The Cosplay Community Has Tried To Make Me Invisible Because I’m A Fat Black Woman
I never considered myself a geek until I picked up a new hobby: costume play, aka cosplay. It’s one of those things that happened organically. Someone took me to a geek convention, I saw people in costume, and not once did it occur to me not to dress up like them. Before I’d been there an hour, I had plans, ideas, hopes, and dreams for how to become a part of this world.
In short: I love cosplay. It is one of the highlights of my life, providing an outlet for my creativity, my problem-solving, my mild exhibitionism, and my need for expression.
I often try to capture my joy for cosplay through photos, of which I have many. And recently, when I did a cosplay photo shoot in my Asgardian Storm costume, I asked my significant other (S.O.) what he thought of one of my pictures. His response: “There’s a little too much boob.”
A little too much boob.
I looked at him, angry and offended, and said, “This is my body. That’s just how it looks.”
“I just think it detracts from the costume,” he responded.
My S.O. loves my body. I know this. But for him to say that my body was a problem in the costume was shaming. It was judgment. It was him expressing that somehow my body was the problem in…
