Gender, Sexuality, and Cosplay: A Case Study of Male-to-Female Crossplay

In recent years, cosplay fans gathering at anime conventions and events all over North America have attracted much public attention and media coverage. These fans, who often refer to themselves as otaku, 1 wear elaborate costumes and makeup to embody various anime, manga, and related video game characters (Cooper-Chen, 2010; Eng, 2012a). The essence of cosplay, or costume-play, involves affective labor where fans transform themselves into chosen anime characters by constructing and wearing costumes, learning signature character poses or dialogue, and masquerading at conventions and events (Okabe, 2012). Crossplay is a subset of cosplay; crossplayers similarly participate in costume-play, except they dress up in costumes modeled after characters of the opposite gender. This paper addresses male-to-female (“M2F”) crossplay where, as the name suggests, male cosplayers costume themselves as female anime characters. I contend that M2F crossplay exemplifies the performance of gender and sexuality in cosplay that challenges hegemonic norms, providing insight into an increasingly visible phenomenon in contemporary North American popular culture. When men crossplay as women, they are not merely donning femininity, but hyper-femininity, revealing the socially constructed nature of gender roles yet concomitantly reinforcing them. Yet, despite apparent similarities between crossplay and drag performances, they are fundamentally distinct. Drag Queens in Western culture typically connotes men cross-dressing as an exhibition of self-identity, whereas M2F crossplayers costume as female anime characters to partake in an aesthetic transformation that goes beyond mere self-expression. Thus, this paper aims to provide a preliminary exploration of M2F crossplay through a case study, investigating the motivations behind and process of crossplay performance, its status within the cosplay community, and the implications for broader society in relation to hegemonic gender norms.Available online: http://fansconf.a-kon.com/dRuZ33A/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Gender-Sexuality-and-Cosplay-by-Rachel-Leng1.pd

Eileen Chang’s Feminine Chinese Modernity: Dysfunctional Marriages, Hysterical Women, and the Primordial Eugenic Threat

Eileen Chang has been described by critics as an unapologetically introspective and sentimental but largely apolitical writer. When most other writers of her time were concentrating on the grand and the abstract in exploring the May Fourth modernist spirit, Eileen Chang’s approach to her writing poignantly laid bare an intense interest in the modern relationships between men and women, between an individual and the collective. Contrary to popular interpretation, this paper argues that there is a strong political and subversive dimension to Chang’s writings that has hitherto been glided over or ignored completely. Specifically, this paper suggests that recurring themes of abortive parent-child relationships, the dilapidated household, and disillusioned sexual unions throughout Chang’s work not only intertwines references to her own private life and love affairs, but reflects a larger sociopolitical history anchored in the rise of a national eugenics movement at the bedrock of Chinese modernity. The parallel narratives of The Golden Cangue (1943) and The Rouge of The North (1967) engage intimately in a social critique of the Chinese state’s propagation of eugenic practices related to reproduction. These stories unveil Eileen Chang at her best in uncovering, even allegorically, the relationship between the feminine and the sociopolitical changes besetting contemporary China. She limns a fictional world where Chinese modernity has engendered its own reflection in the image of the monstrous, embittered woman suffering from psychological and bodily decay and grapples with the corporeal manifestation of the malaise of social and marital relations in modern China.East Asian Languages and Civilization

Some dimensions of integration between packaging and magazine advertising

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) has been recognised as an important concept in today's marketing. The benefits of an IMC concept has been acknowledged by marketers as an effective tool to achieve higher return in investments and a better management control within the organisation. However, there is still a lack of empirical data for operating IMC concepts in an organisation. This is due to the diversity of what IMC involves. The main purpose of this research is examine some dimensions of IMC, that is to examines the level of integration between packaging and magazine advertising. [Continues.

