Everyday resistance through cosplay: Reproduction, embodiment, and appropriation

The study of everyday forms of resistance is increasingly acknowledged as a crucial aspect of IR. Particularly, the sensorial nature and experience of such everyday resistances present an intriguing area through which to explore not only the acts of resistance, but also the quotidian lived experience of IR. The impact and relevance of popular culture to IR, and its power to shape, maintain, and affectively make sense of world politics, are well-established. Marvel’s superhero stories are militarised; violent, gendered narratives that invest and are invested in normalising traditional normative social orders. Cosplay is dressing up as and imitating characters from popular culture; the cosplayer’s sensory experience of popular culture militarism opens up for the exploration of how these narratives are enacted upon and by the body. The cosplayer is immersed in the narrative and character; they epitomise the consumption of banal gendered, militarised narratives and aesthetics. However, through the literal embodiment of characters, the cosplayer’s experience in-cosplay becomes a site of transformative consumption and appropriation. This affective embodiment of otherness results in the cosplayer’s embodiment of those narratives becoming a site of resistance within their reproduction. The (re)production and embodiment of produced aesthetics transforms who speaks: i.e. the cosplayers take the narratives, as well as the creative process embedded in the hegemonic cultural producers of Hollywood, and claim them for their own. I used autoethnography to experience this process myself. I argue that the cosplayer’s embodiment of militarised narratives becomes a form of what I term resistance within reproduction.