The art worlds of gender performance: cosplay, embodiment, and the collective accomplishment of gender

Aug 22, 2026

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Cosplay has become a globally visible performing art where fans dress as anime, comic/manga, or game characters, yet scholarship often overlooks how gender is actively produced within cosplay. Drawing on the production of culture perspective and interactionist gender theories, the study shows how participants express gendered sensibilities through standardized bodily movements and tailored modifications. It also highlights the supporting crew—makeup artists, photographers, and editors—as essential to gender play, emphasizing collective accomplishment of gender embodiment.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Cosplay as fan practice and gender play

Research focus and theoretical question

Yang The Journal of Chinese Sociology (2022) 9:9 [https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-022-00168-z](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-022-00168-z) The Journal of Chinese Sociology RESEARCH Open Access The art worlds of gender performance: cosplay, embodiment, and the collective accomplishment of gender * Yuchen Yang *Correspondence: [yucheny@uchicago.edu](yucheny@uchicago.edu) Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Abstract In recent years, cosplay has gained global visibility as a performing art in which fans dress up as fictional characters from anime, comics/manga, or games. Although scholars contend that cosplay exemplifies gender performativity and may even offer anew heuristic for understanding social interactions in general, they rarely examine how gender is performed in cosplay. Taking together the production of culture perspective and interactionist theories of gender, I detail how cosplay participants project gendered sensibilities through conventionalized body movements and modifications. Contrary to the prevailing focus on individual cosplayers, I demonstrate how makeup artists, photographers, and photo editors all contribute to the success of gender play in cosplay. Contrary to simplistic accounts of donning hyper-masculinity/hyper-femininity, I argue that cosplay participants’ pursuit of authenticity makes singular orientation to sex category insufficient and demands a version of masculinity/femininity that also attends to the character’s personality. Situated in the art worlds of cosplay’s production and evaluation, my findings invite scholars to consider the collaboration between cosplayers and their supporting crew as a conceptual heuristic that attunes our attention to the collective accomplishment of gender embodiment, whose multi-authorship is often obscured. Keywords: ACG, Body work, Cosplay, Embodiment, Gender, Production of culture Introduction Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” is a vital component of the global ACG (anime, comic/manga, game) fandom (Winge 2006; Kelts 2007). In China, it first emerged with ACG conventions in the late 1990s and has been developing rapidly since the 2000s, with a strong internet presence (Liu 2006; Wang 2010). As a fan art, cosplay interweaves cultural consumption and production in its highly interactive process of circulation. During cosplay, fans become co-authors of fictional characters as they put on costumes, wigs, and makeups, often with the help of a supporting crew of makeup artists, photographers, and photo editors (Fung and Pun 2016; Ruan 2018). On the internet, they post, share, review, and consume cosplay photos authored by each other, assessing © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit [http://](http://)[ ](http://)[creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.)[.](creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.) Yang The Journal of Chinese Sociology (2022) 9:9 Page 2 of 23 their “authenticity” according to commitment and adherence to their source characters (Matsuura and Okabe 2015; Rahman et al. 2012). Notably, the “play” in cosplay involves not only role play but also gende

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Why is the concept of collective accomplishment important in the findings?

The study situates cosplay within art worlds of production and evaluation, showing that gender embodiment is multi-authored and is often obscured when focusing only on individual cosplayers.

Aug 22, 2026

Upload by Asher