GOC Cosplay as a Speculative Civic Literacies Practice

• In Event: Speculative Civics Learning Through Artistic Creation and Performance

Abstract

This paper examines learning in an OST course focused on creating “meaningful” media engagements across fan publics. Data includes recordings of a month-long series of virtual seminars and videos of 9-11th grade BIPOC youth at field trips to local anime and comic conventions. Youth collected videos of their participation as cosplayers of media characters at these conventions and analyzed interactions through an interaction analysis lab.
In this paper, we take up Girl of Color (GOC) cosplay as an example of a speculative artistic practice, taking up Player et al. (2023)’s framing of “creative production as a tool for resistant theoretical navigation of the world” (p. 415). We see cosplaying as a speculative civic literacies practice (Mirra & Garcia, 2022) that writes GOC’s identities into mainstream media spaces. Fans’ race, gender, sexuality, and other intersectional identities are central to fan’s meaning-making (Thomas, 2019). Media production and consumption never exist in a disembodied vacuum, as “reading text is a racialized, sexed, and gendered act” (Ohito, 2022).
We saw youth engage in speculative civic literacies through embodied playful interactions across convention spaces. Lori, one of the GOC focal youth, often took pictures with racebent cosplayers, or cosplayers of color who reimagined White characters. This was particularly visible at the mainstream comic convention, as popular comics like Marvel and DC have historically lacked diversity in their superheroes. As Lori described during a video analysis session: “The entire con was really diverse even if there were a lot of the same characters. Everybody took characters and added their own flair.”
Throughout the day, Lori staged celebratory photo shoots with racebent cosplayers reimagining White characters. For instance, she shared with the analysis group: “I saw a black sora and i was so excited about that, i took so many pictures with black cosplayers.” Sora is a character from the Kingdom Hearts video game series which has traditionally lacked racial diversity in its characters. The cosplayer had a large afro as part of the cosplay. She also took pictures with a racebent Wanda from the MCU and Raven from Teen Titans. She herself was recognized as the character she chose to cosplay, sharing in one of her video commentaries: “Some other people from Invader Zim came up to me and tried to take pictures with me, and that was really nice, that was fun, it was really exciting.”
Recognition of these cosplays writes Black characters into the fandom. We see this as significant, particularly in light of the ways that recognition is politicized in online cosplaying interactions, with racebent cosplays often receiving hate and vitriol (miller, 2020). This paper will make the case that critical media discussions and subsequent participation in fandom spaces are productive methods for supporting the development of certain aspects of speculative civic literacies. This kind of speculative work is crucial for supporting BIPOC youth who are already navigating marginalizing practices in fandom spaces and subsequently dreaming toward more just ways of publicly interacting together.

Author

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University