Black Femme Rising
Cosplay and Playing Mas as
New Narratives of Transgression•
Cathy Thomas

The author argues that Black female figures disrupt the normative constructions of genre and gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play
and turns body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black
women at play, she asserts, cosplay (i.e., comic book and pop culture costumeplay) and masquerade (i.e., as during Caribbean Carnival) are rhetoricaland performative cognates. She suggests that Black women at play highlightthe paradoxical dilemma of their visibility and invisibility so that, in public(whether virtual or actual), their presence becomes a phenomenologicalexperience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. She
finds that, because the category of “Black women” in this research includes
people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, Black femme praxis addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate the overlap between cosplay
and playing mas (masquerade), she includes excerpts from interviews with
science-fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, cultural theorist Emily Zobel Marshall, and content from various Black female cosplayers on social media.
Key words: belonging; Black femme; cosplay; dissemblance; playing mas(masquerade); social media; world building

Introduction

Our story begins in a closet. A purposeful ascent out of its darkness toassemble the best approximation of that picture in our hand or that picture weknow by heart. It is our self-portrait. Makeup or mud, smear or spray, wire or
thread, feather or fur, blue eyes or blue scales, hooves or heels, boy or girl ormaybe not. The scene is set in Brooklyn, Leeds, or Trinidad, designing our Blue
Devil mas (Caribbean Carnival masquerade) outfit for Carnival or the multiverse
version of ourself, the version that spans every possible hypothetical universe,
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American Journal of Play, volume 13, numbers 2 and 3 © The Strong
Contact Cathy Thomas at cathythomas@ucsb.edu

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playing itself out for a comic book convention in New York, Denver, or San
Diego with our sculpting the turquoise Homo mermanus façade on top of ourBlack skin to play Marvel’s Atlantean warrior woman Andromeda as inked byDavid Marquez for Avengers’s “The Battle for the Right to Be Called…Earth’s
Mightiest” (January 2019). Both, a stealth retrieval of an “identity, which does
not come when called, nor form out of ash and dust when ordered to do so”(Browne 2018, 49).
This article provides a deep reading of cosplay (comic book and pop culture
costume play) as a performance analog to playing mas. In spite of providing
space for self-invention and play, both the Carnival scene (Trinidad Carnival
and its diasporic offshoots) and the comic book convention hall become complex
sites where paradoxically various social norms are enforced and upheld by expectations. Specifically, I look at Black women and female-identified nonbinary
individuals who play mas (masquerade) and cosplay and explicitly, via social
media and interviews, identify as Black and as of Afrodiasporic descent. This
article considers Black trans women, Black womyn or womxn, and other Black
individuals identifying under an array of terms who contest gender-normed
categories, experiences, and expectations. For this group of people, I will use
the broad term “Black women” and later “Black femme” after introducing it asa generative configuration with social, political, and identification sway.
The presence of Black women players has been both fraught with andenriched by community attention, which suggests that Blackness coupled withgender engages narrative-based costume play in new and productively disruptive
ways. More importantly, this engagement draws attention to the widely assumedrole of play in these two spheres—transgression. In other words, cosplay andCarnival masquerade are meant to be counterculture or subculture creations
yet tend toward the hegemonic, at least given the discrepant rules that make up
the art of pretending. In addition, this article also seeks to skew the hegemonyof narrative-based costume play by shifting the emphasis to the increasing visibility of Black women at play on social media, allowing us to speculate aboutsome of the ways in which race and gender, ironically, contribute to keeping
these physical spaces transgressive and, therefore, liberating. I offer a framework
for looking at the Black female cosplayer and mas maker as a Black femme
praxis that accounts for the nonbinary identity of the actual, fictive, and affective
configuration of players. Next, I provide a brief history of Caribbean Carnivaland how many elements connect to cosplay. I conduct a deep reading of La
Diablesse, the Deviless, a character derived from Caribbean folklore and reimag-

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ined by Trinidadian Carnival performer Tracy Sankar, who creates a specificallyBlack hybridity—a mixed-race, ambiguous species with gender possibilities.
Sankar’s work provides us with an occasion to imagine how, by embodying thediscontinuities of feminine expectations, Black women’s alternative staging of
narrative-based costume play—of world building, if you will—initiates its own
social meaning and sex-positive narrativizing “in relation to the absent presenceof the material metaphor of the black female as matrix-figure” (Jackson 2020,13). To this end, Black women at play are not empty vessels absorbing details
or making aberrant the overdetermined storylines and characters in which they
are noticeably absent or perfunctorily included as “representations of sacrificial
blackness” as is Riley, a black female character in Naughty’s Dog’s The Last of
Us video game (Russworm 2017, 112–14). This is followed by a discussion of
the distinct experiences of Black women in Carnival and cosplay. I interview
writer-scholar-players Nalo Hopkinson and Emily Zobel Marshall to situate
racial and gender logic that dominates cosplay and Carnival, respectively. Then,
my attention turns to the Black female cosplayers who use social media as a safe
space for their practice. Their anecdotes remind us that niche canons such ascomic books, video games, and oral tradition performed in popular culture aremeant to be provisional, iterable, and contingent on the impetus of play.
In my opening scenario, I juxtapose the iconic Blue Devil to Andromeda, a
blue-skinned Marvel character. The Blue Devil is an evolution of the traditional
nineteenth-century Trinidadian Carnival devil character played by freed slaves,
who would blacken their skin with molasses to portray the tortured souls of theoriginal enslaved black Africans who toiled on the sugar estates (Hill 1972).
Today, the Blue Devil is one of many devils performed with wire tails, wings,
and even pitchforks to try to scare onlookers. Andromeda is a merfolk character
whose storyline includes escaping Atlantis’s toxic masculinity by taking surface
forms, one of which was in the body of a mixed-race Jamaican woman, Geneieve Cross. She also duels and defeats her father, the Atlantean ruler. Makeup
artist Suba Mohan (@suba_mohan on Twitter) creates a flawless execution ofAndromeda’s mixed race, mixed species iteration (figure 1). Notably, in Mohan’s
depiction of Andromeda, the makeup effect pays tribute to her alias’s AfroJamaican heritage. Both black skin and blue skin are highlighted. Her look isfeatured in Afropunk.com for the Halloween 2018 feature “Black Cosplayers
Slay Halloween.” Although Suba does not identify as Black on her social media
profile, Afropunk.com, like other digital platforms, emerges as an inclusive third
space, a safer space, for showcasing play for Black folk and other people of color.

Black Femme Rising

Figure 1. Half-Atlantean. Image from Twitter, @suba_mohan

I connect Andromeda and the Blue Devil not only because they are visibly blue but because the consequence of their physical appearance makes theirplay—and, thusly, in this case their Caribbean-rooted narratives—more visible.
In this way, Blackness at play can be seen as a form of critical fabulation in which
the performance draws on and draws out the blanks left by the historical record
and thus the canon (Hartman 2008). “By playing with and rearranging the basic
elements of the story”and “throwing into crisis ‘what happened when’” the Blackcostumed players’ fabulations contest what has been laid out as fact, history, andevent by imagining themselves as world builders who can narrate their presence and present (11). The blue devil player and this version of Andromeda areprovisional projects who emerge from ludic impulses renarrating themselveswith each Carnival, convention, and social media post. They are rhetorical andperformative cognates.
Costume play is not merely cosmetic or decorative. Costumes are phenomenological; they are another surface that more easily articulates what wehave failed, or have not made an effort, to grasp. They draw their power fromindividuals’ imaginations, their affective orientations toward shared experiencesfrom group participation, and their pleasure in the successful execution of “theextended self ” (Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung 2012; Browne 2018). However,

