took to describing him as a cosplaying statesman. Doing so, our errant wordsmiths were able to disparage Johnson subtly and effectively in a way that touting him as “dressing up” could never do.[7] Cosplay gave them cover, a disguise. Having recourse to its masked meanings — childish, bogus, mendacious, unserious etc. — allowed mainstream journalists to communicate messages that would likely not have reached page or screen had they been said directly. (To say nothing of saving word counts.) Messages that were, despite the subversion, all too clear to readers, somehow already versed in “cosplay” as invective, as observed earlier. The morpheme “play” too makes the descriptor “cosplay” irresistible low hanging fruit for those wishing to suggest some behavior is mere trumpery— a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollick.[8] A smear spreading easily to the one so behaving; Johnson thus becomes readable as a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollicker. And so it goes.
When tactically used, “cosplay” works efficiently as a motely slur by tapping into ugly and persistent perceptions of media fandom. For despite increasing and positive visibility, media fans can still fall foul of adverse stereotypes in public imaginaries. Y’know what I’m talking about here: media fans presented as puerile losers and loners and nerds— think “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons. Or worse, as “crazy,” “obsessed,” “freakish,” “rabid,” and “unhinged”— think of Annie Wilkes from Misery, if you dare. Exactly the kinds of people you don’t want running — or ruining — your country. Like lazy bakers going to the larder for a packet of bread mix, loafing journalists pull these stereotypes off the shelf for their shake and bake “cosplay” news stories. And while it’s grand that journalists found a way to satirize a “Teflon” leader in a partisan press, it’s not so great that they had to find an artful way of doing so, such is the state of the British press. Moreover, as a cosplay aficionado, it’s disheartening that cosplay proved the sacrificial lamb in this political roasting.
Untangling the threads weaving through this example, we see a combination of usages produce cosplay’s piercing effect. Ditto for popular usages. Yet there is much still to discover. For as is becoming clear, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of this popular if niche semantic shift, and given the power of words, language, and stories to reflect, to illuminate, to manifest, and to transform — for good and ill — this unfolding trend is one to watch.
“A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”
Before closing I want to dig lightly into some of those subterranean goings on. To think a little more and a little more broadly about why this localized semantic change matters; that’s to say, why we should notice and care about conflicts between grassroots — here, media fan — and mainstream meaning-making practices.
Unlike Athena, cosplay did not appear fully formed from the head of one creator. Like all grassroots movements, practices, and words, it emerges through time, people, and place. Media fans spun the cosplay idea from lived experience, hand-weaving the festooned fabric of this global practice and culture through decades of love-entangled encounters with media texts, all too often exclusionary and hostile. That’s to say, the cosplay idea materialized from us. We are its mother-tongue. Our minds, bodies, histories, imaginings, realities, and localities collectively shape its meaning, its protean definition. And definitions are, like maps with blank spaces, to be treasured not feared. Not interned in dictionaries, splayed in showcases, nor pinned to boards in dusty museum drawers like specimen butterflies, lying still, wings no longer flittering, no longer capable of changing worlds, but instead fannish definitions beat through us and our communities, always fluttering, wild, on the tips of our tongues.
Yet — arguably more influential — non-native speakers are now mediating the meaning of words, of worlds, we have made; indeed, words and worlds we are still making; in public squares, they’re translating the language we dream and play in.[9] Modern transmogrifiers, compromising the possibilities, the promise of cosplay in public imaginaries— will this corrupted meaning sprout still more wings and take off in other yet unimagined directions? Will it beat its way into fan imaginaries too?
Cosplay = what lies await?
Cosplay is, of course, a growing plurality; an umbrella term sheltering many meanings and modes, and many words to describe those vogues. Indeed, media fans are eminently creative when it comes to language and to coining new words and phrases to describe their fandoms and practices; the arrival of a new mode of cosplay is almost always accompanied by a new or compound expression— think: crossplay, cosability, photocosplay, hijab-cosplay, Disney- or Potter bounding, ishoku-hada (body paint cosplay), stealth- or closet- cosplay, and so forth. But the expressions — action and usage — I’ve been discussing are emerging outside cosplay culture, outside media fandom, and within the cultural dominant. Representing too a new, and leastways to my mind, unexpected evolution in cosplay’s ontology. So, what to do? How will cosplay communities respond to this semantic encroachment, especially given its deleterious roots and nature?
Perhaps there’ll be a sharp inhale, a pause, to wait for the bluster, the trend, to pass, as media storms often do. Or no inhalation at all, the moment observed but unmarked. Maybe there’ll be a rush to shore up the meaning of cosplay; a struggle to establish boundaries between fan and non-fan cosplay or between “real” and “fake” cosplay. From such turbid times might not a new word for “cosplay” emerge, like a lotus flower rising from muddy waters?
This all remains to be seen.
What can be said is that cosplay, today, is coming to represent ideas other than it once did. Those self-same outside forces are readjusting its meaning, shifting its “nature and direction,” nebulously fabricating a new cosplay idea in which cosplay is not only synonymous for all kinds of dress-up practices but for all kinds of duplicitousness, and who knows what else will follow.[10]
[Breathing mark: I could enfold the former amplification into my cosplay idea, perhaps, but the latter, I simply cannot; how can I write the sum that makes cosplay = fakery? I know too much about this imagological practice to see those qualities in it.]
