on love, scholarship, and costume
Unless we know each other very well, if you've met me, you've probably met me in costume. Considering that costume is one of the technologies through which I like both to interact with and to examine the world, this isn't really surprising. If you've seen me playing independent academic (hey, someone send me a pic from a panel, yeah?), businesswoman, retrogirl, genderqueer writer, Regency dancer or actress, you've seen me in costume. But for a lot of you, if we're talking about my relationship with costume we're talking about cosplay.
Despite the fact that I talk about cosplay on con panels a lot, it's only adjacent to, as opposed to central to the fanthropology stuff I do. And, despite my love of costume, I've only ever cosplayed two characters: Severus Snape and Jack Harkness (OMG, how can I have so many random pictures of me and can't find a single picture of this cosplay that I feel like linking right now? Anyway, men's clothes, big coat, you know the drill).
Cosplay is, perhaps, the element of fan-behavior most poorly received by those outside of fandom communities, and perhaps even by some of those inside many fan communities (this is, as is quite rightly noted in comments, more a function of Western fandom culture and Western fandom properties than Eastern ones). It is, after all, fairly easy to go, "oh, you know, those people and their Starfleet uniforms" and never think about what those people and their Starfleet uniforms are on about.
There are a lot of things that make people uncomfortable about cosplay. One of the primary issues is that it is play, something that in the West we've been told very specifically is not the domain of adult status (a status that is increasingly difficult to prove by any means other than by what one is not). Another issue, that's closely related to play, is that it's often deeply earnest. But cosplay is also a mode of criticism -- of source materials and their representations (a TV show is just a representation of the work of a writer for starts) certainly, but of also of things, including society, fandom and the self.
Perhaps most troubling for people outside of the world of cosplay is the inability to look at a costume and know what it is: is it play? or is it criticism? does the person doing the cosplay intend it as criticism? and how necessary and/or appropriate is it for us to judge someone else's act of play? Cosplay freaks a lot of people out because it's incredibly hard to divine from the outside what the hell any particular instance of it is about.
While it's no secret that I'm a cosplayer, I often feel it's supposed to be. As someone who is as a guest at some cons and a fan at others, I get a lot of lectures about how it's not done for pros to wear costumes (I certainly don't wear them when I'm working a con as a guest; I certainly do wear them when I'm being a fan, and the notion that it's not appropriate at events where I am not and have never been a guest and am there solely to hang out and have a good time galls me).
The severity of that attitude differs between fandoms and media (I hear it, for example, more often from static media folks (novelists, comics) than from folks who work with the moving image), I've noticed, and it's particularly awkward for someone like me who's become a pro by, through, and about my fannish activities. But the discomfort of others tends to trump frank discussions of cosplay, especially when that cosplay is about things -- like love and criticism -- other than just play.
And the fact is, that no matter what anyone tells you, we don't all put on our pants quite the same way. One leg at a time, sure. But the mood of dressing and undressing, of constructing an identity, varies from person to person and identity to identity.
I find tending to my menswear very calming, and, sometimes, sorrowful -- it is lonely packing myself away in one fashion when I dress, and in another when I undress. I find feminine business wear makes me feel efficient, and 1940's dresses make me want to go shopping using only paper sacks. I find putting on the costume I wore for Snape makes me want to have a lot more physical distance from people than I normally do, and that when I cosplay Jack Harkness, the costume feels truest to me when I'm half dressed and my braces are still hanging around my hips. And all these things tell me something: about the properties and characters I study, about the world I study in, and about myself.
There is little doubt that I engage texts as the "enchanted" believer that I posited in "A Tangible Reality of Absence" (not online yet; sorry, my bad in the self-referencing department, although you can hear me talk about this at Dragon*Con this year), and in doing so I am not just experiencing a passionate relationship with text, but with myself in a reality I've consciously chosen for the duration of an act of play, as opposed to one foisted upon me, or one I only pretend to believe in (i.e, the "ironic" believer).
