Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft
Kommission Pädagogische Anthropologie
Jahrestagung 2009
1. – 3. Oktober 2009
Universität Hildesheim
Virtual Bodies in Cosplays. On Media-generated Gender
Mie Buhl, PhD, Associate Professor.
The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University,
Tuborgvej 164, 2400Copenhagen, Denmark
Email: mib@dpu.dk website: www.dpu.dk/about/mib
Abstract:
How is gender constructed through media-generated social practises?
My paper will discuss how boys explore the phenomenon of gender through various media
generated cosplays. I address this phenomenon with the notion of virtual bodies. The notion of
virtual bodies means to inhabit a possible identity for a while. I will discuss the construction of
gender from the perspective where the display of the choice of the virtual body becomes a crucial
part of the self presentation. The discussion draw on empirical data from the research project:
Education in a Globalized Visual Culture - an Educational Anthropological Perspective on
Contemporary Visuality (2004 -2009).
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Introduction. The construction of gender in a Globalized Visual Culture
Boys who dress like princesses are sissyish! And girls who dress like knights are tomboys!
How is gender constructed visually through media-generated social practises? This study discusses
the increasing interests of cosplays in both digital and physical spaces. The word cosplays is a
contraction of the two English words costume and play. The origin of cosplays is Japanese and the
popularity of Japanese comics and cartoons seems to provide for a worldwide interest in
experimenting with costumes, role play and gender. The Japanese manga/anime culture has grown
into worldwide popularity among children, adolescents and adults. Digital social network like
Second Life makes it still easier to enter virtual worlds where one can choose ones own visual
appearance in regard to eg. age, ethnicity or gender.
This paper discusses how digital media frames boys’ exploring the phenomenon of gender in new
ways. Digital media facilitates a number of possible virtual bodies, but these virtual bodies are not
only digital appearances. They might as well be performed in physical spaces. The notion of virtual
is generated from Roman origin of the word meaning a potential but not yet realised possibility. The
notion of virtual reality is normally linked with digital media and computer. However,
contemporary mobile technologies enhance the blur of what is the real world and what is the virtual
world and social practices happen across traditional distinctions. You can experiment with various
self presentations in cyberspace as well as in physical spaces. The access to visual experiences
grows. The global visual culture expands the possible contexts for experiments with images and self
presentations.
Social practices with gender cosplays do not only take place in leisure activities, they become a part
of students’ school work on identity.
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The key argument of this paper is that the discussions of how male and female gender is constructed
may be complicated and very academic, but the visual practises of multiple gender presentations
flow beyond geographical border and across physical and digital space. Furthermore, I argue that
various characters in cosplays do not only develop multiple gender presentations in digital spaces,
media generated gender are being transformed into embodied characters in physical spaces as well.
Ill. Dressed as a princess and drawing from the photographic outset
The field of study
The discussions point of departure is one photo and 8 drawings which took of in Kolding, Denmark
and moved to Osaka, Japan 2008. However, following the transition of the images from one context
to another, the field of study expanded to include digital cosplays played out in physical space,
which provided for a new interpretation of the Danish images.
Visual arts education in Denmark
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A Danish school was invited to contribute to an international art exhibition of children’s drawings.
The aim was to exemplify visual arts education in Denmark. The sample of drawings was the result
of a pictorial process about identity where second graders visited a cultural institution and
throughout the visit experimented with different costumes. The children posed in a self chosen
costume and were photographed. Back in class the photos were the outset for the students’ own
pictorial production of drawings and their work with aspects of identity.
A major part of the subject as taught in Danish schools centres on individual student productions.
For the most part, Danish visual arts education promotes the notion that technical and formal skills
are acquired in the productive process of communicating interpreted meanings of pre-chosen
themes of e.g. existential, social or personal significance that can lead to new knowledge of the
theme as well as improving technical and formal skills. Existing images of various kinds might be
used to develop design ideas and explorations with media with the aim to break with ‘habitual
thinking’.
For the past years, an increasing interest in visual culture has paved the way for new approaches to
visual art education, partly as a response to changes in visual practices in late modernity. The
approaches incorporate everyday practices such as the way we dress, perform rituals and gestures or
produce meaning by depicting interpretations of our surroundings.
Traditional framing of visual education is located in national curricula more precisely in subject
areas concerning art or visual media. A globalized visual culture set the traditional notions of
education, teaching and learning in relationship to these subject areas in different perspectives. A
globalized visual culture requires an approach that goes beyond well-known boundaries. In
educational practices this notion addresses the conditions for choosing a certain way of studying
visual phenomena or the concepts they represent e.g. “how is my concept of a landscape, a portrait
or a still-life constructed, where does it come from”, or “how is the idea of childhood constructed”?
