that part of sexual difference that does appear as the social (gender is thus the extreme of
sociality in sexual difference), as the negotiable, as the constructed’? 37 If this is the case,
gender is important for all its complexity and contradictions. Gender bending can be read to
both reinforce and challenge culturally established gender norms. Cosplays interaction with
drag such as ‘Wonder WoBear’ or Tracy Trash, suggest that the gender bending of characters
can reinforce more limited narratives of gender. However, ‘Wonder WoBear’s’ and Tracy
Trash’s co-existence with cosplayers such as ‘Gaygeekuniverse’ or ‘such.a.classic’ suggests
that gender exists in an ongoing dialogue between the individual’s needs and societal
expectations. For all the contradictions that exist within gender and its performance,
cosplayers shape characters from popular media to their own individual needs, and in so
doing, expose gender to be a malleable, something which can be shaped and formed to the
individual’s desires.
In becoming Wonder Woman male cosplayers protest against the restraints of
heterosexual gendered norms. Wonder (Wo)men seek to liberate the individual from such
constraints. This is not to suggest that such acts in themselves lead to an end in gender
difference, but rather express the diversity and non-linearity of gender. Whilst aspects of
society regulate gendered binaries, there will always be Wonder (Wo)man, to transcend the
limited male and female binaries, and to fight for and protect those victimised by society.
37
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004) 186.
29