Introduction

In fan studies, the personal, the domestic, and the material have often been overlooked in favor of a discourse on texts and realism. Practices such as dressmaking or model-building were seen as different from fandom because they were not text-driven (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998, p. 150). Fan cultures, however, also contain many material practices that use the text as a starting point for new forms of play and productivity. The textual bias in fan studies has led to the neglect of object-oriented fandom visible in, for example, dressmaking, model-building, and collecting (Cherry, 2016; Hills, 2014; Rehak, 2012). In terms of narrativity, I would suggest that these two things – the material and the textual – are not in opposition, but are, instead, both ways to understand and interpret media texts. Stuff – bodies, fabrics, plastic – allows us to tell stories. Especially in fandom, material practices support narrative inquiry and creation but also have their own aesthetic qualities as media texts.

In this chapter, I focus specifically on “cosplay” – dressing up as fictional characters in homemade outfits. Cosplay is a heavily embodied and affective practice; these are perhaps the reasons why fan scholars have thus far ignored cosplay, despite its visibility at conventions worldwide. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to unearth this unexplored territory through cultural analysis and, second, to explore it socially through qualitative methods.