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“patriarchy cannot hide or help itself. Nor can racism” (Browne 2018, 137). Thus,
for Black women and Black identified gender nonbinary people, costume play
is a surface art that also draws from an interior that is not so much concealing
itself as it is taking its sweet time to publicly play out truths from our inner andundisclosed lives. In this context, “surface art,” or what the surface articulates, has
two meanings. The first concerns the literal and topical adornment of makeup
and textile. The second points to a culture of dissemblance, concealing an interior life, that undergirds at the very least an irresolvable internal contradiction
between the perception of Black women’s politico-cultural openness and their
desire to protect privacy and a subjectivity that has been historically and sociallymaligned by white liberal norms supported by heteropatriarchy. Darlene Clark
Hine (1989), in her article “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the
Middle West,” uses Harriet Jacob’s (1861) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl toillustrate the complicated relationship between Black women and society at large
when it comes to narrativizing the violence done to them. “Only with secrecy,
thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary Black women accrue
the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in theoften one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle” (Hine 915).
Consider the dynamics of dissemblance in one of the works in “Heads of
the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and no Apology”
from Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s (2017) Heads of Colored People: Stories in whichcosplayer and artist Paris arrives by bus to the scene of a “large crowd of flashinglights, police cars, and costumed and uncostumed bystanders” outside the Los
Angeles Comic-Love convention (15). Her boyfriend Riley, who is dressed as
the anime character Tamaki Suoh, and another black man selling self-publishedcomic books get into an altercation we do not witness. They are summarily shotand killed: “Years later, she would regret not drawing the offending officer thatday. Since then, she has sketched his face over and over, penciling his name andimage in her notebook as a sort of plea, saying it aloud, wishing that she, like
Eucliwood, could pronounce the names of those she wanted to die and makeit so” (15).
It takes a third character, a Black man named Kevan, to reimagine Paris’s“story of fragments” in an homage comic he will create “to draw new conclusions” (Thompson-Spires 2017, 16–17). It is a comic wherein the gunned-downed
comic book artist can make “bad things unhappen” with a stroke of a brush.
By proxy, Kevan’s daughter Penny, who sits next to him as he draws the comicof the two Black men gunned down at Comic-Love, manifests a new version ofBlack Femme Rising

this super power by asserting it will also be her power, “but I’m just gonna think
and make it happen or unhappen” (Thompson-Spires 16–17).
These narrative and performative examples eschew overdetermined tragedy
that happens in the lives of Black folks and, thus, beauty is born out of experience. As photographer, poet, and Caribbean scholar Kevin Adonis Browne(2018) reminds us, “If we are, in fact, beautiful and dangerous (and we are), weshould know that it is a hard-worn beauty, a danger tempered with grievance andblood, rebellion and failure” (107). Specifically, I recognize how new versions of
the self-manifest creative disruptions to uninvited ideologies from which Black
women (female identified people) inherit and, subsequently, many divest. In thisarticle, I assert that cosplaying and playing mas are rhetorical and performative
cognates with similar material investments and emotional outcomes for female
bodies that carry self-affirmed Blackness.

Cosplay and Playing Mas, a Black Femme Approach
Cosplay and playing mas are two spaces where I have used an ethnographic
approach, as participant, observer, and interviewer, to better understand how
Blackness and gender shape subcultures of costume play. These spaces, in thissense, become incidental, but they should not be confused with the inconsequential. Space is political. Therefore, to build the parallels between mas andcosplaying and to examine how they work for and are worked by Black female
bodies, I draw inspiration from Browne’s emancipatory project of mas as a praxis
and rhetorical method. Mas is the process of doing and undoing social mores;
the Carnival is the opportunity in which to do and undo it. He embeds with mas
makers as a mas maker to disrupt imaginatively the colonizing effect of both
his photographic gaze and his position as a scholar documenting his subjects.
Browne’s central argument is that mas is not a metaphor. It is the enfleshedmateriality of a recomposed identity for which “issues of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship do not simply occur in the abstract” (Browne 2018, 30).
Therefore, to not come when called insists on there being no easy embrace ofpreset categories or identities. The hallmark of Afro-Caribbean Carnival tradition and its catalog of characters performed in traditional mas is an embodied
rejection to the dehumanization of African and, in some cases, Asian and indigenous people. Trinidad’s Carnival is an ontological coup staged against the gatekeepers of Western humanism and its colonial inventions. It is a balancing of

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Figure 2. Author as Gwendolyn with fellow cosplayers Poison Ivy and Catwoman.
Photo from Cathy Thomas

life. Therefore, to play mas is to be exposed to new erotic and ludic subjectivities. In turn, to examine Black women cosplayers who participate in convention
hall costuming or via social media personae invite us to explore the undoingof rule, with the hall or hashtag as the opportunity (actual or virtual) to undo
it. The rule here is an abstraction of humanism and colonial inventions in theform of pop cultural canons. For example, undoing a rule could be a curvy
Black woman playing Poison Ivy, a petite Black woman playing Michelle Pfieffer’s Cat Woman, and me, playing one of the few black-skinned characters in
Image Comic’s Saga because I know the convention hall will be full of its othercharacter (see figure 2).
Because comic books can be adapted to television and film, these images
often move beyond the page or screen and therefore contribute to a form of
production intrinsic and instrumental to re-creating social reality. For the halland the Carnival parade, this means perpetuating sexist, homophobic, and racist

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ways of knowing. To disrupt this complex space of high-heeled Anglo European
heroes and anime princesses, the Black female figure in costume is paradoxicallyvisible because she is invisible. She has been absented from or pigeonholed as“x” in visual culture and narratives.
Browne’s concept of masquerade making and playing mas a praxis and as arhetorical appeal valorizes the costumer and costume as a much more complex
articulation of identities that may have race, gender, sexuality, and citizenshipconcerns. Mas “is not a metaphor, . . . it is, instead a metonym—a part, a fragment that represents and can compose the whole of a thing” (2018, 30). As
such, the Black female form at play can be seen as a fragment of a larger strategy
designed to expose our own culture’s hegemonic ways as far as the traditions
carried on in convention halls and Carnival parades contribute to reproducing
social reality. In Witch’s Flight, Kara Keeling (2007) makes the same move awayfrom symbolism in her discussion of the Black femme image in cinema. Witch’s
Flight draws our attention to the moment in twentieth-century American history when the invention and circulation of its moving images coincides with the“problem of the color line,” as defined by civil rights activist W. E .B. Du Bois.
Enter now the influence and staying power of the visual and narrative archetypes.
Keeling (2007) proposes that self-valorization and “conditions of possibility forthe cinematic appearance of the black lesbian butch-femme sexuality” emergeout of 1970s blaxploitation films and later in movies like Set It Off (1996) andEve’s Bayou (1997) because we are seeing lives that were never meant to be seen.
Keeling (2007), Browne (2018), and Jackson (2020) pose vital questions withregard to visibility and invisibility, refusal, survival, belonging, and building
worlds outside the confines of the dominant visual culture.
Thinking through these frames, I conceptualize a Black femme praxis atplay when Black women—those who refuse to live by rules that actively suppress their expression with violence, correction, and erasure—cosplay and playmas. Culturally, the Black femme is a queer identity wherein Black feminist
roots and radical potentials give Blackness, chosen sexual identity, and gendered
performance—a refiguring of heteronormative femininity—a simultaneously
hypervisible and invisible embodiment. The Black femme identity is a simultaneously eroticized body recognizable for its indexable femininity and a failed
eroticism that is stealth as a creative work around aiming toward liberatingotherwise beingness. Black femme identity might be better understood, in Kara
Keeling’s statement, as offering “immaterial labor to produce alternative social
networks . . . a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed

