Long ago in a distant future, I described myself as a pop culture scholar with a passion for cosplay. Nowadays I might describe myself as an independent pop culture scholar with a passion for cosplay. But I don’t. I imagine myself as an informed writer passionate about pop culture, cosplay, and the transformative power of stories and storytelling. I say “imagine” because I am still making that writerly dream happen, still making that no-fuss descriptor—writer—mean something, mean me. As I once tried to make other words like academic and scholar mean me, too. Later compounding the issue by trying on other kinds of nouns, other semantic costumes in my search for a designation, a destination, like some latter-day Mr. Benn.3 This kind of meaning-making exercise is something of a rite of passage for scholars exiting the academe, a naming act of self-creation. Each possibility allowing us to make ourselves mean differently, signaling shifting orientations toward the world. And it usually starts with a question, or two.Was I an independent scholar? An alt-academic? An intellectual, escaped from the academe, “free-floating” and at large in the public realm? Or more akin to a rogue or DIY researcher, plaintively edgy? Perhaps I was a displaced scholar, or just plain unaffiliated? I thought too of leaving the space blank, “a scholar.” But no. A blank space = a sin of omission. For while the space has become a void to me—a voided scholar, a (kind of) scholar to avoid—it is unremarkable to others, a pause quickly filled with assumptions of affiliation. With an ellipsis then, “a . . . scholar,” marking the void, forcing the pause, and suspending meaning-making, for me and for others. Again, no. Because however I choose to un/mark the space, the nulling void remains, well unavoidable. Unless, I thought, I stop playing the linguistic “dress-up” game; a game playing into the hands of institutional binary systems, of always being one thing or another, scholar or independent scholar, real or fake, insider(r) or outside(r). And so, one eruptive spring day back in 2021, I began imagining and, falteringly at first, describing myself as a writer, actively making myself mean differently. Like shirking off a COVID-19 infection during the first uncharted wave, the relief was intense. Only upon leaving academia did I realize the privilege, the simple joy, of being a scholar sans adjective. In this, I am not alone.As a writer, then, my intellectual endeavors lead me to try to make sense of other words too, like cosplay, media fan activism, worldmaking, and so on. Misbegotten pursuits to a good many people and frequently described as integral to my failure to make it in the academe. Responding to my essay on exiting academia, one reader commented,Not the first person to observe that I was making a mistake by specializing in unserious subjects, only making problems for myself down the road. A former mentor once told me that I should choose a more “bankable” research subject—rather than comics, superheroes, and fandom—because I had the “makings” of a “serious” scholar and that these “lightweight,” faddish subjects would not long satisfy my intellectual curiosity nor result in a lasting academic career. And while arguably proven right, my “failure” at making good in the academe is a lot more complicated than their “advice” suggests.This, then, is a story not so much about makings as un/makings—scholar, subject, academe—for acts of creation are also acts of destruction. And while lacking heroes and villains, it has its fair share of underdogs, giants, obstacles, and needless to say, power struggles. All stories are, of course, about power, and in telling this story I seek to interrogate the structures shaping and frequently determining not just what cosplay means but what it means to study cosplay.Un/makings play a leading role in my story. More specifically the pleasure and pain of making things otherwise, in the elsewhere: myself, meanings, knowledges, disciplines, worlds, futures (and thus past and present), possibilities, and, of course, the academe. Of, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes about writing, “always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be.”5 Cosplay enfolds these generative elements; maybe that’s why I love it so much—practice and theory—and transformative fandom more generally. In this sense, the relationship between being a cosplayer and being a cosplay scholar can be dialogic.Making believe, making costumes, making connections, making merry, making worlds, making meaning—of self, of texts (in the broadest sense), of power relations, of our unjust world. Cosplay is also an unmaking practice, especially when performed by cosplayers making good on the failures of exclusionary and hostile media, those who speculatively gender- and racebend mainstream characters, for example.A passion for un/making shaped my vocation too.My long-harbored wish to become a professional academic was in effect a wish to become a knowledge-maker, and by choosing (what were then) marginal and marginalized subjects—comics, superheroes, and cosplay—I became part of discipline-making projects too: comics studies, fan studies. Outlier knowledge production undertaken as part of a collegial community engaging in a global process of meaning-making. Heady stuff. Yet while we’re arguably headed in the same direction—realizing cosplay, for example—we’re not on the same footing; bands of differently oriented and empowered explorers inhabit cosplay’s meaning-making terrain: professional scholars, independent