Under Construction @ Keele Vol. IV (1) | Page 36

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