Performing Fantasy: Affective Fan Labor and Queering Experimentations in Cosplay Dates Among Women in China

Liz Zeng

Introduction

I am developing a preliminary idea for my dissertation, concerning how feminist and queer narratives travel across and reimagine geopolitical borders and space/time. I am interested in how they manifest queer desires and practices in women’s communities between digital and “real” temporalities in post-socialist China. For this class, I’m planning to work on a literature review for my collaborative ethnographic project (with Tess Chen, Celine Liao, and Gloria Duan) about cosplay date commission (or “cos委托”/cos weituo), a paid mock-dating service provided mostly by women/AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) cosplayers (predominantly cross-gender performing as men characters) to serve women “clients” who want to date their fantasized “dream boyfriend/husband” fictional characters (from games/animes) in real life. This trend largely stems from the rising popularity of otome games (women-oriented romantic games) in China alongside growing awareness of women's desires, agency, and spending power, reflections on real-life cis-heterosexual relationship violence, and the normalization/romanticization of women’s homo-social/homo-romantic rhetoric and practices in public discourses. Cos weituo reflects the ways young Chinese women materialize digital romantic fantasies, translating them into affective care labor through liberal consumption of same-sex intimacy. It reiterates and reimagines China’s modern discourse of love under globalizing capital and neoliberal influences by making and queering space and time beyond physical limitations and gendered cultural boundaries of relationship, family, and marriage.

Our project aims to perform digital ethnography by observing cos weituo-related discussion posts on social media, in-depth interviews with cosplayers and clients, ethnographic observations of actual cosplay dates, and potentially some pieces of auto-ethnography through first-hand experiences of such dates. Tess and Celine are responsible for the IRB process, designing the recruitment survey, drafting interview questions, and each doing one observation case. Gloria and I take charge of drafting observation items, creating/managing a collective social media account on Red for our communication with future interlocutors, and each doing 3 observation cases. Each of us will carry out 10 interviews (with a total sample size of 40) and transcribe them with preliminary coding. We will revise and finalize our work after peer reviews following our meeting schedule for the summer. 

Here, I would like to adopt the framework of ethnographies of encounter by Faier and Rofel. This framework underlines “the interactiveand unequal dynamics of power that shape culture-making across relationships of difference” with examples of interconnecting power networks of colonialism, transnational capitalism, and the non-human world (Faier & Rofel 2014. p.364). For example, Chinese adoptions and adaptations of Japanese otome games reflect its unique interpretation of China’s romantic landscape through the ways masculinity is reimagined for Chinese women’s fantasy consumptions (and are different from the “Japanese archetype” of girls’ romance). Meanwhile, China’s contemporary dating scene is reconstructed and mobilized by (neo)liberal values of love, loyalty, and choice from its history of partial Western colonization and ongoing globalizing cultural forces, which are often at odds with “traditional” Confucianist values of family and duty. Furthermore, the rising awareness and growing discourses of women’s rights, desires, and agency came from the digitalization of China’s feminist and queer activism, which are in ongoing negotiations, contestations, and debates with popular neoliberal values and conservative narratives. My work intends to research this niche group extended from multiple intersecting communities - including the fandom of cosplay, the fandom of otome games, the fandom of ACG (Japanese genres of animation, comics, and games), and the queer women’s community - under the scope of transnational feminism, China’s position in the neoliberal global market economy and international field of politics, and the merging of “real” worlds with digital fantasy lands.

Otome Games (乙女ゲーム): Women-oriented Romance and Fantasy Men Characters

Figures. The five men characters as romance-options in one of the most popular Chinese otome games, Light and Night (光与夜之恋) developed by Tencent:https://love.qq.com/main.html

Otome game is a Japanese gaming genre targeting women audiences, with a focus on story-telling and romantic relationship-building between a playable woman character and (multiple) men secondary character(s). Characters from otome games are the main objects of consumption in cos weituo. Otome games in China existed mainly as tiny text-based PC games (橙光游戏) with simple illustrations made by amateur developers, until the launch of Mr Love: Queen's Choice (恋与制作人) by an indie company named Diezhi (叠纸) in 2017 as a mobile game. Mr Love soon became a huge cultural and financial success for its character writings and its immersive/interactive “dating” experience with the characters and was later published in Korea, Japan, North America, and Europe, as well as South East Asia. Since 2017, major Chinese internet/technology/gaming companies (like Tencent, Netease, and miHoYo) have been producing otome games for mobile platforms, and otome games have become one of the most popular gaming genres, especially for women in China.

Although the gaming genre is not the main focus of our ethnographic project, it would be worthwhile to explore some of the reasons behind the growing worldwide popularity of this particular figuration of masculinity and (hetero)romantic fantasy that originated in post-war Japan. The image of a bishonen (“beautiful boy”) that emerged from shojo manga (girls’ comic) into otome games provides an alternative form of contemporary masculinity in drastic contrast with Japan’s imperial and colonial recent past. Reflecting on Said’s work on Orientalism as a major field of institutionalized knowledge about otherness that constructs the material and ideological truth of a superior Western civilization, colonization, and domination (Said 1978), I come up with some potential questions of interrogation: How does this particular figuration of masculinity in otome games represent Japan’s post-war struggles, adjustments, and “reascendance” into the present international stage through cultural “soft” power? What kinds of oriental imageries and narratives are adopted and molded into this figuration, and how are they related to the construction of modern femininity/womanhood under the growing domination of the transnational capitalist market? How is the Chinese community perceiving, absorbing, and transforming this genre and creating the work of cos weituo? I want to trace the genealogies of Japanese and Chinese figurations of masculinity: how was masculinity constructed by Confucianism and Shintoism? How did Western colonization of Japan and China change their masculine figurations in response to the pathologizing oriental image of Asian men (through revolution, Japan’s colonization of Asia and the Pacific, and China’s political change to socialism)? Moving on to the post-war globalizing contemporary landscape, how did Japan “rebrand” its military past into “moe” (萌, as being obsessively affectionate of something) politics in terms of rewriting masculinity as a harmless global cultural product? What kinds of oriental images and narratives are being reinforced and rewritten?