scholars, cosplayers, media commentators, and attendant overlapping positions (e.g., scholar-fans)—the “connective web” of objective and subjective knowledge production, as Louisa Stein describes it.6 A rattlebag collective, setting about the art, or today, the business of making meaning, of telling the protean story of cosplay.And that’s the domain I wish to turn to first. For the question of being a reformed cosplay scholar intersects with broader questions about the neoliberal academe and the position of public intellectuals today.As cultural practice and discipline, cosplay is a rich and flourishing pursuit. Every day new work appears on the scene, thickening the meaning of cosplay. Frustratingly, not everyone has access to these works. Many treatises are kept separate, rarefied behind paywalls, products of corporatized academia—a jealous gatekeeper. An exclusionary system pricing publications out of reach, testing too the extent of the “public” in publication.7 Intriguing abstracts and all-to-brief “limited previews” tease independent scholars and interested publics, cruelly. Prohibitive pricing walls off conferences too, oftentimes excluding affiliated scholars. A few instances of why academia is fast becoming described as a walled city or fortress; money can, of course, lower the drawbridge.Barriers and walls, as is well known, create separation and hierarchies within realms of knowledge production, and false binaries (e.g., scholar/independent scholar). Yet, as Sara Ahmed cogently describes, institutional walls have a magical ability to appear and disappear depending upon who stands before them, transforming into doorways for the “right” bodies: “What one body experiences as solid, another might experience as air.”8 Pursuant to my example, professional academics with institutional access do not come up against publication paywalls, breezing through what snags others. Moreover, while not referring directly to independent scholars, one can see the stretch in Ahmed’s theurgical analogy. We might know the magic words to change walls into doors—as gaining our PhDs shows—but despite our best efforts, we can’t seem to pull off the trick. (Sadly, many independent scholars shoulder this admissory “failure” personally rather than protesting the institutional “trick” of access.)Academe walls are tricky in other ways too, doing more than creating inside(r)s and outside(r)s. Internal walls create corridors—knowledge, disciplinary, and career pathways—through which institutions corral and usher their academics or crush them. Walls shift and move, closing in, violently compressing and stressing those inside, bruising, breaking down those who cannot move with them or escape. Popular in film and comics, the “walls closing in” trope is not as exciting in real life or as survivable, as many blighted professional scholars can attest.As disciplining structures, walls shape the “well-traveled byways” that Jack Halberstam describes crisscrossing modern-day academia: “Disciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish; most important, they statistically reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent.”9 And writing much earlier, Pierre Bourdieu perceptively describes intellectuals as aWalled into remaining loyal to and passive toward the university system (and broader power systems), professional academics, so defanged, may find biting the feeding hand tricky but not quite impossible.The publish-or-perish culture dominating corporate academia is one kind of disciplining wall, parapeted with the proviso to only publish within high-ranking journals or publishing houses valued by funding bodies, tenure committees, or, in the UK, the REF (Research Excellence Framework), a system transmogrifying knowledges and experiences into outputs. (How should experimentations, reveries, messy works-in-progress, mash-ups, or imperfect, speculative works be logged, I wonder?) Professionalism is another correcting wall, a concept ever working to uphold the status quo. Citational practices another. Funding bodies build walls too. Their arbitrary determinations—evoking dubious notions of excellence, impact, seriousness, rigor, and so forth—on “eligible” projects, researchers, institutions, and networks play critical roles in making worlds, making myths, political and sociocultural—viz. the kinds of knowledges pursued and prized—as well as personal—the knowledge-makers. (Think of the damage done, and being done, around the globe by the proliferation of Chicago School economic principles.) Their judgments unmake worlds too. UK universities are, for example, facing another funding crisis, particularly arts and culture disciplines, with some subject areas—including art, design, music, drama, dance, media studies, and journalism—seeing cuts of 50 percent. Demolition work set to raze disciplinary walls to the ground; soon, what was once inside will be outside, including “unserious” subfields like cosplay studies and its umbrella discipline, fan studies. A critical point to which I will return.Like increasing numbers of independent scholars, grassroots knowledge-makers, and lay publics—or, as I like to imagine us, vocational meaning-makers—I’ve learned how to circumvent these blockades, numbering more than the above illustrative examples, some subtler than others. To contribute meaningfully to the making of a discipline—despite the difficulties, practical and personal—I must keep engaging debates where they happen, and academia remains a hub of vibrant debate. Despite pervasive myths, however, it is not the