Dr. Anne Peirson-Smith: The Goth, Lolita and the Dressing-Up Box: an examination of the Cosplay phenomenon in South-East Asia
Department of English and Communication
City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.
This paper explores the phenomenon of Cosplay, or the trend for young adults in Hong Kong and South East Asia to dress up in themed costumes assuming the persona of characters from Japanese comic books (manga) and animated cartoons (anime), video games, television shows, pop music bands and Victorian-style Lolitas or Goths as a means of exploring the underlying reasons why individuals pursue this activity and the cross cultural and historical influences that guide them.
The study tests out Stone’s ideas of the appropriacy of appearance in the development and presentation of self in the capacity of fantastic socialization processes (1965), and also revisits Eicher’s work (1981) on communicating and exploring identity via the dressing of public, private and secret selves. It also examines the role of fantasy-proneness and the manifestation of the fantastic imagination in the personality profiles of Cosplayers, and questions why dress is used as a catalyst for escaping the boundaries of self and acquiring multiple identities.
Interviews were conducted with a selection of Cosplayers in Hong Kong who regularly dress in a range of costumes in both private domestic spaces and public places or at organized Cosplay themed events. Research questions included, what it means to Cosplay participants to assume another persona, what motivates them to dress up, how they decide to choose a particular character, whether it is a form of creative expression, sub-cultural rebellion, secret or overt expressions of self, why and how they employ dress to pursue a particular fantasy and the role of gender socialization in this type of costuming.
Findings suggest that dressing up as a Cosplayer is multi-vocal experience representing different things to different participants, depending on demographic and psychographic profiles, including the reaffirmation of identity, the escape from a known reality – in an attempt to recapture a “cute” childhood innocence, and the visible, often mediated adherence to a defined and reassuring sub-cultural collective in the Asian context.