Cos Weituo as Dream-making (“造梦”): Rituals of Love and Collaborative Romantic Fantasy

Cos weituo is often referred to as a process of “造梦”, or dream-making, by both cosplayers and the clients, as it transgresses the boundaries between (digital) fiction and reality, bringing women’s romantic fantasy into personalized lives. Cos weituo roughly consists of three parts of negotiations/performances: communications about the client’s personality, hobbies/interests, preferences for dating events, and sometimes a little taste of digital textual roleplay performed by the cosplayer and some flirting on social media before the actual date; romantic gestures, gifting, and shows of emotional and physical intimacy during the date; and post-date social media posting (of videos and photos) and last farewells. These rituals of love performed by both sides of the commission make the dream of romantic fantasy possible. 

My questions of inquiry are partly inspired by Suma Ikeuchi’s book Jesus Loves Japan. Through ethnographic work of attending and observing Japanese Brazilian migrant workers participating in marriage classes of their church, Ikeuchi demonstrates how Nikkei women make sense of Pentecostal gender ideals as “a rational response to the labor condition that continued to be shaped by patriarchal values”, adopting “traditional” Christian gender roles in the “modern” capitalist context (Ikeuchi 2019. p.103).

Similarly, I would like to discuss what kinds of gender ideals and hierarchies are challenged, transformed, and reinforced through rituals of love performed in cos weituo: what do these romantic (and sometimes sexually charged) gestures mean for cosplayers and clients? Why is there an urge to purchase “dream-come-true” mock dates, and how does it correspond to the question of women’s position and agency in the “real” dating scene? What kinds of class and gender dynamics are represented through negotiations and performances of these romantic rituals, and how do they situate the imaginary ideal of modern urban womanhood in China’s neoliberal economy and growing power in the international field? How should we interpret this new form of commodification of love (perhaps consumerism) that bloomed after China’s intense political and economic control during the pandemic? How are these rituals potentially influenced by the popularization and reinterpretation of cyberfeminism in China, and how are these ideologies traveling across geopolitical boundaries?

Why Women Cosplayers? Homo-social/Homo-romantic Intimacy: Circulation of Cyberfeminist Narratives, Queering Space/time-making

For me, the most fascinating part of cos weituo is the way it materializes hetero-romantic fantasy through “same-sex” intimacy. There are a lot of debates in social media discussion posts about cos weituo contesting queer identities, queer gestures, and ambiguous boundaries between para-heterosexual romance and “homosexuality”/queerness. As we are closely following social media discourses of cos weituo, we could summarize a few statement based on our preliminary observations: “clients”/fans believe that women cosplayers are more capable of fulfilling their romantic fantasies (in terms of aesthetic, care work, and safety); participants of cos weituo are more comfortable performing mock datings with a same-sex “partner”; cos weituo is often framed as a form of collaborative work between cosplayers and fans performing with great investment, devotion, and their shared love for the commissioned character; cos weituo is often framed as an escape tool within the “dream-making” discourse, underlining loyalty and purity, while hinting reflections of “real” relationships. Following the last question in the previous section, I suspect that the homo-social/homo-romantic “nature” of cos weituo and these online debates are closely interconnected with popular perceptions about gender violence in heterosexual relationships, romanticization of women’s queerness, glorification of women’s rights and power in the urban capitalist economy, and ongoing discussions about the imagined dangerous nature of masculinity with cyberfeminist undertones. 

Furthermore, I would like to theorize the rituals of love in cos weituo with an alternative perspective. These rituals of heterosexual romantic fantasy performed through women’s same-sex intimacy, in my view, are a form of queer gesture and queer space/time-making. The bodies of cosplayers could be perceived as sites of active gender transgression, while the clients are also embodying and performing their idealized femininity, collectively constructing fleeting evidence of queer ephemera. On the other hand, Ikeuchi’s observation and theorization of Nikkei’s making of an alternative temporality of life and present state of living through practices of faith, a temporality that exists outside of the “clock-time” of capitalist disciplines (Ikeuchi 2019. p.88). Ikeuchi also underlines generational differences and geographic/cultural distances within the Nikkei community, contextualizing this created time as a break from their temporal suffocation. Inspired by Ikeuchi’s discussion about time, I would like to argue that cos weituo is a form of alternative queer-making of space and time outside of the patriarchal heteronormative timeline in contemporary China. Crossing boundaries of gender roles through performance and affective labor, cos weituo could be seen as a manifestation of queer space and temporality existing beyond the physical world and the heteronormative timeline of love, marriage, family-making, and reproduction in capitalist productive China. Through our collective ethnographic project, I also intend to further examine the ways cos weituo challenges, resists, compromise with, and reinforces capitalist heteronormative domination of time. 

References

Faier, Leiba and Lisa Rofel. “Ethnographies of Encounter.” The Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 363-377.

Ikeuchi, Suma. Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Said, Edward. “Knowing the Oriental” & “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations.” In Orientalism, 31-73. New York, Vintage Books, 1979.