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and that something different might appear therein at any-instant-whatever”(Keeling 2007, 143). In other words, the combination of race, gender, andsexuality in Keeling’s formulation of the Black femme creates anxiety because
she can mimic hegemonic values given by how her body is visually read.
Looking closely at play, it becomes apparent that Black women in cosplay
and playing mas also reproduce hegemonic sociality as a referent, but she is
not recognized as doing so. Rather, a Black femme praxis insists on mediating feedback between her material livingness in the present and imagining
alternative realities in certain spaces.
Black femme praxis is unruly, but I do not lean on a queer identity as aplaceholder for unruliness or that which is set in a binary war against straightwhite male preferences assumed to be the default setting of Carnival or cosplay.
Rather, a sizeable population of queer folk participate in Carnival and cosplay
performances. As the term “femme” is not a straight identity, in this discussion
it helps if we are inclusive and imaginative. “Queerness is a structuring andeducated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmireof the present. The here and now is a prison house . . . . We must dream andenact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately
new worlds” (Muñoz 2019, 1). Thus, the Black femme praxis must be queer tosustain speculative ontologies and new narratives of self within the prison houseof the here and now. Further, much of cosplay is based on comic book and cartoon characters being (looking) sexually dimorphic. Differences between sexes
translates to distinction in gender presentation. In turn, gender presentation
begets exaggeration of desirable archetypes, whether that be a Geisha or Godiva
fantasy and even, if rarely, Beyoncé.
Whereas mas praxis has citizenship as a consideration of the here-and-now
concerns of its practitioners, for Black female cosplayers’ citizen belonging comesin the form of the comic book and pop culture community and their defenseof the canon. The canon in this instance is the comic book, the cartoon, or theactor portrayal of a creative property. Black women cosplayers often confront
insult, misrecognition, and judgments on their costumed looks that are deemedincomplete because, for example, they do not match up to a comic book character’s race or body type, a struggle often voiced by Chaka Cumberbatch on
Twitter @princessology and in online interviews. My exploration asks: What isthe politicized poetics of the Black female form in aesthetically and canonicallypoliced spaces such as comic book convention halls? How might cosplay politics align with the body and pigment politics of popular Carnival masqueradeBlack Femme Rising(pretty mas with beads and bikinis)? How does the cosplaying Black female form
disrupt the constructions of genre and gender normativity, thereby turning body
spectatorship into new narratives of speculation? The Black femme praxis is aconceptual frame capturing the race-gender-sex expansiveness of Black female
forms, cisgender and nonbinary, as it works toward positive alternative imagesof their social, sexual, and mental selves. Costume play is an act of publicly playing out a counterrepresentation of a black women’s interiority as a dissemblance
that, instead, becomes a phenomenological experience and political expressionof their capacity as world builders.

History and Social Emotional Impact of Playing Mas
Play is vital to social emotional development in children and adolescents giving them at various stages of biological development new approaches to thinking, expressing emotion, inventing alternative ways of dealing with repetitionand novelty, and understanding cause and effect (Malik and Marwaha 2020;
Scott and Cogburn 2020). Role play, insofar as research on child education andsocial emotional competencies goes, teaches students to cooperate and express
empathy toward others (Vlaicu 2014). Play, with regards to adults playing mas,
has long been considered profoundly linked to socialization, community, andthe politics of emancipation. Medievalist and Trinidad Carnival scholar Milla
Riggio (2019) in her essay “The Power of Play” observes that “Carnival links
personal freedom with the political: ‘freeing up’ the self, ‘freeing up’ society”(575). Emancipation, we must remember, is a system of events that ended forcedlabor and enslavement. The festive play of Carnival has a positive and cathartic
psychological impact for its participants.
In High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture, Browne (2018)
uses Trinidad’s Carnival to discuss Caribbean identity as a function of Trinbagonian history, transnational returnees, and other diasporic sites where versionsof this Carnival thrive. Because Carnival has a history that entwines colonial
settlers, decimated indigenous populations, and enslaved and freed people andtheir descendants, what is being salvaged and reimagined by way of costuming and performance are, collectively, traditional elements and modern derivative artifacts of Carnival’s evolution. It evolved from once being an event solely
enjoyed by the colonial ruling class to being the rare time and space for catharsis
for the underclasses and laborers.

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In preemancipation Trinidad, prior to the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act,
Carnival was off limits to slaves and lower-class freed people. Preemancipation
Carnival was reported as an elegant affair enjoyed exclusively by the planter elites
who would dress in elegant and expensive costumes as Black field laborers andwomen “mulattas” of the time. Leading up to emancipation, Trinidad switchedcolonial hands from Dutch, French, and Spanish to British rule. Capitulating tostricter Victorian social ordering, emancipation dissolved demarcations between
upper-class Blacks and the newly emancipated in such a way that it createdcolonial anxiety, and this anxiety, in turn, called for more policing. We see thateven middle-class and upper-class Blacks and free colored people, gradually
downgraded and barred from participation in the Carnival, become racial collateral damage. Postemancipation, freed Blacks over time created their own
Carnival in which they took to the streets to create new narratives that reflect
their experiences. Parody, dark and novel, of histories of institutionalized assault,
extraction, and rape underpins the performance and play of this Carnival.
The Baby Dolls and the jamette are two examples of new reenactments ofthe social life of women in nineteenth-century Trinidad that persists today. The
satirical Baby Dolls portray mothers in bonnets who hold an illegitimate baby doll(mock child) and search the crowd for its father, embarrassing male passersby withpaternity accusations until they give her money for milk. This farce belies a historyof rape, miscegenation, and the devaluing of Black women’s reproductive agency.
The jamettes (or jametes) got their name from an insult derived from the French
word diametre, which means people living under the diameter of respectability
in society. Art historian Samantha Noel (2010) unpacks the gendered etymologyof the word noting that “jamette” is feminine and “jamete” is masculine, although
the blanket term of jamette Carnival “clearly feminizes the cultural practices of acertain class of people, and, in turn, is used by society to regulate and scrutinize
the sexuality of black women” (63). Jamette women were targeted because their
hip gyrations, pretend and actual brawling, sexual assertion, and teasing wereconsidered unfeminine. Creole women, in particular, were a double threat becauseof their ability to simultaneously cross race and cross gender play as they satirized
being a white planter (King 1999). But it is important to note they were not trying
to impersonate and deceive. They were trying to entertain and provide pleasure tothemselves and other revelers. Consequently, the jamette mas is theorized by other
scholars who compare the jamette, for example, to modern-day performers suchas Rihanna, citing how her on-stage and social media persona pushes back against
the historical shaming of black women’s dancing bodies (Jones 2016, 174–5).

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The early Soviet literary critic and Marxist language philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin famously considered Carnival a social institution of therapeuticallyliberating force, and Browne reconfigures Bakhtinian models by engaging
affect theory and Black diasporic queer theory to address ethnocentric variations of street performance. He highlights the difference in formation of contemporary mas culture (pretty mas of beads and bikinis), traditional culturemas (heritage figures), and J’ouvert (or “dutty mas,” as Trinis call it), which—with its revelers covered in mud, oil, and body paint—is connected to predawn
celebration on Carnival Monday. The popular performance by bands of people
wearing beads, bikinis, and feathers in the eroticized Beads and Bikini mas
constitutes part of pretty mas. It is the performance most associated with
Carnival parade images. Jamette, Baby Doll, and devils are traditional mas
characters, though they may also be performed in the same Carnival parade as
pretty mas. Revelers will likely encounter traditional mas players on the fringesof the route or during mas making J’ouvert celebrations. These encompass thevarious ways participants can express themselves through play. “As we cometo understand that everyday life in the neocolonial Caribbean involves theacceptance and indictment of socioeconomic/econosocial disappointments
and political failures, we should also understand that Carnival functions not
only as an acknowledgment of the indictment, but also the explicit rejectionof it” (Browne 2018, 14). This statement can be applied to Black cosplayers
and how their performance (and presence) becomes a playful disruption in
the comic book convention scene.
While Browne does not play favorites in his High Mas, his photographic eye
favors the Caribbean subjects whose designs deconstruct the persistent hypocrisies of everyday life and the persistent afterlife of violent and revolutionary
histories. The devils in Trinidad Carnival play out a reaction to the here and now
as an accretion of the dehumanizing conditions of colonialism. The devils are abookmark for Black resistance but not a symbol of it. Browne writes, “People are
not allegories of the hardships they face, nor do they engage purely in symbolic
terms with the circumstances that drive them to make Mas” (96). He refers here
to the devil mas’s inception with the nineteenth-century “Molasses” devils who
used sugar byproducts to blacken further their bodies to contrast more against
white domination. It is also known as the “begging mas” in which these bodies
covered in oil, paint, grease, or molasses beg for money from passersby, whowill pay to remain untouched or to be left alone. In the devil mas performance,
they might pick up the money tossed to them from a safe distance with their

