Written by Daniel Skentelbery – This post was originally a talk written for the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP) Postgraduate Conference 2021. It is based on findings during my PhD research at Keele University. This talk was originally written to share my experiences with new PhD students and openly discuss experiences of change and adapting to change during one’s research. It was the aim of the talk to reassure new students that change is very much a part of the PhD process. I have decided to share my talk, to extend this message, and to offer an accurate summation of the findings of my PhD research.
Introduction
My PhD research is an investigation of the cosplay community. Cosplay is an abbreviation of costume and play; I have come to define cosplay as a process in which a fan dresses and performs as characters from popular film/TV/comics/games. Initially, my project sought to examine the ways in which cosplayers use cosplay to negotiate, question, reaffirm, or express gendered and sexual identities. Subjects around gender identity and expression is a growing field of study in cosplay scholarship, especially in the works of writers such as Bainbridge and Norris (2009, 2011), Gn (2011) and King (2013, 2016). This emerging area of study is hardly surprising given the visibility of certain gender play cosplay. Two of the most common forms of gender play in cosplay include Gender-bending and Crossplay, according to Aadahl gender-bending is the process of “taking a character who is canonically female and reimagining them as male, vice versa, or giving a genderless character gendered characteristics” (Aadahl, 2018). On the other hand, crossplay “is far less easy to spot. […] The hope here is to not stand out as a different gender, to present themselves as the gender of the character as seamlessly as possible” (Aadahl, 2018). Other forms of identity performance include Race-bending and Age-bending. Whilst little cosplay literature exists on race-bending it is a widely accepted term among cosplayers, referring to the process of cosplaying a character who is not of one’s own racial identity. Finally, age-bending is a term I have coined after observing just how common it is for cosplayers to perform as characters that are significantly older/younger than the cosplayer.
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