Cosplay, A Subculture?
For the last few years I have embarked on writing several books on the topic of cosplay and wider fandom. It has been a joy to do in many respects and I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to talk on the subject of cosplay at length through them, and also through my work here at the Journal and beyond. It is a subculture that I love, and that we should all be incredibly proud to be part of the history, but. Yeah, but, and it’s a big one, because I have throughout this time run up against some very interesting attitudes towards cosplay and the idea that it is a subculture in its own right at all. And this has particularly come from the artistic, academic establishment.
When I started working on one of my books I had multiple people just tell me that cosplay wasn’t something worth researching. Or that they thought it was just fancy dress, a tiny sub-section of fan culture but basically the same thing. Or that they thought it was a kink. And at least one person tell me that cosplay didn’t count as a subculture. I was dismissed at an awful lot of turns. One time quite rudely.
I’m not going to say that I deserve anyone’s time, but I definitely don’t deserve someone’s rudeness on a subject because it’s not their thing. Nor do I want anyone to think that this was my experience with all of the people I worked with from this area, far from it, but it was an experience that left me wondering as to why cosplay is so often relegated to the side-lines. Particularly when other subcultures don’t get that same level of misunderstanding.
Cosplay as a subculture is under-explored. That isn’t even up for debate, it is. For a community that’s roots go back to the 1930s, in any sort of “organised” sense anyway - and it definitely goes back and back and back before then - there is a shockingly small amount of academic work around it, unlike other subcultures which have reams of journals, articles, and books about them.
Now, there are plenty of reasons why other subcultures have been explored on a grander scale; they are art movements, anti-establishment, they challenge ideas of respectability, gender, sexuality, but doesn’t cosplay do all of that too? I can tell you now, it most certainly does.
If you define subculture, according to Wikipedia and The Oxford English Dictionary it is:
“A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters.”
Well then. If you look at fandom/fan culture as the parent culture, or in the widest view the enjoyment of pop culture, then cosplay fits into that category of subculture perfectly. Much like any music subculture; punk, mods, ska, and many more, cosplay has moved away from being a single part of fan culture into being a culture of it’s own. It’s an alternative lifestyle that spans not just countries, but continents, and has done for decades under the surface of fan culture and convention life. Cosplayers can meet from all over the world and have a common language, a thread of understanding through in jokes with strangers - don’t tell me you con crunched? - shared experience - god, he sniped me! - codes that pretty only make sense to us - did you get the two things I just said? - and we all come to the aid of our community no matter what. Just because the rest of the world didn’t know that cosplay was here until the internet came along doesn’t discount it as a subcultural movement of self-exploration.
Which sounds very arse-y in many ways, but it is time that we stopped downgrading ourselves as a community and saw the amazing, artistic endeavour we have created because these plenty of folks out there ready to discount us, we don’t need to be the ones doing it for them.
Cosplay as a space allows you to do so much that the world we currently inhabit sees as taboo. We play make-believe without purpose, explore our identity without judgement or expectation, learn to DIY and create simply for our own enjoyment, and we develop new ways of creating, to the point of making new or repurposing technology to create in ways that people hadn’t thought of. And yes I will say that the world sees these things as taboo because they are childish, or silly, or unprofitable - how often are we told that a hobby must be a side hustle huh? But worst than that they are dangerous, and it is that, that defines cosplay as a subculture in my mind more than anything else.
Being something other than the status quo is part of the pride that subcultures and those that partake in them hold dear. You come out of the box and let yourself just be. It’s often why subcultures are seen as a little bit scary, as having an edge. Learning about yourself, your gender, your sexuality, your understanding of your body, that is dangerous but cosplay lets you do it. Playing make-believe, taking time to explore your inner child, look after yourself, express your happiness in a way that is unusual and, honestly, a bit weird, dangerous. Even learning that you can be creative and crafty, that you can DIY, dangerous, because you start being able to mend and make yourself; you’re not reliant on others telling you what to buy or wear or anything once you can do that.
We are the definition of a subculture. And a brilliantly strange one at that. After all, every cosplayer I have ever met has had at some point had the question thrown at them:
Why on Earth are you doing this? Why don’t you conform? What is the point? Why do you have to be so strange? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.
I don’t understand.
And isn’t that the most subversive thing a subculture can be? Something that the mainstream does not understand.
It feels like this article is written over and over in The Journal, online, in books, particularly by me, and I’m sorry for that, well no, I’m not. I’m probably going to keep saying this in one way or another for a long time coming. But I don’t mind if I’m going to write some more books, and some more for The Journal, and probably a lot more than that until people start to accept that cosplay is more than just dressing up. Really I don’t. Because this is an amazing subculture and it should be seen as such. Accepted as such. But possibly we don’t need people to understand entirely, it wouldn’t be as much fun if they did.
