Playing with the self

Abstract This essay is an exploration of how playing with identity through cosplay opens the door to new understandings of ourselves. It is written and painted to feel a little like cosplay’s twisting corridors of self and other, and closely follows my own experiences. Through glimpses of putting on the masks of different characters in different situations, it shows how the release of cosplay renews one's own reality. This intervention shows that while cosplay can be understood as a form of playful resistance to normative subjection, it is also itself an activity subject to the exclusionary politics of those who write the characters, and who are thus able to affect the stakes of the game.