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Figure 3. Erzulie the La Diablesse portrayed by Tracey Sankar. Photo from Maria Nunes, 2015.
https://www.marianunes.com/

teeth. They have a dance that, perhaps, mimics being whipped to being tossedin boiling hot molasses. Punishment and societal atonement face off. There may
be chains attached to them. There may be horns, tails, and a mouth reddenedwith dye. The public dance is a recomposition of a human beingness outside ofWestern knowing.
Among others, Browne focuses on Tracey Sankar’s “Queen of Sorrows” masin which she plays a character called La Diablesse, a modified characterizationof the trope of the “tragic mulatto” woman (see figure 3).
This character first appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s (1890) Two Years in the
French West Indies. She is a complex character, a horned woman with hooves
whose Black female form is literally staged with white paint as if to cover her
mixed-race body in a sheath of white Victorian respectability. She targets happy
couples and married men. Browne writes, “La Diablesse is the extended convenience of the woman’s body in this place, a manmade archetype of Caribbeanness
in the shape of a fractured femininity” (138). In a February 2017 interview with
Caribbean Beat Magazine, Sankar says, “I never choose the mas. The mas choose
me. It speaks to you. So you can’t just think that at the end of the day, you put on a
costume. It doh work like that. You awakening something” (Various contributors2017). Cosplay is redolent with other such manmade tropes: DC Comics’s Cat

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Woman as a noncustodial child turned thief turned costumed character to elicit
the same joy and terror enjoyed by Batman and the Joker. Then, there is Marvel’s
six-armed sorceress Spiral as a mind-controlled experiment of her kidnapper. In
these embodiments—La Diablesse, Cat Woman, Spiral—fractured femininity is
not a weakness; it is a disruption and challenge because the female characters are“being tasked with carrying the burden of toxic manhood” (Browne 2018, 138).
Whereas scholars like Mikhail Bahktin write about Carnival transgressions
in medieval Europe as happening in confined time though not in confined space,
Browne recognizes that the material and emotional reality of the season in the
Caribbean has no endpoints. On Ash Wednesday, people are already dreaming up and saving up for next year’s costume. Browne writes about the extent
to which the body is used. Costumes may be heavy, tight, sharp, or absent. The
sun, the police, the ouroborian parade route with its nonstop soca music andsteel pan drums blasting from speakers on the trucks leading large floats or on
the floats themselves, draped with corporate endorsement banners, set hips andwaists gyrating as participants and observers wine up (wining is a dance withroots in African dance tradition that was made popular in Caribbean Carnival).
The party started ten weeks ago, and you are expected to continue until you crossthe stage, rain or shine, for Last Lap, the final portion of the Carnival parademarch when final judging may happen. The day begins and ends with adrenaline
and sweat. There are accounts of people crying at the end of a Carnival that they
began planning, designing, and saving for on Ash Wednesday the year before(Thomas 2018). These plans may include building a costume, setting up a character’s storyline, and coordinating moves, gestures, and speech acts with others
for its execution. I see cosplay’s emotional and material reality in a parallel field.
I have, for example, planned my costumes for cosplay months in advanceof a comic book convention. For a three-day convention, I will usually spend
one day walking the halls with companions dressed as characters from a single
creative property. My “cos band” usually consists of peers who are also presenting
critical work on panels dedicated to comics scholarship. In 2019 I chaired andpresented on the panel, “Crafts, Covens, and Hunts (re)Producing the Witch.”
It served as an opportunity to use fandom to enact an aspect of our research bymaking visible the relationship between the more disciplinary aspects of ourfields with pop culture. The theme of the witch was, in particular, emotionallycharged given the flagrant misuse of the phrase “witch hunt” by cis white malepoliticians, who used such historical events to explain the ways media and fellow
politicians critiqued their use of their power. We recognized this cooption of an

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Figure 4. Weird Sisters from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Left to right: Natalie Sheppard(Dorcas), Cathy Thomas (Prudence), Jessica Calvanico (Agatha). Photo from Tracy Bealer

identity as an erasure of the history of torture, defamation, and prosecution of amajority female victim populace who were hunted as witches. And yet, within
the idea of the witch, we went further to critique film and television’s white
supremacist and heteronormalizing of these queer and rebellious figures. Ourpresentations included: “Black Witch Liberation from Screen to Comics,” “(de)Colonizing the Coven,” and “The Femme Devil, or What Happens When theDevil’s Whore Dethrones the Dark Lord” (see figure 4).
Presenting research in costume is simultaneously playful and incisive. Like
the Carnival scene, it is a performance of your other self that is not necessarily
seen or shared on a regular basis. While our departments did fund our conference travel, the performance of our witchiness throughout the day included
posing with others dressed as characters from Netflix’s The Chilling Adventuresof Sabrina and exceeded the conventional academic conference paper presentation, as it usually does.

At Play in the Parallel Fields of Blackness
Like Browne (2018) in his attempt to embody and embed his investigation ofBlack Femme Rising

Trinidad Carnival, I intertwine myself as scholar and subject as a cosplayer andmas maker. In this way, I see a powerful irony in Darlene Hine’s (1989) elaboration of Black women’s interiority as a dissemblance that uses “a self-imposed
invisibility” to “harness” strength and “psychic space” to survive (915). With thehelp of the costume and costume play, the invisibility is charged with the creative
energy of pretending. To reflect on ways in which performance, as escape or
expression, operates for other Black women scholars, I offer excerpts from longer
interviews I conducted with two scholar-activists. First, poet and professor Emily
Zobel Marshall discusses her participation in mas. Next, writer and professor
Nalo Hopkinson discusses experiences cosplaying. These conversations movebeyond mere observations of performing identity to insights into, as Muñoz(2009) writes in Cruising Utopia, “multiple forms of belonging in difference[that] adhere to a belonging collectively” (20). Like Browne, Hopkinson andMarshall demonstrate the insight gained through performing, particularly as it
applies to this art form that is so much about embodiment.
Marshall is a cultural theorist whose research, teaching, and creative expression examines constructions of hybrid and liminal identity within the African
diaspora with special attention to Caribbean Carnival culture. Marshall explores
race and racial politics of humans alongside the orality of the tricksters Brer
Rabbit and Anansi. Her first book, Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural
Resistance (2012) and her second, American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition, andBrer Rabbit (2019), focus on the role of the trickster in Caribbean and African
American cultures and how trickster tales that originally encode Black life on
plantations gets appropriated by white writers for antebellum fantasies.
She knows firsthand the poetics of endurance from playing mas annuallyat Leeds West Indian Day Carnival. As a scholar, mas player, and trickster she
observes, “Participating in Carnival is a transformative experience and one has tobe able to let go, to become/ be at one with the ‘mas’ in order to grasp the significance of this unique cultural phenomena.” She represents what Michel Foucault(1977) called “the new historian, the genealogist” who “will know what to makeof this masquerade” (160–61). Marshall shares that, “Performance enhances myscholarship in so many ways.” She is an advocate of bringing together both hercreative and critical practices. In fact, she writes poetry based on her research,“and playing mas every year with my ‘Mama Dread’s Masqueraders’ Carnival
troupe brings my creative and academic work to life.” For her, Carnival scholarship is immersive “whether that be playing mas or helping to sew costumes at
a mas camp” in Leeds. She adds that “there is sometimes a (justified) suspicion

