Cosplay has also opened both opportunity and adversity

Fan culture began early, but it didn’t truly coalesce until the postwar period in the United States, and it didn’t explode into its current form until after the millennium. Cosplay Costume

Cosplay has also opened both opportunity and adversity for woman-identifying fans. Spiderman Costume It’s well established that women have had an uphill climb in many fan circles, despite being early pioneers in collective experience.

Cosplay can involve gender-swapping characters and costumes, mashing up franchises or genre themes, and embracing other transformative approaches to pop culture phenomena.

Think of a character from even a modestly popular science fiction or fantasy universe, and there's probably been someone who's masqueraded as that character. And there large subgroups of specialty cosplay like the "bronies:" men who dress up as ponies from My Little Pony. "They see doctors as being very careful, very detailed," Galinksy says. "The mechanism is about symbolic association. By putting on the clothing, it becomes who you are."

We wear it, and we get it on us," says Abraham Rutchick, a psychologist at California State University Northridge.