Closed-loop control of complex networks : A trade-off between time and energy

W. L. is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grants No. 11322111 and No. 61773125). Y.-Z. S. is supported by the NSFC (Grant No. 61403393). Y.-C. L. acknowledges support from the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship program sponsored by the Basic Research Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and funded by the Office of Naval Research through Grant No. N00014-16-1-2828. Y.-Z. S. and S.-Y. L. contributed equally to this work.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

On Understanding the Dynamics of Energetic Electrons in the Inner Magnetosphere

Earth&rsquo;s inner magnetosphere is a highly dynamic region with different particle populations overlapping with each other. Energetic electrons (tens of keV to &gt; 1-MeV) in the inner magneto- sphere are nominally trapped in the inner and outer electron radiation belts. However, the physical processes that contribute to the dynamic variations of energetic electrons are not fully understood. Therefore, the goal of this work is to improve the understanding of energetic electron dynamics in the inner magnetosphere. First, we investigate the dynamics of energetic electrons in the outer belt, specifically the sudden enhancements of energetic electrons. By exploring the relationship between the inner edge of energetic electron enhancements and the boundary of the cold plasmasphere, we identified a persistent observation where the innermost plasmapause location remains as the innermost limit of the sudden enhancement of energetic electrons regardless of storm drivers and storm magnitudes. Unlike its relationship with the simulated innermost plasmapause, a comparison between sudden enhancements and in-situ plasmapause locations reveals a local-time dependent re- lationship where sudden enhancements can sometimes be inside or outside the in-situ plasmapause locations, depending on the spacecraft location. On the other hand, energetic electron (especially the relativistic electron) dynamics in the inner belt is harder to identify largely due to background contamination that overwhelms electron measurements and instrument electronics. In the second part of this work, we explore ways to improve inner belt measurements and introduce a new ener- getic particle telescope that aims to overcome the challenge of measuring energetic electrons in the inner belt. A detailed description of the design and performance of this instrument is provided. In addition, we have conducted tests to study the limitation of two flux determination methods under different flux spectra; such an analysis is crucial to improving data quality. Together, our studies lead to a better understanding of energetic electron dynamics in the inner magnetosphere.</p

Design, Synthesis, and Structure-Activity Relationships of 3,4,5-Trisubstituted 4,5-Dihydro-1,2,4-oxadiazoles as TGR5 Agonists

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Urethral diverticulum in pregnancy

AbstractUrethral diverticulum is rare in pregnancy. There is no clear guideline on the management of urethral diverticulum in pregnancy, but most cases were managed conservatively. We report a case of urethral diverticulum in a primigravida woman, who presented with anterior vaginal swelling at 14 weeks of gestation. She was managed conservatively and the cyst (approximately 8 cm × 13 cm) was aspirated during the early stage of labor. However her labor did not progress during the second stage, which resulted in an emergency cesarean section. She underwent diverticulectomy at 1 month postpartum because of the recurrence of the swelling and persistent discomfort. We believe that her dystocia may have been caused by factors other than the diverticulum. As previously described in literature, we concluded that, even in pregnant women with a large urethral diverticulum, vaginal delivery can still be considered with prior aspiration during the early stage of labor

Partial cross mapping eliminates indirect causal influences

Causality detection likely misidentifies indirect causations as direct ones, due to the effect of causation transitivity. Although several methods in traditional frameworks have been proposed to avoid such misinterpretations, there still is a lack of feasible methods for identifying direct causations from indirect ones in the challenging situation where the variables of the underlying dynamical system are non-separable and weakly or moderately interacting. Here, we solve this problem by developing a data-based, model-independent method of partial cross mapping based on an articulated integration of three tools from nonlinear dynamics and statistics: phase-space reconstruction, mutual cross mapping, and partial correlation. We demonstrate our method by using data from different representative models and real-world systems. As direct causations are keys to the fundamental underpinnings of a variety of complex dynamics, we anticipate our method to be indispensable in unlocking and deciphering the inner mechanisms of real systems in diverse disciplines from data