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P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021of the academy (the ‘institution’) amongst Carnivalistas.” However, part of her
process is being attentive to the hierarchies around the researcher who parachutes in to extract data. She has created a Carnival platform that brings together
artists, performers, and scholars into a “much needed dialogue.” It is obviousthat the much-needed dialogue Marshall draws attention to is the inclination ofacademic spheres to approach those considered marginal and their practices asobjects of study rather than as knowledge producers. In other words, stereotypes,
shopworn curated images, and habituating cultural assumptions fill the space
between mas makers due to a foreclosing on who can be and what is considereda worthwhile contributor to knowledge production.
It may surprise the casual observer of contemporary Caribbean Carnival toknow that many of the performing groups use play to recenter social and politicalproblems. For example, in 2008 the HB Mama Troupe were stopped from entering the Carnival park with their “Free Dem—Close Guantanamo” placards. They
were deemed too political for the Carnival authorities at the Leeds West Indian
Day Carnival. And this is perhaps why traditional mas and dutty mas thrive inthe margins. “Dutty mas” is the official start of Carnival (J’ouvert or daybreak)on Carnival Monday where participants may be smeared in oil, mud, and paint.
A reflection on what motivates Carnival’s political and social importance connects Marshall to the figure of the trickster, not merely to its symbolic will tosurvive through planning and deceit, but to the manifestation of motives that thetrickster conceals as a way to overcome the system. She had the opportunity toplay mas with the “last remaining Midnight Robbers in Trinidad.” The Midnight
Robber is a stock character from traditional mas with roots that predate slavery,
evolving from the West African griot. Evolved as Trinidad Carnival’s Midnight
Robbers, these characters wear a broad-brimmed hats with fringe and are known
for their robber speech that mocks masters, derides former slave owners, andbrags of deeds done. The back story of the Midnight Robber tells how, despite
being born an abomination (likely in some unhospitable place), the Robber brags
he is the greatest among greats and uses his eloquence to persuade onlookers togive him money. Traditionally, this is a character played by males, but Marshallfound herself with an invitation to join a group of Robbers. However, Marshallrecalls, in our interview, that she “was given a cape and a whistle and a sombrerohat last minute. I wasn’t expecting to play with the Robbers, only to interview
them—but this costume made me move, talk, and think differently.” She adds
that “the Midnight Robbers were welcoming once I had performed a day on thestreet with them. This was a kind of test, I think—I’m not sure they thought I

Black Femme Rising

Figure 5. Emily Zobel Marshall as Midnight Robber. Photo from E. Zobel Marshallwas cut out for the job initially!” (Interview with author December 26, 2020).
Belonging in is not by any means a seamless dynamic, but Marshall’s
example gestures to findings in the context of early childhood development
and theories about pretense or pretend play. Pretense functions to change individuals’ perspectives in role taking and advances their “cooperative behavior,friendliness, positive emotional expressions.” Simply put, it advances one’s psychological domain (Weinberger and Starkey 1994). Further, “the content of thepretense may be enriched by having a larger number of participants.” Marshall(2017) wrote about her experiences on the road with the band in Trinidad on
her university blog: “The Midnight Robber is part highwayman, part cowboy
and part agent of death and destruction . . . . Words are what he uses to holdpassers-by to ransom” (n.p.). Pay out or else be regaled by the Robber’s colorful
fast-tempo stories of vengeance against his oppressors. The fierce Robber talk is
as much part of the costume as his broad-brimmed hat. “My tongue is the blast of
a gun!” is one of the threats Emily recalls from a reveler. The degree to which mas
players feel and see themselves connected with others is married to the degree
to which they can transform into character. She adds that “I felt strong in myMidnight Robber costume . . . what I did feel was that as an (Anansi!) Midnight
Robber, I wasn’t going to get too much unwanted attention from men—I would

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be seen to be a figure of dread and power” (Interview, December 26, 2020).
Marshall connects the trickster figure of Anansi the spider god to the boisterous
performance of the Midnight Robber. While physical attributes such as props
and costume may not coincide with attributes of Anansi, mimetic attributes
such as crowd interaction and verbal expression do. Acts of disruption such as
baiting and play threatening the crowd is a common attribute in mas characters
including the devil, Baby Dolls, and jamette. A pretense of transgression belies
a narrative based on past transgressions in Caribbean history.
In Carnival, some of the most provocative and memorable female characters are those who play out tropes of survival and noncommittal seduction,such as Sankar Charleau’s La Diablesse mentioned previously. Specifically, whenit comes to representations of pure evil or goodness incarnate in the traditional
mas characters who women commonly play, some ambivalence is attached tothem as they parody plantation life. The Baby Dolls approach people with wild
accusations interceding for the health and welfare of their abandoned and hungry child. The Dame Lorraine parodies the French planter-class women who
were, perhaps, physically unfit but always overly dressed for the stress of thetropical climate. The jamette are brash and loud both to mark and to counterpoint their lives being overdetermined by class, race, and gender violence. In
Carnival is Woman, Samantha Noel (2009) points out that portrayals of folkloric
characters like the soucouyant add a women-centered significance to J’ouvert (orJouvay), the pre-Carnival celebration. The soucouyant is a childless, unmarried
woman living outside society who, after making a pact with the devil, can slip
out of her skin and take the shape of fire so she can travel through small spaces
into her victim’s home to suck their life-blood. J’ouvert celebrations have theiractual and symbolic roots in the use of fire to burn cane at the end of the growing
season to mark a break from work or to sabotage the work entirely by creating
a stoppage. Given this, the soucouyant’s fire reminds us of the dehumanizing
effects of plantation regimes and of the possibilities of resistance once she sheds
her dehumanized human body.
These traditional mas players, with their shape-shifting and transgressions,
usually perform during J’ouvert in the predawn hours, relegated to a space andtime when the majority of people are asleep. To come out for J’ouvert is to willfully transgress the “normal” setting of time and place for Carnival. Similarly,
Black women who cosplay often complain of alienation from the scene. As such,they create their own asynchronous time spaces that transgress normal settings.
For example, there is the #28daysofblackcosplay challenge created by AfroCa-

Black Femme Rising

Figure 6. Anime gestural portrayals in #28daysofblackcosplay. Image from Twitter,@princessology

Figure 7. Black trans and nonbinary cosplayers in #28daysofblackcosplay. Image from Twitter,@yakfrost

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Figure 8: #closetcosplay. Image from Twitter, @ThouArtAnuli

ribbean cosplayer Chaka Cumberbatch-Tinsley in 2015, then again in 2016 as#29daysofblackcosplay on Twitter (see figures 6, 7, and 8).
As a professional, Cumberbatch-Tinsley worked as the Social Marketing
Manager for the Pokémon brand. As @princessology on Twitter, she has a penchant for Japanese pop culture, having grown up in Okinawa where her father
was stationed. After cosplaying as Sailor Venus (of the Sailer Moon comic series)
at an anime convention in the United States, she was harassed online by people
who felt she should not be cosplaying non-Black characters. A key difference
here between Marshall’s initial feelings of not belonging with the Midnight Robbers and Cumberbatch-Tinsley’s experience as Sailor Venus is this: The former
fictionalized identity is African rooted, and gender conventions are overlooked
because the Robbers were willing to welcome Marshall after they had tested
her. She states, “When the band gave me a signed photograph at the end of theday, I felt the rush of the warmth of acceptance and the feeling of having lived
through an important Carnival ritual” (Interview, December 26, 2020). For acomic book convention, long-standing costumed groups may exist but the success of a fictional identity is usually measured against the racial, gendered, andbody-type visual accuracy from a commercial or canonical narrative. Of note,Black Femme Rising

