Blogpost#5 The Effects of Cosplay

As a child, we've all been fascinated about wearing a costume of our favorite fictional characters. But it is different for cosplayers, cause until know, they still dress up as their favorite characters, some of them even makes a living out of cosplaying. Cosplay short for "Costume Play", is a some kind of art where people dress up as characters from a fictional world, the most popular source of cosplay ideas is mainly from anime characters, in fact the Japanese even coined the term "Cosplay".

I myself have never experienced dressing up as someone from a TV show or anime series, because it's not really my interest. But that doesn't stop me from discussing about it's effects on our society.

As I was searching on about the effects of cosplay to our society, I encountered this article, A Cosplayed Life: Subcultural Influences on Racial and Heteronormative Structures in Everyday Life, from digitalcommons.uconn.edu, by James Joseph-Westcott Hogan. There he talked about the way cosplayers dress up to anyone they like, strengthens the resistance to gender and race restrictions. There is really no rules and regulations in cosplay. A male can dress up to anything or anyone he likes, may it be from a fire breathing dragon to a curvy and beautiful female icon, the same goes with females. 

As he quoted "By examining the interactions of cosplayer's social exchanges with other cosplayers where they display knowledge of their character or anime in general, I demonstrate how the appropriation of cultural symbols-anime or manga episodes and characters- and their subsequent transformation into cosplays can develop resistances to dominant notions of gender and race in both the participants engaged in cosplay and those that witness the phenomenon." This tells us that cosplay can be viewed as a good thing in our society. Some people think that cosplay is a way out, because in a convention where cosplay is needed, people can dress up to whatever or whoever they want to be, without being discriminated by society. 

But sometimes, cosplay can also bring out the problems it is trying to avoid, such as cosplay bullying. This is where cosplayers, particularly the homosexual ones, are getting cyber bullied and discriminated just because they are dressing up to someone in the opposite sex.  The root of the problems are homophobes.

I researched on why are there even homophobes in this world, and why do they hate on homosexuals, particularly the cosplayers. I read this article called Homophobes May be Hidden Homosexuals, by Jeanna Bryner on livescience.com. There she quoted another person who talked about that the homophobes in this world are basically homosexuals themselves. The main point of the study is to why are some people hating on gays? The answer is simple, they hate on homosexuals because they hate themselves. They sometimes feel jealous and envious of gays because they can express what they truly feel, and homophobes don't have the courage and admittance to do so. 

As she quoted "Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they 'doth protest too much,'" Ryan told LiveScience. "In addition, it appears that sometimes those who would oppress others have been oppressed themselves, and we can have some compassion for them too, they may be unaccepting of others because they cannot be accepting of themselves.".
I think most, not all of the homophobes are homosexuals themselves. Most of the cosplay bullies are probaly homophobes, they hate the homosexual cosplayers because deep inside, they know they want to dress up to someone they idolize in the opposite sex too, they just don't know it yet.



Even though I've never experienced Cosplay, I can understand it's effects in our world today. . For some, Cosplay is like their freedom, it's their way of becoming who they want to be in life, regardless of race and gender.