Closing traps: Emotional attachment, intervention and juxtaposition in cosplay and International Relations
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Katarina HS Birkedal |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219830112 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219830112
Journal of International Political Theory
2019, Vol. 15(2) 188 –209
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219830112
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Closing traps: Emotional
attachment, intervention and
juxtaposition in cosplay and
International Relations
Katarina HS Birkedal
University of St Andrews, UK
Abstract
This article explores the everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses through
the embodiment of popular culture representations of war(rior) bodies in cosplay. In
cosplay – the (re)creation and wearing of costumes of characters from popular culture
– the cosplayer is able to express and experience behaviours and emotions normally
unavailable to them. This enables a radical, empathetic form of identity exploration,
wherein the cosplayer is able to express and develop an understanding of their own and
others’ experiences. Building on autoethnographic fieldwork in cosplay as Black Widow,
I posit three links between cosplay and the study of emotions in International Relations
(IR): the first, going through the everyday constitutive character of popular culture; the
second, linking the embodiment of representations of war(rior) characters in cosplay
with the feminist IR challenge to study the human experience of war; and the third,
arguing that the study of something so seemingly random can engender exciting insights,
like a collage. I argue that cosplay can be used to understand our emotional attachments
to violent, gendered discourses found in popular culture narratives, but that in the (re)
enactment of these upon the body – in their embodiment – there is a space for resistance.
Keywords
Attachment, embodiment, emotions, martial politics, militarization, popular culture
Introduction: Sticky strands
This article has its starting point in a moment of what Linda Åhäll (2018) terms ‘affective
dissonance’.1 I first started studying cosplay within the context of International Relations
Corresponding author:
Katarina HS Birkedal, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, Arts Faculty Building, The
Scores, St Andrews KY16 9AX, UK.
Email: khsb2@st-andrews.ac.uk
830112IPT0010.1177/1755088219830112Journal of International Political TheoryBirkedal
research-article2019
Article
Birkedal 189
(IR) because I was curious about how being physically and emotionally embedded in con-
temporary and fantastical war stories impacted attitudes to militarism. I thought I would
most likely get better answers if I, too, were in cosplay, and thus began my sense of some-
thing being a little off: upon donning my own costume, the gap between my own politics,
and those of the corporations producing the narratives from which I took my cosplay,
seemed if anything to be growing, even as my attachment to those same narratives and
characters grew too. I found that I, and other cosplayers, were simultaneously so emotion-
ally invested in a character as to make them a part of ourselves and using that very invest-
ment to purposes arguably at odds with discourses in which those characters are situated.
At the time, this became something of a puzzle to me, driving forth a feminist curiosity
(qua Enloe, 2004) concerned with unpacking the relationship between the violent, gen-
dered politics of much of popular culture, and the affective, (gender, identity) boundary-
crossing embodiment of cosplay.
In this article, I argue that cosplay can be useful in understanding our emotional
attachment to violent, gendered discourses inherent in so many popular culture narra-
tives, but that in the cosplayer’s very embodiment of these, there is a space for resistance.
Cosplay thus helps to appreciate the embodied and everyday role of emotions and sheds
light in practice on the ways in which emotions can subvert dominant popular cultural
narratives. Drawing upon the works of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, I theorize
cosplay as a form of resistance within reproduction, which is predicated on an empa-
thetic reflexivity. Furthermore, I build on my autoethnographic fieldwork to explore how
this resistance takes shape (literally) on the body of the cosplayer as a series of emotional
impressions of character, sense and (sense of) agency; here, I use the works of Sara
Ahmed and Åhäll on emotions, affect and agency.
The article is structured into two sections. The ‘Red threads: Linking cosplay, emotions
and IR’ section is a brief outline of the main concepts, and a discussion on their use – and
the use of cosplay – to the discipline of IR, as well as the study of international relations.
Here, I outline three links between cosplay and emotions in/and IR, through the everyday
and popular culture, representations and embodiments of war(rior) bodies, and the disrup-
tive potential of juxtaposition. The ‘Closing traps: Deep attachments and reflexive politics’
section uses my experience as Black Widow2 as a springboard both to survey the narrative
from which she stems and to draw out the politics of these affective, embodied dimensions
and their potential as a form of (small-scale) resistance. In this section, I include an autoeth-
nographic interlude, which serves both as an example of the attachment of cosplayer to
character and as its own form of juxtaposition of academic and narrative writing.
Red threads: Linking cosplay, emotions and IR
Finely woven: Concepts and context
I have chosen to study cosplay as it is the most physical and direct fan engagement with
popular culture. As such, not only is the act itself of interest, but cosplayers themselves
will typically be well informed and engaged with the narratives in which they situate
themselves. The word ‘cosplay’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘costume’ and ‘play’, and
is an activity and a process that recreates the look – hair, make-up and costume – of a
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