ABSTRACT
Cosplay is an increasingly popular form of leisure in which fans of pop-culture texts (comics, videogames, films) dress up as characters from those texts. Many of these fictional characters align with dominant ideals of beauty, which presents a challenge for cosplayers. In our ethnographic research based in the midwestern United States, we found that cosplayers feel pressure to approximate unrealistic ideals, and often choose characters that they feel they can “pull off” based on their body type. Women cosplayers are especially wary of negative judgments of their bodies from others. However, cosplayers also identify an alternative discourse of body acceptance and more flexible ideals of beauty as reasons that they enjoy cosplay and feel like they belong in cosplay spaces. Most cosplayers explicitly reject narrow ideals of beauty, although they are more generous with others than with themselves in accepting divergent body shapes and character portrayals.
