Closing traps: emotional attachment, intervention, and juxtaposition in cosplay and International Relations

This article explores the everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses through the embodiment of popular culture representations of war(rior) bodies in cosplay. In cosplay – the (re)creation and wearing of costumes of characters from popular culture – the cosplayer is able to express and experience behaviours and emotions normally unavailable to them. This enables a radical, empathetic form of identity exploration, wherein the cosplayer is able to express and develop an understanding of their own and others’ experiences. Building on autoethnographic fieldwork in cosplay as Black Widow, I posit three links between cosplay and the study of emotions in International Relations (IR): the first, going through the everyday constitutive character of popular culture; the second, linking the embodiment of representations of war(rior) characters in cosplay with the feminist IR challenge to study the human experience of war; and the third, arguing that the study of something so seemingly random can engender exciting insights, like a collage. I argue that cosplay can be used to understand our emotional attachments to violent, gendered discourses found in popular culture narratives, but that in the (re)enactment of these upon the body – in their embodiment – there is a space for resistance.