Snape was never a costume of some Other I longed to be, but a representation of the power I believe my personal uglinesses (an unconventional face, a deviant gender, a difficult manner, an inconvenient intellect) have given me. The Harkness costume has certainly never been about the man I wish I could be, but the one I fear I am: gregarious and yet terribly alone; preoccupied with the past; and unable, too often, to appreciate the affection around, and directed, at me.
Of course, it's highly likely that such an explanation of costume and cosplay serves, not to make anyone reading this more comfortable with the idea, but less. After all, I talk often enough about how we all secretly fear we are -- or everyone else on the Internet is -- one of Snape's Wives.
Today Henry Jenkins tweeted regarding this discussion of the acafen perspective, which in passing addresses notions of costume and generally argues against the acafen perspective, essentially saying that love is a blindness.
And yet, it is only the people who know me best, who care the most for me, that have seen me without costume. It is these people who unavoidably know my flaws, and who seek to understand why I have them and how they hurt the person I am both in private and in many different publics.
The idea that love is an obstacle to critical thinking and rigorous scholarship, especially in Fan Studies, and pop-culture related fields, is one that, while I can certainly process the arguments for, ultimately make no organic sense to me. In love, we know the details; get the layers; we peel off the skin.
Love makes me a better scholar and a more persistent one. It is the ever so risky sin of sentimentality that opens more windows of thought for me than any other, and perhaps, even more importantly, is the angle through which I'm able to cultivate a receptiveness to those ideas. It's surely not a style of scholarship that suits everyone as a producer or a consumer, and I am not advocating a conversion of others to the style of it so much as I am advocating a push-back against the shame culture that says love is dangerous because it obscures ideas, when I have always known that love is dangerous because it breeds them.
I wear costumes and am many men who never were. I am also scholar and a fan and a woman and a self-critical blogger and a total geek. And not only do I have absolutely no idea why all those things supposedly aren't compatible, I also know that I can read all the theory in the world and still come to only one conclusion about my existence in this regard: I am as true as any fiction.
Which is to say, yet again (and for surely not the last time): Stories Matter.
And so does how we feel about them.
Stories don't matter less because they never happened. They don't contain less meaning because we love them. And they don't go away or sit in the corner or become less noticeable because we shame them.
Despite the fact that I talk about cosplay on con panels a lot, it's only adjacent to, as opposed to central to the fanthropology stuff I do. And, despite my love of costume, I've only ever cosplayed two characters: Severus Snape and Jack Harkness (OMG, how can I have so many random pictures of me and can't find a single picture of this cosplay that I feel like linking right now? Anyway, men's clothes, big coat, you know the drill).
Cosplay is, perhaps, the element of fan-behavior most poorly received by those outside of fandom communities, and perhaps even by some of those inside many fan communities (this is, as is quite rightly noted in comments, more a function of Western fandom culture and Western fandom properties than Eastern ones). It is, after all, fairly easy to go, "oh, you know, those people and their Starfleet uniforms" and never think about what those people and their Starfleet uniforms are on about.
There are a lot of things that make people uncomfortable about cosplay. One of the primary issues is that it is play, something that in the West we've been told very specifically is not the domain of adult status (a status that is increasingly difficult to prove by any means other than by what one is not). Another issue, that's closely related to play, is that it's often deeply earnest. But cosplay is also a mode of criticism -- of source materials and their representations (a TV show is just a representation of the work of a writer for starts) certainly, but of also of things, including society, fandom and the self.
Perhaps most troubling for people outside of the world of cosplay is the inability to look at a costume and know what it is: is it play? or is it criticism? does the person doing the cosplay intend it as criticism? and how necessary and/or appropriate is it for us to judge someone else's act of play? Cosplay freaks a lot of people out because it's incredibly hard to divine from the outside what the hell any particular instance of it is about.
While it's no secret that I'm a cosplayer, I often feel it's supposed to be. As someone who is as a guest at some cons and a fan at others, I get a lot of lectures about how it's not done for pros to wear costumes (I certainly don't wear them when I'm working a con as a guest; I certainly do wear them when I'm being a fan, and the notion that it's not appropriate at events where I am not and have never been a guest and am there solely to hang out and have a good time galls me).
The severity of that attitude differs between fandoms and media (I hear it, for example, more often from static media folks (novelists, comics) than from folks who work with the moving image), I've noticed, and it's particularly awkward for someone like me who's become a pro by, through, and about my fannish activities. But the discomfort of others tends to trump frank discussions of cosplay, especially when that cosplay is about things -- like love and criticism -- other than just play.
And the fact is, that no matter what anyone tells you, we don't all put on our pants quite the same way. One leg at a time, sure. But the mood of dressing and undressing, of constructing an identity, varies from person to person and identity to identity.
I find tending to my menswear very calming, and, sometimes, sorrowful -- it is lonely packing myself away in one fashion when I dress, and in another when I undress. I find feminine business wear makes me feel efficient, and 1940's dresses make me want to go shopping using only paper sacks. I find putting on the costume I wore for Snape makes me want to have a lot more physical distance from people than I normally do, and that when I cosplay Jack Harkness, the costume feels truest to me when I'm half dressed and my braces are still hanging around my hips. And all these things tell me something: about the properties and characters I study, about the world I study in, and about myself.
There is little doubt that I engage texts as the "enchanted" believer that I posited in "A Tangible Reality of Absence" (not online yet; sorry, my bad in the self-referencing department, although you can hear me talk about this at Dragon*Con this year), and in doing so I am not just experiencing a passionate relationship with text, but with myself in a reality I've consciously chosen for the duration of an act of play, as opposed to one foisted upon me, or one I only pretend to believe in (i.e, the "ironic" believer).
Snape was never a costume of some Other I longed to be, but a representation of the power I believe my personal uglinesses (an unconventional face, a deviant gender, a difficult manner, an inconvenient intellect) have given me. The Harkness costume has certainly never been about the man I wish I could be, but the one I fear I am: gregarious and yet terribly alone; preoccupied with the past; and unable, too often, to appreciate the affection around, and directed, at me.
Of course, it's highly likely that such an explanation of costume and cosplay serves, not to make anyone reading this more comfortable with the idea, but less. After all, I talk often enough about how we all secretly fear we are -- or everyone else on the Internet is -- one of Snape's Wives.
Today Henry Jenkins tweeted regarding this discussion of the acafen perspective, which in passing addresses notions of costume and generally argues against the acafen perspective, essentially saying that love is a blindness.
And yet, it is only the people who know me best, who care the most for me, that have seen me without costume. It is these people who unavoidably know my flaws, and who seek to understand why I have them and how they hurt the person I am both in private and in many different publics.
The idea that love is an obstacle to critical thinking and rigorous scholarship, especially in Fan Studies, and pop-culture related fields, is one that, while I can certainly process the arguments for, ultimately make no organic sense to me. In love, we know the details; get the layers; we peel off the skin.
Love makes me a better scholar and a more persistent one. It is the ever so risky sin of sentimentality that opens more windows of thought for me than any other, and perhaps, even more importantly, is the angle through which I'm able to cultivate a receptiveness to those ideas. It's surely not a style of scholarship that suits everyone as a producer or a consumer, and I am not advocating a conversion of others to the style of it so much as I am advocating a push-back against the shame culture that says love is dangerous because it obscures ideas, when I have always known that love is dangerous because it breeds them.
I wear costumes and am many men who never were. I am also scholar and a fan and a woman and a self-critical blogger and a total geek. And not only do I have absolutely no idea why all those things supposedly aren't compatible, I also know that I can read all the theory in the world and still come to only one conclusion about my existence in this regard: I am as true as any fiction.
Which is to say, yet again (and for surely not the last time): Stories Matter.
And so does how we feel about them.
Stories don't matter less because they never happened. They don't contain less meaning because we love them. And they don't go away or sit in the corner or become less noticeable because we shame them.
no subject
Cosplay is a term I've only even heard in the last six or seven years, and I still haven't figured out how it is different than what I'd call hall costuming or possibly LARPing without an official game in progress.
