Cosplayers’ Bounty: an ethical path that guide consumers’ subjective forms

Abstract

Cosplay is a marketing phenomenon that allows consumers to create themselves through the desire to intensify their consumer relationships. Therefore, the present study aims to understand how market relations arrange the subjectivity of cosplayers. To do so, the Ethnographic Foucauldian Genealogy (EFG) was adopt combining multiple approaches to virtual ethnography – i.e., netnography, virtual ethnomethodology, autoethnography, online ethnographic interviews – to collect the data and Foucault's genealogical perspective to analyze them. Three subjectivities were identified among cosplayers: Businessmen, Ambassadors, and Models. Each of these subject-forms presents the cosplayers' ongoing effort to follow a Bounty ethic that suits their own desires. Bounty ethics reveals how an arrangement of desirable productions, when subjects know and manifest themselves through desires that are inherent to market logic. Thus, the subjectivities associated with cosplay reflect the existence of a neoliberal ethics, where economic and cultural relations are superimposed on values ​​that guide contemporary subjectivities. Such results findings indicate how cultural and collaborative phenomena, such as cosplay, also manifest a neoliberal ethic. Additionally, the interpretation of the results attests to the possibility of cultural consumer research studies combining concepts from epistemologically close theorists – i.e., Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari.