Teri Silvio: "Anime: the New Performance"

[stormdog]

I read a fascinating article last night (Teri Silvio: "Anime: the New Performance") that talks about animation and cosplay. It suggests that, just as the paradigm of performance that became popular with the rise of television gave us a new toolkit for analyzing a great deal of everyday life in terms of a performance (giving rise to concepts like gender as a socially constructed performance), the rise of animation, people engaging in things like cosplay, and interactive virtual worlds populated by avatars offer an equally revolutionary way to look at peoples' everyday life through the lens of animation and projection of self external to the body.

This morning, as I walked to my first class wearing a shirt that supposedly has the
Cheshier Cat's grin on it but which I call Toothless from "How to Train Your Dragon", I thought about the fact that, applying this paradigm, I am not just performing an identity as an animation fan, but I am animating and being animated by these characters. Nifty!