When I moved to DC in the mid 80s, I joined what was then a vital (opinionated, cliquish) and thriving competition costuming community. Even if you weren't competing officially (the in-crowd was ALWAYS measuring itself against itself against what that person had done previously) you wore costumes for two reasons:
1) Love of character. Sometimes a character you created. Sometimes regardless of whether you "ought" to be a media character. (There were plenty of discussions of whether you should be playing to your own race/gender/background/size. Suffice it to say that I didn't let being a shortish, fat, white woman stop me from starting work on a Lord Bowler costume)
2) Love of challenge/learning experience. Can fabric be found that matches a faded print from 1910? There isn't any commercial beaded trim like that, but if you loom this bit and add that bit... What happens when you put two colors of dye in separate spray bottles and let loose on a piece of wet silk with both hands? What would a fat white female Lord Bowler wear and still be recognizably Bowler?
I'm making myself a bit nostalgic! I enjoyed the learning and experimenting part.
But anyway - this is a wordy way of saying that I hear the words "play" and "criticism" and they are so far from my experience of making and wearing costume that every time the topic of cosplay comes up I'm sitting uncomprehendingly with my head on one side like a dog in front of a victrola. This post is pointing the way to a whole new perspective.
no subject
no subject
Yup! I had *such* a thing for Lord Bowler in specific; he was by far my favorite character.
The last remnant of said costume is full-length oilskin coat with loomed beadwork on the shoulders. By competition standards the loomwork is mediocre and I don't have the breadth of shoulder for the complete pattern he had... but I still wear that coat when it rains and I've never thought about taking the beadwork off.
no subject
My feeling: I did a very tiny bit of con going in the late 80s, early 90s, and I think there used to be more of a difference between the two terms, more of a mental mindset. My impression of hall costume/masqueraders was that costuming was VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS. My first (and only) experience with costuming was very painful, because I had a amateur, slapped-together Old Trek costume, of which I was very proud, and I was wearing it in a world where, my God, if you wore the wrong insignia you'd get torn to pieces. Yes, I should have done more research, but the reaction was so harsh that it permanently turned me off of going to a con in any sort of costume whatsoever.
Then, in the early 90s, cons devoted to manga and anime started appearing, and the "cosplay" term became more prevalent as a direct loanword from Japanese, it in itself a neologism made up of two English words. At Animecon 1991, the first international anime con in the US, the Japanese guests were astounded at the detail of costuming by the American attendees. Going by photos of costuming at Japanese cons in the 1980s, costuming was much more informal and less detailed. You put on an outfit more or less signifying your character in broad strokes and you were done. I believe anime/manga fans took up the term "cosplay" to delineate their own fandom, which at the time was MUCH smaller and more underground in the US than the traditional big Western fandoms.
no subject
I agree; even competition costumers are starting to use the term for non-competition stuff.
costuming was VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Pretty much. (Sorry for that, BTW. I never went after people that way, but I know folks who did get that wrapped up and ye gods, why didn't anyone including me say "Breathe, it's not important"?) Attitudes like that are why the local guild is a pale shadow of its former self; the people who didn't flee costuming finally put their backs up and said "Screw you, we're doing our own thing over here." And in the meantime, Anime was a completely different culture doing a completely different thing. I'm not surprised that their term has taken over as the movers and shakers of classic competition costuming die or retire.
(To this day I feel guilty for buying a lot of my rennfaire garb. In addition to the good side of things - "Ooo, I love that costume and I know just how to make it" comes the guilt of not making or repurposing every stitch you wear.)
the Japanese guests were astounded at the detail of costuming by the American attendees
Politics and overkill for people who don't want to play to that level aside, there was good from the old mindset. You could learn a lot - for every person bitching about quality, there was one who'd happily teach - and there was a goal to learn, grow, and do your best.
Speaking of great detail, a story from long ago: I know someone who recreated the cover of The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. She was so detailed that she replicated Whelan's signature where he worked it into the costume, and she called him once to get his impressions of what the backside of the spacesuit looked like. In addition to sewing the suit, she used plastics to build the gun and soft-sculptured the cat for her shoulder.
At a Worldcon panel where the artists, a couple costuming BNFs, and authors were discussing character interpretations, she deliberately came a couple minutes late so the speakers would glance to the door.
She hit the pose from the cover of the book.
Whelan's jaw hit the floor.