Content area
This dissertation investigates the affective, immaterial, and emotionally charged labor of cosplayers across social media platforms. This project is preoccupied with how cosplayers – often understood as fans who dress up and roleplay as characters from media – promote their labor online to professionalize cosplay as a potential full-time career. In this aspirational pursuit, some cosplayers leverage multi-platform branding to commodify cosplay, thereby conforming to the gig economy. Digital and technical tools such as Instagram, Ko-fi, Patreon, and TikTok allow cosplayers to manage their fans’ feelings through the performance of affective labor. By synthesizing discourse, visual, and media analyses across the digital media landscape, this dissertation examines cosplayers’ exchanges with followers and their post engagement to argue
that the performative nature of cosplay complicates the perceived optimistic performance that cosplayers assume.
This project looks at how cosplayers manage the conflicted feelings of their fans and their fellow cosplayers in negotiation of the paradoxical tension between hobbyists and professionalism online regarding selling out in contemporary social media. Given perceptions around selling out permeating contemporary social media, this dissertation analyzes how cosplayers navigate their complex feelings, perceptions, opinions, and thoughts about going professional by strategizing affective labor.
By studying how cosplayers manage their fans’ feelings and fellow cosplayers’ feelings in negotiation of the tension between hobbyists and professionalism on social media, this research is heavily inspired by feminist approaches to affect theory and Sara Ahmed’s concept of “happy objects” where any sort of positive, emotional value vows to promise happiness through the interactions with these relations and objects. Framed as an intervention in the fields of fan studies and digital media studies, this dissertation argues that many cosplayers who aspire to make a career out of cosplay leverage social media as a self-marketing tool to promote their brand; in doing so, cosplay is complicated by the artifice of performance since cosplayers engage in self-branding strategies that conflict with a perceived sense of authenticity, connection, and intimacy.