Figure 9. Cumberbatch-Tinsley as Sailor Venus. Image from https://thisisblacklight.
com/2018/02/23/representation/in addition to cosplay, Cumberbatch-Tinsley also plays mas. On an Instagram
story from 2019, when she attended Miami Carnival, she writes, “I don’t wantto think or say anything that [is] unrelated to Carnival for the foreseeable futuretbh” (see figure 9). Again, racial and gendered diversity of a space contributes
to the feeling of belonging.
From my own experience at large comic-book conventions, I am a crossrace, cross-gender, and cross-species cosplayer and mas player. I have dressed,
for example, as the white female character Kelly in the British science-fiction
show Misfits. Those at con who knew it, knew it well. My slicked-back hair and“chav” jewelry are Kelly’s signature adornment. Kelly’s superpower is reading
other peoples’ minds. I was pleased when, off the bat, one woman knew who
I was. However, in separate encounters, I was surprised at how much energy
I expended explaining to others why I was not cosplaying the Black character
Alicia whom they believed I even looked like. Alicia’s super power is inadvertently causing people to violently lust after her by simply touching her; so she
keeps to herself. Cognitive biases in cosplay reflect societal norms carrying over
into imaginative realms. I find the hypervigilance about racial accuracy in many
cosplay spaces to be antithetical to its origins. In fact, it was a woman, a science-

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Figure 10. Author as Kelly Bailey from Misfits. (photo from Cathy Thomas) and an image ofthe character Kelly Bailey. From http://fanboy4um.blogspot.com/

fiction zine publisher named Myrtle R. Douglas, who pioneered cosplay in New
York in 1939 using the alias Morojo and dressed in “furisticostume”—pure narrative invention. Perhaps cosplay cognitive bias also reveals whose inventions
are tolerated and preserved.
In speaking with Nalo Hopkinson as a fellow cosplayer, I was interested in
knowing how she understood the way she was regarded by spectators at large.For
example, what kinds of assumptions have people made about who she was trying
to be? Similarly, I was interested in knowing if, in the past three to four years,
she felt her movement through the space of the convention hall in costume to besomething transgressive. In other words, did she feel she breached an unspoken
order and ordering that may be defined by such norms as age, ability, morphology, gender, race, and even pigementocracy (skin tone hierarchy). Hopkinson
shares: “Yes. I’m Black, fat, female, and over fifty-five. How could my presence
moving through those spaces as though I belonged not be transgressive? Casein point; walking through Comic-con dressed as Nakia (from Marvel’s Black
Panther) in a tight dress with thigh-high slits, yet having non-Black people
misidentify me as Queen Ramonda from the same film. They didn’t make thereverse mistake when I dressed the next day as the older character” (Interview,
January 9, 2021.

Black Femme Rising

Hopkinson, the 2021 Damon Knight Science Fiction Writers Grand Master,is its youngest-blackest woman recipient. When Afro Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter (1995) writes, “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words
made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized
in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. . . . And the maps of springalways have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.” Hopkinson’s body of work
speaks to undared forms. (Wynter 1995, 35). Her ability to world build, blending
cosmologies from African, Caribbean, and Indigenous cultures has inspired newreaders to the once bastardized genre with her novels, Brown Girl in the Ring
(1998), Salt Roads (2003), Midnight Robber (2000) and countless short stories
that include erotica. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s (2020) analysis of Brown Girl in
the Ring (set in postapocalyptic Canada) points out the text does not waste time
opposing a Western liberal humanist lens of what life looks like for Black people
in a dystopic future Toronto. Hopkinson’s speculative world is not concernedwith the dehumanization or bestialization attached to Blackness in literature,art, and science. Brown Girl is not pointing out suffering from stereotypicalrepresentations. Instead, it just gets “on with upending and inventing at the edgeof legibility” (4). Additionally, Hopkinson is the cowriter of DC Comics’s Houseof Whispers series, a world built within Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe thattakes up a Voodoo mythology storyline. Literature, being a singular expressionof an identity, offers notes on Black woman sexuality, Black woman vernacular,Black woman sex acts, and Black woman roles within Caribbean cosmology.
Because Hopkinson is a fellow cosplayer and a comic book writer, these series ofinquiries draw from another valence of her world building. Hopkinson spoke tome about how the performance of cosplay intersected with other performancesand masks in her everyday life, about the practice of being recognized or misrecognized, and of recognizing oneself. She participated in Carnival as a childbut not as a performer (mas). She adds, “I would have liked to, but being part ofa mas parade is an expensive undertaking.” But, as an adult Hopkinson was able
to participate in comic book conventions: “Attending my first science fiction
convention at twenty-one years old, in Toronto, Canada, right out of undergrad.
It was 1982. I’d been reading SF/F [science fiction and fantasy] most of my life,
but this was the first time it occurred to me that a) I might like to take part incosplay; b) I’d like to do so as a Black character; and c) at the time, there werereally only two female ones available to me: Lt. Uhura from Star Trek, and Storm
from the X-Men. (That was an early lesson into racism in SF/F)” (Interview,
January 9, 2021).

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Hopkinson leafed through an expensive book at her local comic bookstore
store and memorized the details about female crew members. She observed “Themen wore pants. The women wore short tunics that exposed their haunches
garbed in matching panties. (I’d already figured out there was sexism in SF/F,
so that only caused me an eyeroll, not an epiphany)” (Interview, Jaunary 9,2021). Using a pattern and cheap red polyester, she made the tunic-cut dress a
bit longer as a mini dress. At that time, she wore her hair straightened so she
was able to match actress Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Uhura for the costumecontest. Hopkinson admits, it “wasn’t a visually spectacular costume, which isperhaps why it didn’t place.” However, she “managed to elbow out a space in thegenre” as a Black woman without having to go in “whiteface or blueface.” You
can see the satisfaction on her face in a photograph from that day. She recalls
how “fun” it was to pose in another photo with someone who had built an R2D2
bot (Interview, January 9, 2021). See figure 11.
Returning to Black Panther cosplay, I asked Hopkinson about her convention experiences with spectators at large and with people with whom she
might consider part of a belonging-in group. These might be friends she knew
or travelled with or other cosplayers identified as familiar—in this case, theMarvel Universe. On this point, she noted that “Black people, who culturally

Figure 11. Nalo Hopkinson as Lt. Uhuru from Star Trek in 1982. Photo from Nalo Hopkinson

