sexuality. Similarly, cosplayer Vera Wylde’s image ‘Bound for Fun’ 17 depicts Wylde as Wonder
Woman bound up with rope 18 , playing with tropes of the bondage genre. In these instances
physical masculine and performed feminine are merged in equal sexual gratification, creating
something altogether new. Taylor and Rupp point out that ‘these [performers] are people who
create their own authentic genders, suggesting that, rather than eliminating the notion of
gender categories we need to expand the possibilities beyond two or three to a whole range
of possible identities’ 19 . In this sense gender bending has the potential to blur gender
categories, through which cosplayers can create their own identities. Yet in doing so, Tracy
Trash and Vera Wylde also transform Wonder Woman, deemphasising character traits of the
warrior in favour of Wonder Woman’s status as a sex symbol. In Gender Trouble, Butler
highlights the limitations of drag as subversive, by arguing that ‘Within feminist theory, […]
parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag
or cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping’ 20 . In enacting an
overtly feminine and sexualised version of Wonder Woman, Tracy Trash and Vera Wylde can
be received critically as an ‘uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping’ which ultimately
reaffirms heterosexual gendered norms. ‘Wonder WoBear’ can similarly be read as
‘degrading’ in that he too is ultimately mocking ideas around femininity. The excess of these
cosplays therefore can make them difficult to be interpreted as revolutionary in their display of
gender.
I am Wonder Woman: Transformation and transcending gender
Despite its contradictory forms, there are alternate modes under which drag can be read as a
celebratory act. Kumbier’s ethnographic research on drag kings (women who perform as
men), for example, reviews drag kings as using their creativity to possess gender: ‘Watching
women perform convincingly as men, working their dicks and getting tips […], female fans are
empowered by the knowledge that […] we, too, can possess that dick’ 21 . It’s worth
emphasising the importance of the performance being ‘convincing’. Butler similarly argues that
‘imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of
originality’ 22 . Where the word ‘convincing’ might be used, its application can be defined as: a
cosplayer who accurately represents a certain set of culturally established myths to such a
Vera Wylde “Bound for fun” (2016). https://www.flickr.com/photos/verawylde/32507327300/.
Gold painted rope, as if to replicate Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth.
19 Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp, ‘Chicks with Dicks, Men in Dresses’, Journal of Homosexuality 46:3
4 (2004): 131.
20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble ([1990] 2010), 187.
21 Alana Kumbier, ‘One Body, Some Genders’, Journal of Homosexuality 43:3-4 (2003): 197-198.
22 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble ([1990] 2010), 188.
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