Review: Costuming Cosplay: Dressing the Imagination, Therèsa Winge (Bloomsbury 2018) (original) (raw)

Therèsa Winge enjoys something of first mover status in the annals of cosplay scholarship. Her 2006 article 'Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Manga and Anime Cosplay' in the inaugural issue of Mechademia-a journal which helped launch the serious academic study of Japanese popular culture-rates as perhaps the first rigorously scholarly treatment of the subject. Thus the appearance of her Routledge monograph in the same year as Intellect Books' Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (disclosure: I am author of the latter, along with Anne Peirson-Smith and Adam Geczy) marks late 2018 as the year in which the relatively outlier field of cosplay scholarship came of age-or, at least, crossed a threshold into the realms of sustained scholarly literature. It is worth contemplating for a moment how young cosplay scholarship is. Prior to 2006 academe treated cosplay as a tangential consideration while most of the published 'literature' consisted essentially of non-scholarly sources, such as newspaper, magazine and online articles, exemplified by Michael Bruno's pieces for Glitz and Glitter Newsletter in 2002. The few full-length books on the subject, such as Aoyama and Cahill's Cosplay Girls: Japan's Live Animation Heroines (2003) and Robert Holzek's Cosplay: The New Main Attraction (2004), were aimed at a general readership or, rather, fandom. These pop cultural forerunners of the more academic treatments that would soon appear are still quoted in journal articles due to the relative dearth of material in this pre-theoretical phase of the cosplay phenomenon. Yet during the 1990s and early 2000s the ground was being laid for a more robust framing of the popular cultural practice of fannish dressing up along three broad disciplinary axes. First was the intersection of subcultural, gender and performance studies, which cumulatively afforded scope for new understandings of gender as a performance inscribed on the physical bodies of social actors, with a particular focus on its transgressions, including queering. Second, fan practices such as fanfiction were being re-framed by Henry Jenkins' famous formulation of fans as 'textual poachers,' while related discourses around gaming, narrative and identity foregrounded the 'ludic' (or rule-based play) as both a performative and, potentially, critical practice, that resulted in a variety of appropriations and remediations. Thirdly, as noted, manga, anime and associated fandoms in Japanese otaku (hardcore nerd, geek) culture had become fashionable topics in the 1990s with Susan Napier's Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001), later reissued as Anime From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle (2005), being a much quoted keystone. 2006's inaugural issue of Mechademia, which carried Winge's 'Costuming the Imagination,' was subtitled 'Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga.' Winge drew attention to cosplay's roots in western popular culture-and in particular sci-fi and comics convention culture-where previously many had assumed the practice to be Japanese in origin, though her focus was primarily on the cosplay of Japanese manga and anime media franchises and their subcultural followings. Fans' performances of their chosen characters were based on research and study into a source text, leading to an 'interpretation that takes place by reading and watching.' This was the same year Jenkins famously argued in Convergence Culture (2006) that, far from being the cultural dupes This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License JTSFT.MS.ID.000641.