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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Managing Cosplay Performance: The Forms And Expectations Of Convention Roleplay, Isaac V. Price May 2020

Managing Cosplay Performance: The Forms And Expectations Of Convention Roleplay, Isaac V. Price

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Costume play (i.e. cosplay) is a performance of fandom rife with rituals and communication practices. Cosplay roleplaying performances are cultural practices that reveal how cosplayers interact with one another and among non-cosplaying members of their fandoms. This study examines the expectations that cosplayers hold for roleplay, the forms of roleplay, and the ways in which roleplay can become an instigator of harassment. Through the lens of Face-Negotiation Theory, the author discusses how roleplay functions to maintain or threaten the public images of cosplayers and their audiences, and what strategies cosplayers implement to avoid the loss of face.


Fantastical Body Narratives : Cosplay, Performance, And Gender Diversity., Tiffany M. Hutabarat-Nelson May 2017

Fantastical Body Narratives : Cosplay, Performance, And Gender Diversity., Tiffany M. Hutabarat-Nelson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to explore how the phenomenon of cosplay has been able to produce and sustain a diversity of gender expression due to its emergence from an activity-based community that emphasizes creative play. This creative energy is manifested through cosplay as an active, ritualized practice in which gender diversity is invited to be realized as a distinct possibility, resulting in a display of a full range of masculinities and femininities as well as crossplays and genderbend cosplays. I argue that cosplay can therefore be understood as a phenomenon that destabilizes the gender binary—its active practice promotes the production and …