Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence by Frenchy Lunning (review)

Frenchy Lunning is deeply implicated in the rise of cosplay research and scholarship. She is the founding editor in chief of Mechademia, a journal which practically introduced the specialized study of Japanese popular culture into culture studies, as the title’s amalgam of the giant-robot genre of mecha with academia suggests. Its 2006 inaugural issue, Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, contained a seminal article, Therèsa Winge’s “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Manga and Anime,” which offered one of the first theoretical accounts of cosplay.1 Cosplayers’ nomination and performance of their chosen character was based not simply on fannish infatuation but on research and study into a source text, leading to an “interpretation that takes place by reading and watching.”2 Valorization of the fan as what we might now call a cultural prosumer (cough) was in the air, with Henry Jenkins famously arguing that same year in Convergence Culture (2006) that fans were critical readers and (re)writers of cultural texts.3 Mechademia is also the banner under which conferences have been staged annually from 2001 in Minneapolis—and now biennially across Asia—just as the journal has concomitantly expanded its remit, in a “Second Arc,” from focusing on Japanese popular culture to that of East Asia more generally since 2018.4 Commentators have noted the resemblances between popular sci-fi, comics, and fan conventions (most of which include cosplay) and academic conferences. This crossover is perhaps nowhere Review