Black Femme Rising

don’t, IME [in my experience], tie female attractiveness so inexorably to youth
and slimness, generally didn’t make the same mistake.” And they tended torespond positively, “whereas I only remember three non-Black people doingso.” She credits the Black con goers for knowing what she was doing but as fora majority of attendees—“and I may have been imagining this—I perceived acertain amount of anxious aversion of eyes on their part.” However, anxiety isnecessarily tethered to fancy dress whether it stokes or hinders you. You want toexecute your design to the best of your ability, and you want that to come across.
There is a nuanced vulnerability in costume play for adults. It may be attributed
to rationalizing peer critique. For Black women, there is the added challengeof performing in spaces where gender and race creates cognitive biases. Hopkinson affirms that this is not only a problem common to the convention hall.
Recalling her experiences playing Black Panther characters Ramonda and Nakia,
Hopkinson “perceived a certain amount of anxious aversion of eyes” from nonBlack people that she has experienced in the “real world.” She observes “whitecolleagues not recognizing me outside of the workplace because they refuse tolook directly at me, and when I put myself directly in their line of sight and callthem by name, their faces at first display anxiety, aversion, or affront, I presume
because they either don’t know what business a Black woman has addressing
them and they haven’t recognized me yet, or they’re afraid that some rando
angry Black woman is about to confront them loudly.” I too have experienced thereal-world anxiety, aversion and affront with one stand-out incident involving achatty researcher following an almost two-hour version of some twice-monthly
meetings. After the meeting, he took the elevator down and I took the steps,
he did not recognize me minutes later outside our genetics building. Flighty
professor? Bad eyes? Or, maybe one just gets used to “I thought that was you,
Cathy” after the startle of “Hello Professor—it’s me.”Of the many overlaps between Hopkinson’s and my own experience (atwork and in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood), not being recognized
by one’s white colleagues stands out. I have jokingly called this phenomena“out-of-context negro” to point out how ethnicity and race, perhaps gender
representation as well, conditions people to experience their own life within
a set orientation “by means of our origin myths and cosmogonically charted
narratives” (McKittrick 2015, 25). Specifically, in Sylvia Wynter’s sense and in
McKittrick’s words, humankind is—and brace yourselves—conditioned to “subjectively experience ourselves as semantically, neurochemically opiate-rewarded,
thereby fictively eusocializing, inter-altruistic, kin recognizing member subjects

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P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021of the same symbolic life kind (here “kind” refers to our genre-specific or pseudo
species-specific human groupings—our class, our tribe, and so forth)” (McKittrick 2015, 25, emphasis in the original). One is opiate rewarded when you
recognize kin as members of an in-group who adhere to a narrative that makes
sense and creates closure for you. Therefore, the anxiety, aversion, or affront
Hopkinson speaks of in her professional settings can also be imagined with asimilar dynamic when the out-of-context negro configuration is costumed as ifpart of “our tribe” of narrative-approved pop cultural icons (25). We need only
to read current headlines to see what can be at stake when Blackness, anxiety,and misrecognition align.
Similar to Hopkinson, Marshall observes anxious moments playing in
her Midnight Robber costume and recalls that although she felt strong in her
costume, she “was also feeling vulnerable because [she] was an outsider playing with mostly older men whom [she] didn’t know very well and it was [her]first time in Port of Spain.” She doubted her ability and “had to work throughall sorts of emotions on that day.” She says “my shoe broke, so I felt even more
exposed. When the band gave me a signed photograph at the end of the day I
felt the rush of the warmth of acceptance and the feeling of having lived throughan important Carnival ritual.” Eventually, she was accepted as a performer ofa figure who emerges from the Caribbean Carnival canon where, by the very
nature of the region’s history of colonization and interracial mixing, fictional
identities and actual ones have the space to world build. She adds that as a “as alight-skinned mixed heritage woman” it is important for her to “trouble binaries/
boundaries between race (monolithic/fixed ideas of Blackness and whiteness)”(Interview December 26, 2020).
Indeed, Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber inspired Marshall to play Robber mas
in Trinidad because it challenges “ideas of women as fragile.” She writes, “Thisis why I love Hopkinson’s protagonist Tan-Tan in her novel Midnight Robber somuch. She plays the Robber to call for justice and seek out her revenge. It’s awonderful portrayal of the power of mas.” For Marshall, “the idea of revenge isalso strong” giving her the opportunity “to play out some kind of revenge against
sexual and racial oppressors on the street in Carnival.” For her next project,Marshall will be looking at the history of Baby Dolls who “speak directly to how
black women survive sexual and racial abuse in the Caribbean.” And, the best
kind of revenge is success. For example, Chaka Cumberbatch-Tinsley writes
that the #28daysofblackcosplay effort “will be a rallying call to arms for a groupof people who are consistently subjected to derogatory comments and outrightBlack Femme Risingracism in response to doing little more than proudly displaying their love for thishobby” (Plunkett 2016, n.p.). From the page scroll of this challenge, you will see
Cumberbatch-Tinsley’s hashtag project is not exclusive to Black women alone
because, as the story goes, Black feminist projects are necessarily world-building
projects and the Black femme praxis is staked on the daring of world builders.

“Waz Di Scene Gyal?” Social Media as aSpace of Support, in Spite of Itself
In Trinidadian slang, “waz di scene, gyal” means “what’s up, girl” or more colloquially, “what’s going on.” This is a casual and popular way to address friends,
and this address seems apropos for a growing and supportive online communityof “friends” and “followers” who want to be “belonging in difference” (Muñoz
2019, 10). The scene, as it were, moves from Carnival to cosplay, from convention halls to Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and vanity websites. Social
media, in this sense, becomes the scene where Black cosplayers, especially, candepart from heteronormativity and race, gender, and sex taxonomies.
In convention hall cosplay, it will be a person’s sublimated race, perceived
gender, assumed ability, and body type that challenges the immanence trapped

Figure 12. ZiggZagg∑rZ, Raging AfroSamurai Cycloptic Cyborg #1, Afrofuturist Occupation at
Pomona College (2019). Photo from tobias c. van Veen

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Figure 13. ZiggZagg∑rZ as Niobe. Image from Twitter, @ziggzaggerz

in comic, manga, or pop culture iconography. This is similar to playing mas
insofar as pretty mas will be more concerned with the excessive corporeality
and even skin tone of those wearing beads and bikinis. With traditional mas,perhaps, there is push back around gender and with performing a traditional
mas performance that is dictated by gender. Crossing over to the other side or
mashing up many sides, as Marshall has done with her Midnight Robber mas
and Hopkinson has done with her Lt. Uhura cosplay, transgresses hardened
canons. For gender, nonbinary players, the narrative generates a whole newscene. Consider the call for transformation in the line “You risk rotting in thatshell…” from the poem “Hatch or Rot” by gender nonbinary performance artist
and cosplayer ZiggZagg∑rZ the Bastard (see figures 12 and 13).
Breaking the shell can mean freedom, physical and psychic. In Black on
Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton (2017) writes a modern genealogy of “(black)transness” in narratives and histories of “captivity, fugitivity, and plain old everyday
survival” (57). Snorton writes about an escape tactic of enslaved Black people
in America of cross-dressing to succeed in their flight to freedom. There is thefamous case of the light-skinned Ellen Craft, in cross-gender wardrobe, fleeing
with her darker-skinned husband who, in acting as the manservant to her performance as a nearly blind old white man, made their way safely North. HarrietBlack Femme RisingTubman also dressed as man and as a freed Black woman to deceive her captors.
Snorton writes how this use of costume “play” by Black individuals was boththe scene of identity theft and property theft from their former masters. This
articulation of (Black)transness maps itself, visually, discursively, and practicallyto the idea that Black women cosplayers are stealing the identity of a beloved
character away from its point of origin. However, it is easy to declare freedom
when rarely has there been room for Black women’s own origin myths.
Another scene that a Black femme praxis plays out is this failure of origins to ever be relevant to how the Black imagination—coupled with resources(money and time)—narrates its stories. If bookstores, media, and academia
can stake a claim to the “Black traditions of ” or the “Black voices from” can notcostume design also carry the same potential for “Blackening,” for Black embodiment and performance? Is it not also true that the Black female form’s representation within Western imagination carries a Blackening of their femininity(or lack thereof), their masculinity (or how they overreach), their animality (orhow they get down), and their thingification (or how they are fungible)? What
does it mean when the production of cosplaying gets in the way of the otherproductions of being a Black person (particularly in this newly, always, masked
world in the era of COVID-19), as happened to @ZiggZaggerZ:#AWKWARD When u get so lost in ur #Blackcosplay u forget it was #quarantine & u frolickin about with no #mask, gloves, or shoes, but have elf ears,
a #sword, YOU BLACK, & some patrollers just rolled up eyein you
It’s for my mental health!
#niobe @strangercomics #cosplay (@ZiggZaggerZ)

