Zuleika Lebow explores the impact of cosplay on disabled creatives with intersectional identities.
The creation and wearing of costumes to embody a character or entity has been a feature of humanity for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Whether for cultural or religious reasons, we seem to love the process of becoming through what we wear, and certainly when our clothes have significant symbolic meaning to us, they can change how we behave. (Adam H, Galinsky AD, 2012)
To a large extent, this is how costuming for film, TV, and performance works. Many actors have been quoted as saying they knew who their character was when they put on their clothes for the first time in a wardrobe fitting. I believe that this is also why cosplay has become such a large part of comic book conventions and popular culture; who amongst us can resist the call of being a superhero for the day?
With its roots in the Japanese word Kosupure, cosplay (an amalgam of the words costume and play) is thought to have been coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi of Studio Hard, perhaps after attending the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Los Angeles. Although defined within the cosplay, convention, and nerd worlds as a multi-disciplinary art form; many cosplayers “build” their costumes from scratch, make themselves up, take their own photographs and spend hours researching their chosen character for a shoot or appearance.
When you think of the word ‘nerd’ most of us will immediately picture someone who embodies a stereotype and that stereotype usually does not feature Black people into the equation. Black nerds or ‘blerds’, a term first brought into the mainstream by the character of Turk in the comedy show Scrubs exist and are a thriving community. As the worlds of blerdom and cosplay have grown and intersected; Black cosplayers have thrived, events such as BlerD Con have gained huge popularity, and platforms like blerd.com, Cosplay of Colour, FTO Nerd Talk and Black Girl Nerds have grown to prominence. I recently was lucky enough to interview four people who identify as disabled, are Blerds and love cosplay, to hear their experiences of the cosplay world.
Dee as She Ra.
To a large extent, the power of being a blerd is in finding community with other people who look like you who are into a subject that you have largely felt excluded by. When I asked all of my participants about what the term means for them, the answers ranged from joy and pride that the term exists, feelings of safety and security in a term made by and for Black people which encompasses our specific experiences, to feeling welcomed by the community when other established blerds also refer to you as one. Dee (@disableddee on Instagram) a professional cosplayer, summed up what the term means to them this way:
“That’s one of the most beautiful parts about the Black community is that they’re not going to wait around for some majority to do it. Just because we’re a minority doesn’t mean anything. We still have power. Creating the term blerd was a pivotal moment for many Black cosplayers and nerds, because they finally felt like they belonged and that they had a place in the media. There are tons of Facebook groups and support groups for blerds where you can just ask for tips on wigs or for tips on making costumes fit us better, or it literally anything. The Blerd community is so accepting, so loving, so caring, and I really identify with it.”
So far, the practice of cosplay has yet to receive recognition from more formal arts institutions and publications. On a personal note, the parallels that I see existing between performance art and cosplay are essentially what lead me to write this article. It is also what led me to interview lead artist for Brownton Abbey, Tarik Elmoutawakil about the way their practice intersects with the concepts of performance art, cosplay, Blackness, queerness, and disability. Created by queer and black and brown disabled folks, Brownton Abbey is a transcendental mash-up of Performance and Party that centres intersectionally marginalised identities (Brownton Abbey website).
When I ask Tarik about the way that their performance practice and love of cosplay interact, they tell me that it all started with working at a tea shop during Glastonbury festival that decided to hold weddings. Upon hearing about this they:
“…went and found a priest costume and put it on, wore it out of the shop, came back to the cafe, and they were like, ‘Brilliant, and you should be the priest!’ I conducted 80 weddings over the course of that weekend (not legally binding), and I really enjoyed myself, it was amazing. It began with putting the costume on, then it gave me license to explore; what I actually discovered was another facet of myself.”
Tarik as The Priest
As we have already touched on, costumes frequently help people to get into character, but for Tarik, the Priest character was the start of his using cosplay to facilitate his performances. After friends had asked Tarik to help them get into festivals, they eventually landed on the idea of performing at various festivals as a troupe of “sexy, Victorian, steampunk aliens”. It so happened that one year, all of the aliens were also gods, and all of the performers were people of colour (POC), and queer:
“That completely changed the feeling of what it meant to be performing as a really empowered alien. Being able to be weird, and unusual, and powerful, and respected, worshiped even, was hilarious and interesting. Especially coming from the actual kind of alienation that being a queer, disabled person of colour who was seen as being “out there” just because of the nature of your being. It was a really powerful experience. And it led me to thinking okay, alien gods, queer people of colour, alien gods, this needs to be more than this festival weekend thing. That was the beginning of the Afro-futuristic Space Church, the performance party that centres, celebrates and elevates disabled queer people of colour that is Brownton Abbey.”
As time has gone by, the relationship between cosplayers and conventions has only strengthened, in large part due to the competitions and prizes that have become a regular feature of convention life – giving rise to the professional cosplayer. As performers who cosplay full time, the world of professional cosplay is a safe haven for creative practitioners and artists: who value the autonomy that self-employment provides. In recent years, platforms like Patreon, OnlyFans, Instagram and YouTube have enabled cosplayers to support themselves through a mixture of advertising revenue, sponsorship and fan donations.
