Cosplay and the Dressing-up Box in the Spectacular Presentation of Selves in Hong Kong

This research project will explore the phenomenon of "cosplay", or the trend for young adults in Hong Kong and South East Asia to dress up in themed costumes assuming the persona of characters from Japanese comic books (manga) and animated cartoons (anime), video games, television shows, pop music bands, and Victorian or Gothic-style Lolitas as a means of exploring the underlying reasons why individuals pursue this dress-up activity and the cross-cultural and historical influences that guide them.The project will make a new contribution to visual ethnography and communication studies by focussing on the under-researched youth cultures of cosplay in Hong Kong. It will test Stone’s ideas of the appropriateness of appearance in the development and presentation of self (1965) via the capacity of fantastic socialization processes, whilst also revisiting Eicher's work (1981) on communicating and exploring identity through the dressing of public, private, and secret selves. It also examines play theory, the role of fantasy-proneness and the manifestation of the fantastic imagination in the personality profiles and cultural identities of cosplayers, and questions why dress is used as a catalyst for escaping the boundaries of self and acquiring multiple or "otherwordly" identities within a specific culture and historical space and time.