👀😬😩

ZiggZagg∑rZ’s social media post is a meta commentary on the policingof Black and gendered bodies. In this way, Snorton’s “(Black)transness” is a
generative provocation for both cosplay and playing mas because these are still
spaces predominantly curated by the inadequate vision of the male gaze. The
challenge of Black cosplay and playing mas is that performers have been disciplined by nationalized standards the other 364 days of the year. They inherit
a synthesis of selves from which to experiment. The synthesis of social andaesthetic selves is an experience that Tavia N’yongo (2019) writes about in Afrofabulatios. N’yongo is interested in, “conveying something like the varieties ofafro-fabulative experience. I write at a time when the powers of the false areneeded more than ever, precisely in order to refuse the terms by which present
cultural politics are increasingly being reordered to suit the dictates of a bully-

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ing and belligerent white nationalism” (44). The “powers of the false” are mas
and cosplay. In ZiggZagg∑rZ’s poem “Cosplay,” the urgency of the lines “Let goof yourself/ Become someone/else./ Personalities can end./ There’s powers in/pretend” (ZiggZagg∑rZ.com n.p.). The lines “become someone” and the soleword “pretend” are not concerned with restaging the voice or the position of the
oppressed, the put-upon, or the victim of the mundane. The lines are preoccupied with disrupting the notion of mimesis as the end goal of pretend. Pretending
invites a thoroughgoing reappraisal of being. Such subjectivities have, of course,
been essential to reclaiming sex-positive, racially nonessentialized, ethnically
capacious, species friendly, and nonmimetic bestial humanity. And in the caseof Tubman and Craft, costumed subjectivities have meant straight up freedom.
To consider Black femme praxis as rhetorical and performative, therefore,
is to consider the extent to which Hopkinson’s notes about sexuality, vernacular, sex acts, and ethno-positive cosmologies and her own embodied practiceof cosplay and design upend a culture of dissemblance. Let us not pretend that
dissemblance begins and ends when you put on or take off a fantastical costume.
Super heroes and Midnight Robbers may be fantastical but, as Sylvia Wynter
reminds us of “undared forms,” we need to revise constantly the content andcontext of the human. So by dissemblance I mean the powerful ideology weencounter every day that functions to shame-fit Black women into a box ofheteronormal Victorian femininity that has actually made many of us conspirators against race-gender-sex oppression. This dissemblance is not concealment,
it is an entrenchment. If, as Darlene Clark Hine (1989) writes, “dissemblance…
shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors,” then
Hopkinson’s Black femme praxis on and off the page is a go-between masteryof iconic and ironic exposures. She shows what she will not tell and tells what
is at stake. Like Hopkinson, what is at stake for Marshall is a consideration of
belonging-in social mores. It is important to acknowledge that the feeling ofunease and anxiety at performing can sometimes originate from within a support network. Newcomers to a space dedicated to minoritarian exposures may
find themselves going down a mental check list of their own authenticity, as itwere. When social mores of a marginalized group reproduce its own brand ofhegemony, giving off the slightest whiffs of dominance over others, participant
engagement must dig down deep and rely on the confidence and enthusiasm it
took to show up in the first place. Self-awareness is not resolved with participation in belonging-in communities of mas players or Black cosplayers. It is
resolved by daring.

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Conclusion
In our time, I observe a pyramidization of power in America, Europe, and the
Global South—the former being a space which, as a generalization, professes
loudly to immanent freedoms and historical righteousness. This is not to say
atrocities such as the criminalization of ethnic groups like the Uighurs in China
or condemnation of sex-positive persons within modern Middle Eastern societies are not acts of immanent righteousness by the state. It is to say, however,that I have witnessed American capitalism and patriotism slip into shades offascism that does the work of institutionalizing sameness in the name of profitsand philosophy. Thus, in this steadfast globalizing world, minoritarian life ismentally and physically taxed by hostilities grounded in the grammar and logic
of representation. That is, what is being represented is “not just a random collection of concepts, but concepts organized, arranged and classified into complex
relations with one another” (Hall, Evans, and Nixon 2013, 18). What is being
represented and by whom is a question also of who is re/producing it. So, let
us take the examples of mas and cosplay as an observation of the opportunity
to flip the script, as it were: a new grammar and illogic of fractured femininity,(Black)transness, undared forms, and speculative identities that do not comewhen called because belonging in difference is the power in pretend (to paraphrase ZiggZagg∑rZ’s poem) and the power to insist on something else. It is
nothing new to read about the intricate processes of costuming, whether for Carnival or a convention. Representing in surface art the inner details of an “else’s”
inner life; becoming a trickster to expose the truth of an “else’s” given truths;
wearing someone else’s clothes to show your belonging in is something “else.”
While gender and sexuality are crucial to storylines within Carnival andcosplay, a discussion of race, especially in relation to gender and sexuality constitutes an emerging topic. For example, Tobias C. van Veen has conductedinterviews of Black cosplayers at Emerald City ComicCon to understand how“gender bending, queering, disabled, and interracial play” affect the “white-abledcanon” with a focus on nonbinary cosplayer ZiggZagΣrZ the Bastard, who coins
the phrase cause-play to describe the “admixture of the political and play” (vanVeen 2018, 81). Discussions of minoritarian participation in cosplay has shiftedfrom perfunctory to pernicious based on anecdotes and personal experiences.
Similarly, in Carnival, although I have not discussed it in detail here, idealized
body types and even skin tone, become its points of contention. Not only is thisshift symptomatic of reactionary mainstreaming of once marginalized forms of

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play, but points to how we conceive of the role, and thus rules, of costumes inplay. Black women at play intrinsically fracture rules by assuming roles.
A Black femme praxis relies on these fractures within the social constructof femininity. And bestiality is a bonus. In Becoming Human, Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakkiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) writes of moving
beyond a critique of prevailing Western thought that yokes Blackness andBlack humanity to tropes and identities of “the animal” and also Blackness’s“thingification” in history (1). She writes of the “spectacularization” of “theAfrican female” that imagines Black womanhood to be “a gender apart” (an“other” gender, but also an “other” sex) citing this supposed failure in sexualand racial legibility as a generate space for “imaginative practices of worlding” (1, 8). Tracey Sankar’s La Diablesse mas is a bestialization of colonial
myth worn on a Black woman’s body. #29daysofblackcosplay (as well as theoriginal #28daysofblackcosplay) is the surprise of “thingification” and racial
permeability gifted to the reimagining of manga characters. Nalo Hopkinson’sand Emily Zobel Marshall’s embrace of sexual, racial, and body illegibility isa necessary surface art practice for academia’s overreliance on theory. Blackfemme praxis facilitates an exposure of the interior self—the self that struggles
against living legibly—by finding ways to reincorporate and revalorize racesex-gender positionality. Kevin Adonis Browne (2018) accurately writes how
everyday life in the duration of duress “involves the acceptance and indictmentof socioeconomic/econosocial disappointments and political failures” (24).
Whereas he speaks about Carnival, I expand this critique to Blackness at play,and I see how playing mas and cosplay are both an “acknowledgment of theindictment, but also the explicit rejection of it” (24). Manifested in playing
mas and cosplay, this acknowledgment becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of Black women’s (cis and nonbinary) capacity
for worlding and self-reinvention.
A Black femme praxis is, metaphorically speaking, like a nutrient-richroot tuber pushing out a phylogenetic tree whose leaves, shoots, and eventual
branches celebrate its species and discursive hybridity. The lack of imaginationon the part of immanence, righteousness, and hegemony upholds boundaries
coding white femininity as a byproduct of the human. Boundaries are dug
deep and calcified. Black femme praxis is a fractured femininity that maneuvers through this hardened earth, subverting and transgressing historicallypreserved end points, making its wayward progress, another ascent out of
our closet.

Black Femme Rising

Funding from the DiverseScholar mini-grant assisted in the completion of thisarticle.

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