The relationships between fans and cosplayers can be increasingly symbiotic and complex, particularly if the performers in question are also sex workers, which is a fairly common intersection in the world of professional cosplay. However, it should be acknowledged that many cosplayers see their fans as family, a supportive network of people who appreciate their dedication to their craft.
For Dee, the relationship with their fans has kept them going through some tough times:
“I call them my friends. They’re all so sweet. I have a P.O. box. Whenever I’m sick and I’m in the hospital a lot of them send me things and letters. I have an amazing support system. I have had to miss cons because I’ve been in the hospital, and my friends will buy con merch for me and all sorts of things so that I don’t feel left out. No matter how small your platform is, it’s not how many followers you have, but who your followers are.”
Typical of any creative field largely based in the Western world, there are certain communities that find themselves underrepresented. While I was searching for Black disabled cosplayers to interview for this piece, I ran into difficulty simply trying to find Black cosplayers who also identified as disabled. Searching the hashtag #disabledcosplay, on Instagram showed me lots of cosplay by white or white-presenting people, but there were hardly any people with darker skin tones. Even searching #blackdisabledcosplay yielded few results, although this was how I found the super-talents Elicia and Dee. As with most creative professions, particularly those that rely largely on visibility on social media to earn a living, it is essential for professional cosplayers to have their work viewed on these platforms. The well-known racism and ableism of social media algorithms aside, the difficulty seems to come from larger, well-known cosplay pages not publicising the work of Black or visibly disabled players as much as their white, non-disabled, counterparts. If the work of disabled cosplayers is shared, it is usually when their disability is unseen or their mobility aids are not in the picture.
For professional cosplayer Elicia (@naught_3 on Instagram), this is something that needs to change:
“I want people to know that I am a disabled cosplayer, not just a cosplayer, I am a disabled cosplayer. There’s the cosplayers and then there’s the disabled cosplayers, which I feel aren’t very well known in the cosplay community. Okay, we’re under the cosplayer hashtag. Then we got to section it down even smaller to the disabled cosplayer hashtag. And it’s like, now you’ll find us and you know, we shouldn’t have to dig that deep. It’s nice to have our community but we should be included in the bigger swimming pool.”
Recently due to various social media campaigns, the tides have slowly been changing. Advocates such as Disability and We (@disability.and.we) have also sought to transform ableist ideas about disability within popular culture. Launching their Disavengers campaign which portrays disabled cosplayers as Marvel superheroes, in order to subvert the narrative that disabled people cannot be main characters.
As a community, cosplayers are largely supportive, welcoming, and protective of one another and their craft. However, as with any community, there are factions who have different ideas about what cosplay is or is not and how much interpretive license a cosplayer can take with their costumes. For example, some cosplayers are purists, believing that bought costumes do not and should not have the same cache as built ones. Other, more extreme views, relate to the appearance of the cosplayers themselves – with some believing that unless you can perfectly recreate and resemble the character you wish to cosplay as you shouldn’t bother. A damaging ideology when you consider that most of the popular characters we experience across comic books, manga and video game fandoms are largely white, able-bodied, thin, cis-gendered and heterosexual. This raises interesting questions about what cosplay looks like if you happen to be visibly disabled, queer and Black.
For Dee, making sure that their mobility aids are visibly part of their cosplay is extremely important to them:
“For me, I’m expressing myself and so my costumes can’t just be me, it’s also my mobility aids, because they’re a part of me. So, what my mum and I do is we decorate my wheelchairs for cons and even just going to Universal Studios or going to pride. We make wheel covers and specialty bags. Even when I’m not using my wheelchair, I have forearm crutches. One time I cosplayed Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time, and my crutches were pink, and I took little candy beads, and glued the candy on there. I love seeing other disabled people’s reactions when they see that your mobility aid can be an extension of yourself, not just something that’s there.”
Elicia as Rogue.
When Elicia decided to include her power chair and walking aids in a Rogue cosplay shoot, the reactions were mixed. She says that although most people were supportive, some purists in the community gave her a hard time both for featuring mobility aids in a shoot for a character who is not visibly disabled and because she is a black woman cosplaying as a white character. Some people believed that she borrowed her mobility aids for the shoot, something Elicia says really bothers her. This is a widespread and contentious issue within the cosplay community, with some able-bodied cosplayers ‘cripping up’ to play as disabled characters for shoots and events, while players who genuinely need to use mobility aids receive critique for including them when portraying non-disabled characters. Elicia expands:
“For me, I want to cosplay whoever I want to, regardless of my chair. I get into a dilemma about it. It’s a double edged sword. Thinking I’ll do Rogue for some cons coming up, because, you know, I took that picture. But when I first thought about dressing up and going to this con, I tried to think of ways to work in my chair into the cosplay and if people want to do that, that’s fine they should have the option, but I shouldn’t have to base my cosplay on my mobility aid either.”