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As a strategy of reflection visual culture can be unfolded by making settings for students own art
production that challenges their preconceptions. It thereby focuses on exposing diversities and
thereby unfolds pluralism as a condition of late modern societies The practical dimension of visual
culture is also an issue today, as we understand the social constructivism not just as a mental but
also as a constructive process through articulation. We relate the notion that “visual culture is the
visual construction of the social” but also recognized that the social can construct vision (Mitchell
2002).
Working with identity through pictorial production
The eight drawings were the result of a visual cultural practice. Second grade students explored the
concept of identity by dressing up as a new identity and creating a pictorial production of this
character. One part of the process was carried out at the cultural institution ‘Nikolai for Children’
where the children were invited to dress up like a particular (self chosen) character and were given a
mask. They were asked to pose in their character in front of a camera. The pictures were brought
back to their school and were used to make drawings. The collection of drawings was chosen to
represent Denmark on an international childrens art exhibition in Osaka.
The drawings were sent to Japan, and were exhibited in association with the conference Education
through Art with the overall theme: Heritage – Culture -Mind. Attending the conference, I had the
opportunity to follow the drawings entering a new context.
The gender perspective came about, when I first received the drawings in Denmark. I was surprised
that the children did not only experiment with costumes related to historical characters or
adventures figures. They did also experiment with gender identity. I was amazed that the boys dared
to play sissyish, and the girls played knights. I decided to maintain the amazement and investigate
how and why I was amazed. I was challenged on my preconception of children’s gender approaches
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in public spaces. One thing is to play with your parents’ wardrobe, another thing is to dress up and
let yourself be photographed witnessed by your school mates.
Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework of amazement is based on my overall notion of being transformative
amazemed. I draw on the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup’s ideas of how the researcher needs to
sharpen her openness towards the obvious and force herself to question the well-known. This
methodological approach have an influence on how my research questions are posed and
negotiated, how the data is constructed and how the analysis is conditioned by the extent to the
consideration of inter and trans disciplinarity.
I find it important to be considerate about the methodological development for doing visual cultural
studies in order to strengthen the scientific modus operandi and at the same time maintain modus
vivendi in regard to keep open for the potential of the field.
I operate this approach by using visual culture as a strategy of reflection. Visual culture can be
practised as the researcher’s opportunity (Buhl, 2004, 2005) to take on the ‘curious eye’ (Rogoff
1999), which means to operate with the twist of being reflexive positioned (Buhl 2008) in an
interlocutory field of ethnographic presence and anthropological distance (Hastrup 1992).
When I use visual culture as a reflection strategy, I wish to emphasise how the visual is a part of
constructing a domain of research, which in the present case means how gender is explored through
performativity and staging conventions of the opposite sex. This makes visual culture into a
dynamic practice that is characterized by change and implicitly contains reflexivity (Buhl 2004). I
wish to explore the possibility of this methodological approach where openness to question the
expected and reflect the unexpected is a part of the research design. The aim is to discover new
aspects of a visual phenomenon.
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The strategy of visual culture indicates that, when something is observed, it also implies reflections
of how this ‘moment of observation’ is established. This makes visual culture into a dynamic
practice that is characterized by change and implicitly contains reflexivity. In this sense, I see
potential in using visual culture as an analytical strategy for unpacking the supposedly self-evident
in ones perception of visual phenomena. Thus in this case, I force my self to be amazed of:
1) in which ways the Danish boy develop his gender identity by pointing out those aspects
2) the change of context which indicates multiple ways of self presentations.
I so to speak, use position myself to be visual curious as a strategy to uphold amazement towards
the research field I enter.
Local gender - Global rendering
The transition of the drawings from the Danish to a Japanese context was part in an intercultural
exchange of educational ideas. Seeing the drawings hanging on the walls in Osaka, did not bring
any reactions about from the audience, like for instance laughter of a boy dressed up like a princess.
The philosopher of visual studies, Susan Buck-Morss, states how images fluid in an out of context,
which creates new premises for meaning making (2004). Thus the transition of images from
Denmark to Japan provided me with a new perspective on gender performance.
