By the time John joined us, my roommate & I were already deep into AX: both in costume, we’d been greeting & snapping pictures for half the day already. This was my first cosplay and, while not my first convention, my first anime convention. My roommate has been cosplaying for as long as I’ve known her (to varying degrees) and I often helped her make the costumes. So I asked to borrow her costume for Fuu since I’d sewn it (she did everything else) and I knew who Fuu was (I also passed a stall selling things-with-kanji & pointed to one, telling my roommate it was my favorite. “It means wind,” she said, “it’s pronounced ‘fuu’.” so maybe I had other reasons for choosing it). After the initial “I’m totally dressed up as a cartoon character” moment (which wore off before we even parked), I was completely into it. There are so many people at AX who were cosplaying that I seemed like one of the normal ones (see below for discussion of “normal”).

So when John arrived & asked me what my “feminist opinion” of AX was, I was given pause for a moment. I felt a little like a water droplet in a great river, just sort of flowing around with everyone/thing else. It took me a moment to step back & look at myself.

There’s certainly a lot about AX that ought to offend me: it’s basically built around objectification, especially of women. Women in manga/anime frequently occupy a very archetypal role. They are the Mother (who makes bento for her son, the main character, before he goes to school), the Sister (who’s always annoying, always at home, and often just barely less sexy than), the Girlfriend (a sexy sidekick of the main character), the Grandmother (who is the Mother but ends up with more autonomy since she’s often single), or the Evil Woman (who’s sexier than the Girlfriend but evil). This is changing, perhaps due to American audiences (although I’d like to think it’s due to emancipation of Japanese women), but in general it still holds true. Women in anime/manga are very stylized, with a wasp waist and bambi eyes. She often has breasts larger than her frame would otherwise imply, and wears very short skirts. If she’s the Mother, she wears longer skirts, if the Grandmother, longer skirts & longer sleeves. If she’s the Evil Woman, she probably has few clothes at all (maybe just some strategic wisps of clouds). Any actual woman is unlikely to have the appropriate proportions and is probably asking for whatever objectification comes from dressing like one of these archetypes (I didn’t see any Mothers there, but there was one Grandmother, who was dressed as a ugly shaman-woman covered in furs, dreadlocks, and animal bones). So why is this something that I, at least tacitly, approve of?

Honestly, context. I’m really not (usually) offended by anime/manga girls. I don’t know if it’s fact that they are in a cartoon that makes it less threatening or the fact that it’s foreign. When this gets transferred to cosplay at an anime convention, the non-threat of it transfers, too. When I see people in costume, I’m mostly seeing the costume. I’m admiring the work that went into it, the time & effort, the design & thought (it is not easy to get stuff in real life to look like manga/anime, the physics just isn’t the same), how much it looks like what I know the character looks like, and the courage it took to dress up in it. When I see a woman (and I saw many yesterday) in pleather, vinyl, or paint in order to pull off what is so easy to draw, I’m impressed that they managed to do it! I’m impressed by the self-confidence it took to walk out in the middle of the city dressed in little more than your pride (and the pride is debatable). I’m impressed that they have the body for it, or if they don’t, that they have that extra courage. I may ask one who I recognize (the character) for a picture, and she will smilingly comply. I may complement another because “that top looks great!”, and she will beam that her hard work is recognized. The objectification at AX is objectification of the costumes and not so much of the people wearing them.

I said above that anyone who dresses like this is asking for objectification and that’s not a statement that I type lightly. I don’t believe that wearing a short miniskirt is asking for wolf whistles, upskirt pictures, or rape. I believe that whatever a person wants to wear on a given day is up to them and people may refuse service (no shirt or shoes), a job (dress codes at work are appropriate), but not humanity. But there’s a difference between dressing for the day, when you look in the mirror to make sure everything’s just so and that you look perfect, and dressing for AX, when you look in the mirror and make sure you look like someone else.

Most cultures have spaces where wearing a mask is expected, required, or accepted. AX, and similar events, are ours. Wearing a mask gives you the freedom to break outside “the normal” and do something that you’ve always wanted in your heart to do but don’t think you could do without the freedom that the mask conveys. Or just something you’ve wanted for the last few weeks to do. I saw people in utilikilts, goth, and Lolita fashion who were unaffiliated with a particular comic. I saw crossplay and crossdressing. And all of it was “normal”. In fact, if I had not been in costume (and when I saw people who weren’t I wondered if they felt the same), I would have felt out of place.

I’d like to get into crossplay for a moment because my roommate crossplayed at a recent event (I honestly don’t know which one) and discovered The Underground Movement among cosplayers and because my favorite Mugen & Jin (my co-characters) were crossplayers. In that it takes a certain amount of courage to get into costume in the first place (not once you’re there, but packing the car before we left was amusing), it didn’t occur to me that crossplaying would be any different from normal cosplaying. You’re playing a fictional character. It’s just as likely to be genderless as it is to match your gender. And most “handsome” men in anime/manga look like women anyway (I always have to ask my roommate about genders). There are the extreme, like Man-Faye, but again, when I’m looking at a person in costume, I’m looking at the costume. There were a lot of crossplayed Soras, including one Shadow Sora who looked amazing in blue-black facepaint. I wonder if there is (or should be) a word for cosplaying across race. The otaku at AX yesterday were predominately white or Asian (probably 99%) but I did see the black X-Men, who had some great costumes. I got pictures of Storm (my perennial fav), Phoenix, and Juggernaut. I didn’t recognize Rogue or Mystique quickly enough. And except for one or two others scattered about, they were the only non-white-or-Asians who I saw. One of the great things about cosplay is that you can cosplay as anything. There were reindeer & flying squirrels, pokemon & domokun, a go board and a Wii controller. Cosplaying as a different gender, a different body type, or a different race seems to be no different than cosplaying in the “correct” gender, body type, or race. There’s Sailor Bubba who manages to cosplay against all those lines and yet is still accepted by the greater cosplaying community. People laugh at him, people take pictures of him, but, underneath it all, he’s just got more courage than your regular cosplayer, and I think a lot of people get that.

My final point on the feminism, gender, and sexuality of AX is that of Yaoi, which is man-on-man hentai for women. What, my roommate & I asked ourselves on the way home, is the appeal of this? I’ve had a similar conversation with my husband, who believes (that every het man believes) that two girls kissing is “totally hot!” But when I explain to him that lesbians have no interest in him, especially in his penis, his response is simply an enigmatic smile and, “It doesn’t matter.” My roommate hypothesized that, if it was man-on-woman porn, you know that the man is unavailable because he’s with a woman, but with man-on-man, both men are potentially available. This makes me wonder if homosexuals like het porn… I’m wondering if it’s not a kind of subjugation thing. Women, especially in Japan, have a very defined role in man-woman relationships. Seeing a man taking that sub role allows a woman reading the manga to feel dom for a moment, even if she doesn’t actually want to be dom with her particular man.

In any case, this stuff is amazingly popular, even here. They were selling (for $35!) paddles with YAOI written on them and probably 1 in 10 people had them. A lot of popular US characters have been mangaized including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings & what the salesperson at the table told me was “Butt Pirates of the Caribbean they lost the ships & kept the booty”. So what’s the appeal? Anyone?