The conversations around cosplaying as characters who are of different races to your own raise interesting questions about representation and identity. When I ask Merissa, an artist and non-professional cosplayer, how she feels about the conversation around race and cosplay she mentions seeing some discussions that took place in the Blerdsphere recently about the character Raven from Teen Titans. Literally the daughter of the devil, Raven is portrayed as a young white woman with very pale white skin. For the most recent con that Merissa attended with her husband and sons, she was considering playing Raven, but this conversation made her think twice:
“There was this conversation about well, if we [people of darker complexions] were to cosplay as her, because Raven is obviously very, very white, is that the opposite of blackface? Am I appropriating that character? But I think what some white people don’t seem to understand is that Black people cosplaying as white characters is very different to when white people wear blackface. Blackface is when you’re actually trying to mimic Black people, and you know, it’s done in an insulting way. Whereas cosplay is literally an appreciation of characters that are not real. But I really had to think twice about cosplaying as that character and what it might mean for me to paint my face white. I didn’t do it in the end, I decided to do Cat Woman instead.”
Merissa as Cat Woman.
Discussions around race and disability in the cosplay world become further complicated when we relate them to access; not only in terms of disability but who has access to money, resources, time, energy to be a cosplayer in the first place. Cosplay as a profession is expensive and time-consuming. Some cosplayers are known to spend months, or even years building specific costumes, plus there is the additional cost of accessories. Some players find the solution in what is called ‘closet cosplay’, using items from their existing wardrobe to portray a character. When I ask Elicia about what she feels is an aspect of professional cosplay life that goes unnoticed she says:
“Besides the actual obvious work that goes into it, it’s the creativity. Even if it’s a closet cosplay, it takes a sense of creativity because, if you have a character you want to do you have to have that vision and create that look from what you have and think about what’s in your closet you can use. I try to get as much out of what I’m going to use for costumes. You have to because it does get expensive. That’s why I say it doesn’t always have to be store bought or hand built for months on end. Heck, I see people who make cosplays out of cardboard, actually just a cardboard box, and they come up with something amazing and I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful’.”
During our interview together, Dee mentions that one of the hardest things about cosplaying for them is finding wigs that will fit over their locks:
“ I will cosplay characters with Afros or with braids. I get a lot of backlash from that because people are like, ‘that’s not canon’. I also get backlash because people are like, ‘that character is not black’. But when white cosplayers cosplay, someone from a Japanese anime they don’t get ridiculed, it’s like that person’s not white either. So, the cosplay community can have this one idea of what cosplay should look like. And my goal in the cosplay community is to break that shell and say cosplay can look like anything. Anyone can cosplay no matter how tall, how short, how thin, how fat, how able or disabled.”
As with any creative profession or hobby, cosplaying comes with its ups and downs. When I ask my interviewees what they love about cosplay, they all say that it has given them a sense of freedom and fun. A chance to explore their creativity as multidisciplinary artists. A window into another aspect of themselves and a chance to explore their creativity in alternative ways. Merissa summed it up well during our conversation:
“I’m definitely the sort of person that has always needed to escape in some way, but it’s always had to be in a creative way. I much prefer to sit and read a comic than to read a book, because I struggle with long sections of text and I am very visual. Being able to escape into a comic is one thing, because you can actually do that in your mind. But to put on an outfit or a costume and become that character you were just reading about is next level. It’s a double whammy!”
This is a sentiment I share. Cosplay is fun, and it is incredible to see how people from different backgrounds interpret characters to fit their culture, aesthetic, or identity. When I look at the work of my contributors, from Tarik’s space aliens, Merissa’s Cat Woman, Elicia’s Rogue or Dee’s Princess Bubblegum the joy and pride that these artists take in their work is undeniable. For me, when I see people cosplaying as characters that I have a strong affinity with, their interpretation of the character deepens my own feelings of synergy and belonging – especially when I see that the player looks like me. The joy of seeing and being seen is twofold, whether the characters are well known and loved cultural favourites or completely new creations, what stands out about the work of these performers is that each of them brings something of themselves to these characters that no one else can.
Special thanks:
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Dee, Tarik, Elicia and Merissa for trusting me with your words and perspectives for this piece. And to my consultant on all things blerd: Demtries Murray of @ftowire and @ftonerdtalks.
Sources:
https://libguides.lib.umt.edu/cosplay
https://gamedaily.biz/article/2/an-inside-look-at-the-business-of-professional-cosplay
https://www.diggitmagazine.com/papers/cosplayers-and-offline-world
https://www.blerd.com/what-is-a-blerd-and-what-does-blerd-mean/
https://fashionandtextiles.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40691-014-0020-7
https://www.sapphirenation.net/cosplay-is-it-an-art
Adam H, Galinsky AD: Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2012, 48 (4): 918-925.