Contemporary children are trained to walk in an out of contexts and across institutionalised areas
like art, media and education. In this field they practice self presentations through gestures, cloth,
attitudes, rituals and visual preferences (Werler & Wulf 2006). Late modern lifestyle requires
competences to handle the situations as e.g. being a friend, a girl/boy, familymember, etnicity, facebook friend, citizen and participant in institutions like schools or leisure-time-activities. No matter
how the body acts, it is the centre of all daily activities.
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The body creates series of social visual narratives. Christophs Wulf’s Berlin Ritual Studies shows
how social visual narratives in school provide children with competences of a student (Wulf 2008).
In mimetic processes images become embodied and internalised in schemes of things through social
practices, events and actions (ibid). The practices provide children with learning skills, and
competences in living and being which they achieve from rituals. When Wulfs perspective is
applied to social visual narratives in digital media across geographical borders and temporal
chronology the importance of the meaning of context becomes evident.
The images’ flow in and out of context means that meaning must be negotiated in every new
context. This appears to be the case with bodily self presentations as well.
The Japanese context created a frame in which the images of the ‘princess-boy’ became a
participant in a Japanese cosplay concept.
Cosplays or crossplays1
The cosplay perspective came about by accident as the result of an analysis of what I from my
European perspective thought of as a self evident visual repertoire of media generated genderrepresentations and intercultural exchange of educational development. However, following the
drawings from Danish to a Japanese context provided the study with another perspective on role
playing and investigating the implications of visual communication in a late modern society. The
pictorial process reflects the display of a certain identity, sharpens the ability to communicate a
narrative and to use bodily experience in acquiring design and meaning construction competence.
1
Cosplaying as characters of the opposite sex is called "crossplay", and cosplaying as characters who dress as the
opposite sex is called "cross-dressing". The main reason that people do “crossplay” or “cross-dressing” is because in
anime there is an abundance of bishounen (beautiful youth), who are very attractive and feminine-looking male
characters. Therefore, in the reality, females can often act as these characters better than the males. “Crossplay” and
“cross-dressing” often coincide, but since some Japanese characters cross-dress to start with, it is possible to do one
without the other. http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosplay
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Furthermore, staging of a new identity expose a visual cultural practice where the classic genre in
visual arts education, the self-portrait, is being investigated through the personal experience of
pretending to be somebody else and depicting this new identity.
When the American poststructuralist Judith Butler (1990) claimed that gender is a social
construction which is performed every time one interacts in a social practice and supports
discourses of doing ones gender, she referred to social gender as a frequently repeated production of
rituals which performativily constitutes the dichotomy of male and female. Her positioning of the
social construction of gender appears to be contextualised in a western cultural discourse of how
gender is constituted, when she outlines the difference between the biological sex and the social
gender. In that sense she can be said to enhance the same discourse, she aims to deconstruct.
However, her work is significant in discussions of the complexity of the relations between sex and
gender as well as the notion of identity as a construction. The performative aspect of gender is
exposed when digital media provides new platforms for networking and creation of community
practices.
From the case study emerge self presentation be a cross between the physical embedded body and a
‘digital’ body in the social practice of exploring staging of gender provides an amount of various
self presentations. I argue that these cross between advances a positioning of oneself as a virtual
presence. The notion of virtual indicates ‘a temporary inhabitancy’ of a possible body – digital or
physical. Virtual refers to digital mediated images, but not only. It may as well refer to a particular
position of the body in the physical world - like for instance a physical cosplay. The positioning of
the virtual body renegotiates the conditions of performing a social gender. I might indicate that
digital games and social network widens the room for experiments with social gender construction.
The boy is apparently not embarrassed to act a cross play in the public space of a school class and
to experiment with female clichés of visual appearances.
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The issue has both a local and a global implication since the staging of gender in self presentations
on the one hand develops from digital mediated images which facilitate the habit of changing visual
appearance (e.g. games, social networks etc) and on the other hand takes different forms of
interpretations in different parts of the world.
Closing remarks - Perspectives on globalised visual culture
When an eight year old boy dresses like a princess in a small town in Denmark in 2008, this is
unusual. When a whole group of children dresses like the opposite sex it is still unusual and in an
educational exhibition it will be expected to draw some attention to how the media influence and
affect childrens behaviour. However, this is not unusual in Japanese anime and manga, which
becomes still more popular outside Japan and represents a growing trend all over the world.
The questions raised from this study contribute to outline a trans national pattern of visual cultures
produced by children and young people across psychical and digital spaces where local and global
experiences intertwine and frame visual interactions.
References
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277-293
Buhl, M. (2005). Visual culture as a strategy of art production in education, In: International
Journal of Education Through Art, vol. 1 (2), p. 103-114
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