Cosplaying with Gender: Freedoms and Limitations to Gender Exploration at Canadian Anime Conventions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the gendered dimensions of cosplay and cross-play at Canadian anime conventions. How do cosplayers use cross-play to explore gender identities at anime conventions? What limitations hinder cosplayers from feeling free to explore their identities at these events? Why do cis women and non-binary people assigned female at birth (AFAB) participate in cross-play? I use in-depth interviews with cosplayers, autoethnography, and textual analyses of convention anti-harassment policies to explore these questions. Cross-play at Canadian anime conventions is beneficial to queer, trans, and non-binary attendees as they are able to explore their gender presentations in unique ways. Yet, there are limitations to this freedom, particularly for cis women and non-binary AFAB cosplayers who experience negativity surrounding femininity and heightened sexual harassment. These findings broaden understandings of gender and anime fan practices and encourage convention organizers to update policies on harassment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".