2. What does the terms détournement mean and how is it applicable to cosplay?
Détournement as a practice refers to taking a text and “reappropriating” it via “creative disruption”, subverting the core messaging of the text or revealing its underlying ideology in a critical manner. This practice first emerged during the Situationalist movement, which used the technique to criticise many capitalist texts by reshuffling them and injecting a Marxist reading (Malitz, n.d.). In the context of cosplay, the exploration of Détournement is less politically charged, but still is an important tool in understanding Cosplay’s role as a “citational act” (Mountfort, 2018). Many early conceptions of cosplay’s relationship with the source material from which the costumes/performances are derived is one of mere ‘borrowing’ or theft where the performer temporarily references the source text in celebration of it. More recent theoretical approaches to Cosplay are less one-sided, suggesting a more complex exchange between text and performance. While these frameworks still acknowledge that this relationship is citational and intertextual in nature – requiring the replication of elements from the source material, they also argue that by performing characters from these texts in new dimensions and contexts can act as a type of Détournement, where creative intent is subverted and new understandings of the original text are constructed. These arguments suggest that cosplay is not merely replication, but also a non-canonical addition to the cited text, operating in a very similar way to fanfiction by recontextualizing and expanding upon the franchise’s identity. Discussed by Mountfort (2018) are a few notable ways in which this subversion and contribution can occur. Frequently within cosplay, concessions must be made in the performance of a text due to the physical limitations of a performer, resulting in character depictions which may vary in gender, body shape and race. These recontextualizations, while referential, provide new means to understand the performed character while potentially criticising the source material’s limited depiction of race, body or gender. This highlights the existence of intentionally satirical or critical performances which also occur in cosplay, where elements of characters are stylistically altered to a point where they are still recognisable but communicate a disparate message, one which often subverts the audience’s initial comprehension of source material. Even in instances where the performer intends to faithfully replicate all elements of the original text, the fundamentally limited act of translation between image/text and bodily performance means the performer will be forced to extract the character from its initial position in setting and narrative and position it within a new one, providing a potentially unintended reinterpretation and expansion of text. While such a performance can never capture the narrative of a source material as a whole (Gn, 2011), via this extraction and positioning within the performer’s life, Mountfort (2018) points out that the character becomes involved within a new narrative, again underlining how cosplay shares qualities of Détournement with fanfiction. While these new narratives are not directly connected to the cannon of the text a cosplay cites, a character’s inherent ability to allude to the narrative which they traditionally exist within means that these additional narratives act to construct new understandings the same way a fanfiction might. Especially in late capitalism where characters often exist within transmedia franchises and cannot be tied to one singular canon identity, cosplay and other forms of fan interactions provide significant agency to the audience in regards to defining the brands of characters and their franchises going forward. By presenting Détournement in association with postmodern theories of audience consumption, Mountfort (2018) explores cosplay not only as a means to honour a text, but as a means for a community to fundamentally shape the media they consume.
Mountfort, P. (2018). Cosplay as Citation. In P. Mountfort, A. Peirson-Smith, & A. Geczy, Planet Cosplay (pp. 21-38). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Malitz, Z. (n.d.). Détournement/Culture jamming. Beautiful Trouble. https://beautifultrouble.org/tactic/detournementculture-jamming/
Gn, J. (2011). Queer simulation: The practice, performance and pleasure of cosplay. Continuum, 25(2), 583-593. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2011.582937
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