Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces

Abstract

University of Washington Abstract Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces Lando Tosaya Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Ralina L. Joseph Department of Communication Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces explores the transformative power of cosplay as a site of identity formation, resistance, and community-building for Black femme-presenting individuals. Through an interdisciplinary framework that draws on Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism, critical media studies, and cultural performance theory, I examine how Black femme cosplayers navigate hypervisibility, racialized exclusion, and gendered stereotypes in fan culture while asserting agency, visibility, and joy through embodied creative expression. Using a hybrid ethnographic methodology, including participant observation at major and regional comic conventions, in-depth interviews with thirty-nine Black femme cosplayers, and digital ethnography, this study uncovers the ways cosplay becomes a liberatory praxis for participants marginalized within both society and fan spaces. I argue that Black femme cosplay is not simply aesthetic mimicry or fandom engagement; it is a deliberate and radical reimagining of self and world, grounded in cultural resistance and speculative possibility. By tracing the history of cosplay and its intersections with racial representation, I contextualize how Black femmes disrupt the normative whiteness of fandom through racebending, genderbending, and Afrofuturist reinterpretations of canonical characters. Their artistic practices reveal an affective labor that reclaims narratives historically used to stereotype and marginalize Black women. Drawing on the legacy of speculative fiction and the evolving tenets of Afrofuturism, this dissertation positions cosplay as a critical cultural site where Black femme participants project futures in which they are not only visible but central, powerful, and limitless. This work contributes to conversations in communication, media, and cultural studies by affirming the intellectual and creative labor of Black femme cosplayers. It challenges dominant structures in fandom and academia by centering community-based knowledge, multimodal storytelling, and lived experience. This dissertation contends that cosplay, for Black femmes, is not merely play, it is a profound form of freedom work, a visual archive of self-authorship, and a radical assertion of joy in the face of systemic exclusion.