Cosplay and Communities of Creativity
As should be no surprise to any regular blog readers, I’m still working on the cosplay book! And I will be working on the cosplay book until August of this year, so strap in for a few more months of this. But one of the interesting things I’ve found about cosplay and the cosplay community is the role of creativity. This creativity spreads through the fandom and the interactions within the community. So today, we’re going to talk about the cosplay community specifically as a community of creativity.
In our last cosplay blog post, I mentioned an article by Lamerichs which was about cosplay as a subculture. At the time I said we’d talk about cosplay as subculture a different time - this is that time!
Many of the groups in pop culture more generally are described as subcultures, this is because they are seen as and a group that is both distinguished from but embedded within a larger group. Dick Hebdige is perhaps the most prominent scholar who really laid the foundations of the study of subculture, through his focused study of youth subcultures in Britain. For Hebdige, subcultures are formed to challenge dominant ideologies and social normalisation that occurs in the wider culture. Therefore, their style and interactions are all done as acts of resistance.
While cosplay is something that may not be necessarily embedded in the everyday actions of wider society, and it can definitely be a form of resistance and subversion, it is not always like this. The wider cultural group, of course, can also be vastly different in different areas of the world, and yet cosplayers see themselves in cosplayers from a variety of locations.
Hebdige also commented on how the style of subcultures become gently folded into the mainstream society it initially fought to separate itself from. This was mostly described as evident in punk. What first was seen as radical, and sometimes a source of fear for the mainstream culture, it slowly becomes more commodified until it’s presence is a part of the mainstream.
A collection of cosplay wigs, construction books and other resources for cosplay creativity (taken at MCM London).
The commodification and the folding in of cosplay into wider mainstream culture is definitely something that has been occurring in the last ten to twenty years. Since cosplay was described and coined by Takahashi, its popularity is fast growing. The emergence of professional cosplayers demonstrates a place in the growing commodification of cosplay. However, I don’t think cosplayers ever initially were viewed with fear. In fact, the mainstream society at worst viewed cosplayers as social losers, rather than punk-ish miscreants.
A more complicated term that has a growing presence in discussions about cosplay and other nerd subgroups is that of the ‘neo-tribe’. The idea of the neo-tribe is primarily based on the work of Michel Maffesoli, a French sociologist. Building on the idea of modern society’s push toward more and more individualisation, Maffesoli believed that in response, individuals would start to embrace nostalgia, bringing on a era of neo-tribalism.
The network of sociology that Maffesoli built is idea on is starting to take us quite far from the world of cosplay, but the idea is that modernity causes social fragmentation. We no longer live in close knit familial stages, for example. The person who grew up surrounded by family in rural Kentucky, for example, now moves to New York, separating themselves from the world of ‘community’ as we once knew it.
The preference toward neo-tribes is two-fold. The first is the growth of importance of ‘found family’ in popular culture and popular discourse - the idea that an individual is not bound to their birth family, but rather can build their own family from those around them. The second preference is that the idea of things like ‘culture’ and therefore ‘subculture’ is inherently rigid. Neo-tribes, by contrast, are more ambivalent, reflecting a state of mind or a lifestyle choice, rather than something as strongly cemented as, say, familial clan based organisations, or formalised nationalities.
The primary advantage of neo-tribalism is how it sits in contrast to the idea of a subculture. This is getting into weird definitional wars undertaken by academics world over, where someone dislikes one so comes up with their own, and then another hates that, and it’s a constant cycle. Often, if your problem with one definition is the theoretical underpinnings, then new definitions that don’t address these are going to have the same problems. This is kinda the case with neo-tribes. The concept of neo-tribes is theoretically underpinned by the idea that modernity has caused us to no longer have traditional bonds, an idea that I don’t know if I fully agree with.
During the course of my research, while chatting with cosplayers, the term ‘community’ was used freely. This is mostly because only anthropologists sit around overthinking the terms we are using and why it may or may not matter. But also, I don’t think the individuals thinking about the cosplay community are that far off.
The idea of a community, sociologically speaking, is primarily concerned with the idea that a group of people have something in common. This can be something like location in which they live - if I live in Brooklyn, I’m a part of the Brooklyn community, for example. But this can be loose. If I move away from Brooklyn, I’m no longer part of the Brooklyn community. I may feel some affinity, and I may be able to share some of the same language if I run into someone else who still is a part of that community, but ultimately, I’m no longer there, and therefore I don’t belong. Communities are built on this - the in group vs the outgroup. To have a community, you have to have people who belong. And one of the consequences of having people who belong, is you have people who don’t.
Sample sewing kit typical of cosplayers to be able to adjust or mend costumes on the fly (photo taken at CosXpo).
But like the idea of neo-tribes, communities can be fluid. Albert Hirschmann, for example, wrote about ‘shifting involvements’ in communities. People can vary their involvement in their community, and can even drop in and out of their ‘belong’ status depending on the individual. As Hirschmann pointed out, this is most common in groups that require some degree of active engagement from its members.
So if to be in the cosplay community, you must cosplay, then individuals may feel themselves dropping in and out of the community depending on how much energy they have to give to keep their involvement active. One individual I spoke to was a student, who felt they had little time or money to engage with cosplay. They still considered themselves a cosplayer, but admitted to no longer feeling as ‘connected’.
Cosplay is, therefore, a community that defines itself by the shared love of creativity and creative action. It’s the act of cosplay that defines them and unites them, even if that act of cosplay looks different for each person. But creativity is the root of everything - cosplay is a community of creativity.