Cosplay’s definition seems up for grabs. Having caught the mainstream’s eye, is it now becoming victim of its own success? Like punk, or other counter-cultural movements or practices defanged by massification and commodification. But we don’t need to go that far back to see why it’s troubling when the mainstream coopts a grassroots word or phenomena; just look at what’s happening today to “intersectional” or “graffiti” let alone “feminism” or indeed “fandom.” A custom word — cosplay — is here not so much losing its definition as undergoing a process of translation but coldly done, and inexpertly.
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.”
A struggle for meaning is afoot.
A struggle rather than, say, a war, for this inchoate semantic change is to many people imperceptible and, to many more, irrelevant. For really, isn’t it such a little thing, this shift, this desiccation of meaning; not even a whiffet amidst the winds of change besetting our calamitous age. True. But it is also true that this soft wind is part of the raging tempest battering the integrity of language usage today, as in past times. And thus, as Orwell famously observes, battering the integrity of thinking and worldmaking: not only does slovenly language prompt foolish thoughts and vice versa, it prohibits clear thinking, the “first step towards political regeneration.”[11] (Indeed, the contrived decline of language really helped blow us over the brink and slap bang into the sixth mass extinction.[12])
Look all around: voices silenced; writers assaulted; journalists murdered; words repurposed; books banned; news commercialized; lives surveilled; laws undone; futures rewritten and unwritten. One unifying plotline is detectable through all these disparate tragedies: in the matter of worldmaking, words matter.
Artwork: The Color of Words IX by Wosene Worke Kosrof
Language remains a “place of struggle,” and no word or shift in usage is ever so small nor so niche as to go unminded.[13] As all herders of little things know, small oversights can cause big problems down the line— just ask a bistitchual about dropped stitches.[14] Moreover, each co-option, adaptation, euphemism, equivocation tells its own story about power, control, domination, if we but take the time to look. Looking, or confronting, is a critical step towards social action. But what does examining the co-option of cosplay reveal? A glance before closing allows us to point to a few revelations, for example:
(i) not as much progress has been made on rehabilitating public perceptions of media fans as we (involved publics) might hope.
(ii) the partisan nature of mainstream British media culture, today, excessively commercialized: to critique troublesome political figures, journalists must resort to code words and hidden messages rather than clear and direct language.
(iii) the utility of distraction: focusing on the spectacle of cosplaying politicians distracts publics from the real and immediate issue of corrupt, inept political figures.
(iv) power relations: political figures are so out of touch with everyday people that they feel our jobs, our lives, are entertainment, are whimsical worlds that they can dip a boneless toe into, like old Greek gods stepping down from Mount Olympus to play at being a worker or being poor.
(v) that nothing changes (unless we, the people, act to bring about progressive social change). For a quick illustration, let’s return to 2022: Take the popular idea that Truss was cosplaying Thatcher, for example. This message worked to reassure Tories of a continuation of, arguably more extreme, neoliberal policies, as noted. Yet, the observation also alerted the British public to this continuance. Truss’s Thatcher cosplay revealed that despite cries of a fresh start and new beginnings, things were not going to change under Prime Minister Truss. Coming face-to-face with this zombie Thatcher gave us a heads up. We didn’t have to wait to see what would happen; we knew what was going to happen. We can strike, now, before it’s too late, I remember thinking. Like survivors in zombie apocalypse stories, the first zombie might well catch us off guard but not the second. (It didn’t pan out that way, and Truss became arguably not only the worst UK Prime Minister, but also the shortest serving, lasting barely seven weeks.)
But it’s not enough to simply observe language change, particularly top-down change; we must confront it robustly and those triggering it. Our observation and struggle against the co-option of “cosplay” — and other fan terms, such as fanfiction — into dominant discourse becomes thus part of a bristling ancient howl against the corruption of words, of language, of stories and thus against the reactionary forces currently straightening the progressive arc of history— “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!”[15]
Image from Howl: A Graphic Novel by Eric Drooker, (2010). Full animated version of Howl by Allen Ginsberg / Animation by Eric Drooker available here
[1] A new behavior, idea, or phrase inexplicably spreads from one group to all other groups rapidly.
[2] Note, for instance, my clarification of “fan cosplay” suggesting other non-fannish kinds of cosplay, a fresh development in cosplay discourse.
[3] Questions prompt troubling notions of answers and while there will be answers of a kind in this essay, they’ll not take the form of pronouncements, conclusions, or solutions but rather comprise observations, considerations, reasoning, and thoughts.
[4] See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017).
[5] See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017, p. 17). And, of course, all other modes of intellectual activity (e.g., visual, musical, crafting).
[6] Here, to “wander aimlessly” (OED).
[7] The monopolized mainstream British press is fervently right wing and supportive of any Tory leader, as long as they do as they’re told.
[8] Interesting too, though a tad speculative perhaps, is remembering that “cos” is shorthand for “because,” “cosplay” thus becomes readable as a childish explanation of a behavior. Question: “Why are you dressing up like [x]?” Answer: “‘cos play.”
[9] That’s to say, more influential in terms of making “official” meanings stick within public domains and dominant discourse.
[10] See, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks. (Boston; South End, 1990. 145-53).
[11] See, “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, Horizon, April 1946.
[12] E.g., euphemism, adaptation, co-option, and so forth
[13] See, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks (Boston; South End, 1990).
[14] First-rate knitting slang: someone who knits and crochets.
[15] Fragment from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.
Biography
Based in the north of Ireland, Ellen Kirkpatrick is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, Ellen writes mostly about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets. Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds, her open access book on the radical imagination and superhero culture, can be found here. Ellen can be found writing at The Break .
