Love to Fandom: Ethical Condition for Cosplayers Subjectivity

Abstract Cosplay is a fan production that allows its participants to express their subjective values through dressing up as characters from media products. Such phenomenon exemplifies the intricate dynamics of consumer relations since cosplay explores multiple aspects of consumer culture theory. Thus, drawing from fan studies and Foucauldian frameworks, the aim of the research is analyzing how cosplayer subjectivity is constituted. In this sense, the study performs an Ethnographic Foucauldian Genealogy, based on a corpora constituted of autoethnography, netnography, online ethnographic interviews and virtual ethnomethodology data. The results evidenced two subject-forms: Nailers, representing the position taken by cosplayers who take on the role of exemplary representing the cosplay phenomenon; and Guardians, highlighting how some cosplayers feel responsible for maintaining a community of practitioners that allows those interested in cosplay to feel comfortable. Both subjectivities share an ethic named as Love to fandom. Such ethic guide cosplayers to produce truths about the ways in which they interact or show solidarity between peers based on their own condition as fans, legitimizing autonomous and complementary subjectivities, and enhancing and ensuring experiences with cosplay practice. Thus, the study expands the possibilities of living love through consumption – here, inherent to fans. It is a love established and maintained by the consumers themselves both through the intense relationship with the products consumed and through interactions with their peers.