only talking shop.With more than one homeland, cosplay meaning-making ranges across many manufactured borders. Echoing the naming rite of passage I described earlier, these kinds of antidisciplinary knowledge-making and -sharing spaces possess no singular designation and have been variously described over the years as, for example, “grey literature,” “subjugated knowledges” (via Foucault), the “undercommons” (via Stefano Harney and Fred Moten), “para-academia” (see Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers), and, relating directly to this discussion, “participatory culture,” that’s to say meaning-making—in its broadest sense—undertaken by media fans outside the disciplining sphere of the neoliberal academe.11 Perhaps they never will coalesce under one banner, tapping into the power of remaining processual, nebulous, undisciplined.Intellectual life is well lived in such places.Many vocational meaning-makers freely share their knowledge, thoughts, and experiences: a blog here, a zine there, a Signal chat, a cosplay party, a podcast, a workshop (theory or practical), Twitter (or Mastodon) threaded discussions, a “free education” class or event, an Open Access publication—another incomplete list, but you get the picture.12 The Open Access movement, of which presses form only one limb, is integral to knowledges flowing freely—in all senses—within public domains.Formal scholarship circulates within these spaces too. And while neoliberal academia may not foster collegiality and knowledge-sharing sans payment, academics almost always do. Thus, the informal practice of contacting authors to request copies of paywalled publications has become established. And while a successful workaround with unexpected consequences, such as impromptu networking and occasioning good feelings, is it a productive, meaningful way to confront a broken system? Though it must be said, it’s only broken from certain standpoints, namely to those disenchanted with corporate academia. To those favoring neoliberal policies, the university “machine” is working just fine, doing exactly what it’s meant to do: exploit labor to make money.From even this snapshot we can detect the stunning effect of power relations upon knowledge-making, viz. cosplay and beyond. (This is not to build walls or false binaries between professional academics and vocational knowledge-makers; our work and our struggles are intimately connected, and we will equally benefit from smashing the university machine and adopting new ways of learning and producing and sharing knowledges.) A complicated affair in which even those privileged within the university system cannot always benefit from their promising status; indeed, they are exhaustively exploited by that very system.Professional academics may easily harvest all available resources, but do they always have the time to do so? Those beyond fortress academia must work with what’s available to them or labor to find workarounds, always with the nagging doubt that they’re missing something, that their knowledge is partial. Systemic inequality giving succor to the hydra known as impostor syndrome, a calamity striking professional academics too. A notorious and polycephalic beast of which the hierarchicalization of knowledge production forms another fine head. Despite much contrary evidence and advocacy to dispel the pervasive idea that work undertaken within the academe is of higher value, rigor, and importance, the myth persists.Regardless of best-laid plans, institutional walls separating professional and vocational knowledge-makers remain upstanding; even within inclusive and forward-looking disciplines, such as fan studies, vocational knowledge-makers are easily forgotten and excluded when, for example, professional academics are preparing or sharing CFPs or seeking research partners. As an indie fan-scholar friend of mine once said, “It’s like we helped arrange this great party but can’t get past the bouncers at the door.” Many vocational knowledge-makers don’t even (want to) know about the formal “party” and are happy going to their own parties, raves, and bashes, however. Feeling objectified, a cosplaying friend recently described that she used to feel like she was shouting from the sidelines when it came to scholarly discussions about cosplay; she doesn’t feel like that anymore, having decided to immerse herself fully in fan and grassroots knowledge-making communities and forget “playing the academic.” She’s still actively contributing to the cosplay meaning-making project, just now on her own terms.Of course, there are always inspiring exceptions to the standard exclusions—my happy inclusion in this special issue is just one such example of inspiriting collegiality and inclusivity. Professional academics are not the institutions they work for and frequently—creatively and bravely—resist and undermine their neoliberal overlords. Still, these exceptions must become daily practice if vocational knowledge-makers are to become full participants in the making of a discipline.But wait. Maybe that’s not the goal, or it shouldn’t be, right?Myths tell us that vocational meaning-makers seek admission to the neoliberal academe, the center of modern intellectual life, we’re told. And no doubt many do, as I once did. But—necessity being the mother of invention and all—I’ve had to explore other avenues, potter falteringly down chance pathways, and discover other ways of participating in intellectual life. It is proving the most enlivening, stimulating, and challenging part of my scholarly journey, by