Sometimes a microcosm of the world allows us to examine something in a fresh way. Cosplay culture gives us a new context in which to understand how beauty standards affect people. Cosplay is the practice of dressing up as a character from a movie, book (often a graphic novel), video game, or comic. Most frequently this practice occurs when people attend the various “cons” usually in larger cities, such as San Diego Comic-Con.
In The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics edited by Maxine Leeds Craig, Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy explore the infiltration of beauty standards into the world of cosplay. When talking about cosplay, there are two important and distinct contexts that direct the discussion: the source text and the cosplayers. The source texts comprise the video games, comic books, and movies on which the cosplayers base their costumes. In the source texts, the women are generally hyper-sexualized, and the men are generally hyper-masculinized. These “hyper” depictions are not merely slight exaggerations; they are often impossible body types. The source texts present the first difficulty in understanding beauty standards in the cosplaying context. But the cosplayers themselves face other difficulties and judgment, regarding their physical bodies.
While cosplayers report that they often feel accepted within the community of cosplayers, who tend to focus on creativity and confidence, they felt a tremendous amount of judgement from outsiders and themselves. A recurring criticism of people’s costumes was rendered under the guise of authenticity to the source text. The character is tall (or white or skinny and so on), and you’re not. Therefore, you shouldn’t cosplay as that character. And this influences cosplayers own ideas about which characters they can embody. Those kinds of criticisms ignore our imaginations, but even worse they fail to acknowledge when the construction of the costume was well-crafted and thoughtful.
They interviewed 23 cosplayers (most were from the midwestern United States), and they spent more than 200 hours observing various cons between 2015 and 2019. During their interviews, the word “beauty” didn’t come up much, but related ideas like attractive, hot, sexy, and cute were used with regularity. They recall in this essay that three topics surfaced repeatedly.
First, the interviewees agreed that it is not necessary for someone to be attractive to be a cosplayer, but it certainly helps. They believe that the quality of the costume and the ability to act like the character should matter more than someone’s regular appearance. But one’s attractiveness makes them more noticeable. While it can be a confidence boost, others, including men, felt like it is really difficult to compete with attractive women for recognition. And most agreed that attractiveness at cons is more important for women, which mirrors the pressures of everyday life.
Second, similar to the first topic, professional cosplayers, those with massive online followings, are more likely to be attractive, according to the interviewees. Marie, one of those interviewed, said, “it certainly does help to be pretty if you want to monetize it.” But this attractiveness can backfire a little in the culture because people assume that attractive cosplayers with large followings are not making their own costumes.
The final topic that arose was “the relationship between sexualized images of women cosplayers and characters, and the objectification of real-life cosplayers.” They note that some people might engage in self-objectification to grow their followers and influence, which also earns them money. And this can lead to harassment or disparagement as people are objectified at in-person events. Another interviewee, Emma, notes that when a woman “dresses as a character that is very sexual, the people who view that person view them as also very sexual.” She goes on to explain that she once cosplayed as a character who wore a bikini top, and people gazed only at her body, which felt uncomfortable and unsafe.
Other than overt harassment, much of the criticism tries to mask its more nefarious intent under the guise of accuracy as noted above. It’s clear in many (if not most) cases that it is an excuse to criticize people’s bodies. As creatures of habit, however, some may appeal to some idea of “being familiar” with a character’s appearance that (significant) deviations are harder to accept. Such as, I’m used to James Bond being a white guy. This attitude feeds into a larger more pervasive problem of what these characters (many of which are heroes) “ought” to look like from the start.
This brief recounting of some of their ideas was meant to highlight some ways in which a smaller sector of the population is affected by beauty standards. While there’s more work to be done here and elsewhere, this introduction serves as a reminder that human beings are behind these costumes. We should strive to be more sympathetic to the work they put into their costumes and personas, and we should allow our imaginations the freedom and play that is supposed to be inherent in these practices.