far.It’s not just intellectual life for people like me that’s changing; academic worlds are changing too. Around the globe, arts and culture disciplines face myriad difficulties, from funding cuts and state and media propaganda to gag orders, book bans, and censorship.The glorious, assured expansion of fields of study marking recent decades, particularly in arts and culture disciplines, now looks uncertain. Not because of a lack of public appetite (or tuition fees, another matter for another day) but a deliberate withdrawal—or tactical curbing—of government funding, and propaganda. Emergent disciplines are at risk of losing their hard-won place within the neoliberal academe. Established disciplines are likewise vulnerable to this funding contraction, especially those within arts and culture domains. Subjects, scholars, and (prospective) students cut free as disciplinary walls come tumbling down; a double blow to imperiled (sub)fields as no students today means no professional academics tomorrow—thus are “unprofitable” and “troublesome” disciplines snuffed out. Not the end of meaning-making, of course, but the closure of one of its grandest boulevards.Tracing the trajectory of evolving arts and cultures (sub)fields and disciplines is both alarming and reassuring: outside(r) → inside(r) → outside(r). Subjects like cosplay, games, comics, and fandom once shifted from the margins—the public sphere—to the center, the academe. (Migrating inward has seen an uptake of legitimating and professionalizing strategies as professional academics work to discipline their unruly subjects, not unsuccessfully.) Funding cuts and increasing propaganda look set to reverse that inward procession, leaving our burgeoning subjects vulnerable to eviction from the academe. And we’re back to magic walls again, sliding forward and backward at the whim of political and economic systems; mirroring sociocultural change too, progressing only to regress, but bending always, as per Martin Luther King Jr., toward justice.While the expected cuts will be deep and bruising, they will not be fatal. Swinging, the pendulum of change will see the margins become the center and the center the margins. Kernels will doubtless remain within the academe, not least in realms of interdisciplinary research or top-tier institutions, but the radical work will continue elsewhere, as history shows. The question then for me does not concern the future of imperiled meaning-making projects like cosplay studies—it’s bright, it’s always been bright—more interesting is the opportunity these tumultuous times offer, a chance to shift the terms of the debate.A recurring question: Might we not take this moment of upheaval within arts and culture disciplines to radically rethink the project of knowledge-making itself?13 To reimagine intellectual life and recast our notions of public intellectuals: who they are, what realms they inhabit, what intellectual “work” looks like? To stop, once and for all, thinking about how to enfold vocational knowledge-makers into academia and to think instead about shifting the perception that the neoliberal academe is the heartland of modern intellectual life?Moreover, to escape thinking about academic heartlands entirely. May we not think of a nexus, an assemblage, a rhizome (via Deleuze and Guattari), a grapevine? Should we not encourage and treat knowledge-making as an additive and collaborative practice, hybrid and generalist, not competitive nor hyperspecialist? Likewise, as original, provocative, undisciplined, critical, exploratory, radical worldmaking activities, not replicative? What might we gain by picturing knowledge-making like a scattergram: a decentralized, nonhierarchical arrangement of dots, or nodes, sharing the story of something—an event, a subject, a text, an action? Increasingly prevalent questions as we see the hearts ripped out of arts and culture disciplines worldwide, a process syncing with the increasing and soulless commodification and mediazation of the academe, and the anti-intellectualism raging around the globe.If, as I described previously, cosplay is a practice of un/making meaning—of self, of subject, of world—then my happy engagement with it has perfectly readied me to imagine the world of knowledge-making otherwise; rather than, as was mooted, damning me to a bankrupt future, cosplay—as an art of making elsewise—has perhaps saved me.In happier times, I might have concluded on the possibilities of collapsing borders and building coalitions between professional and vocational meaning-making, of, and in the spirit of Angela Davis, turning walls sideways to make bridges. And, via Moten and Harney, talked not of reforming but of tearing down, founding, making anew. Proclaimed the pleasures of deepening insight, shared discoveries, and fruitful alliances that collaborative, undisciplined knowledge-making and sharing brings. Touted too the inestimable value of making activist-intellectual communities over making disciplines. Our historical moment makes writing about such things difficult, if not painful. I’m thinking here, of course, about the savage funding cuts striking (emergent) arts and culture disciplines especially, but also our context of global pandemics, perpetual (if not nuclear) war, and abrupt climate collapse—we may not have time to fix the mushrooming problems we face.Like any activism at the dead end of times, it is a distant future I continue to wish for, and to work fearlessly toward.
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May 4, 2023
Tharanat Hin-on + 1
Open Access