Anime, video games and geek culture have fascinated Adele since childhood.  But she quickly noticed how tough it can be for people of colour to find a place in this community.

Adele’s current research project examines representation and inclusion in geek culture. She is finding out how people of colour are using creativity to make a more representative and inclusive environment- making a place for them in the community.

This Research Journey is part of a collection made with members of the 100 Black Women Professors NOW network.

Browse stories from the collection.

Transcript

[Adele is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Adele: So I've always been a fan of geek culture.

I used to wake up early in the mornings to watch Cardcaptors and Dragon Ball on TV, and then sneak away in the evenings to watch Outlaw Star and dodgy streams of Naruto on YouTube. And I used to spend my summers working in my uncle's video game shop for whatever niche Japanese RPG I could find in exchange.

But even back then, I noticed that the characters that I watched and I played as didn't look like me. There were very few brown characters. And the ones that they had often had stereotypical traits. They were either deviant or sporty or cool. And these were characters which I couldn't relate to, because they were nothing like me.

As I got a bit older, it was made clear to me that my hobbies weren't seen as compatible with my skin colour. I was accused on many occasions of acting white. And there was one instance which comes to mind where I'd gone to a friend's house, and her mum had asked me about my interests and hobbies. And I was talking about my interests in video games and East Asian culture. She gave me a puzzled look. And she asked, why are you so weird for being a brown geek?

And it was at that point that I really understood that race and culture can be conflated. And you're expected to like certain things based on what you look like. And my interests weren't seen as suitable for the colour of my skin.

But regardless, my interest in geek culture continued. And for my PhD, I decided to study cosplayers, who are individuals who dress up as characters from video games using intricate costumes and props. And I'd seen cosplayers at many of the geek culture conventions I had attended. And I decided to use participatory methods in order to understand the subculture through the eyes of its members.

The first event I went to, I decided to dress up as this school idol character from this multimedia franchise called Love Life. And the character, Nozomi Tojo, she has bright green eyes and long purple hair down to her back. And to look like this character and to get my hair under the wig caps that needed to be worn to get my hair into the wig, I had to wet it down beforehand. So I had to get ready at home and then travel three hours to the event.

I had an amazing time, spoke to loads of cosplayers at the event. And after eight hours with this wig on, I'd had enough. I had this painful red indent line across my forehead from the pressure of wearing all these wig caps. So I decided I had enough. I'm not travelling home like this. I went to the toilet and took it off. And it was at the moment I took the wig off that one of the cosplayers I was speaking to earlier came out the cubicle and she saw me and she kind of startled and she exclaimed a little bit. And I was like, "oh, what's wrong?" And she was like, "I'm really sorry. I thought you were white." And I was like, "okay."

And I thought that was really weird because throughout the whole day, race, I hadn't noticed anything to do with race. It hadn't come up in any of my notes. I just assumed like the cosplayers were saying throughout the day that cosplay was a colourblind space. But as soon as she realised that I wasn't white, she started recommending brown characters for me to cosplay. And she was talking about how she was doing a group cosplay of this manga called Berserk. And she wanted me to go as Casca, who was the brown character.

And it was at that point that I realised that I hadn't been seeing race because people had assumed that I was white and issues to do with race aren't as apparent to the people it doesn't impact upon.

I did more research into this area after I got home. And I noticed that there weren't that many studies being done on race in subcultures or especially in geek culture in particular. And that's because the majority of researchers who were doing research on this area are white themselves.

So the areas of race aren't being studied within these communities. And this finding led to my current project where I will be exploring the ways that people of colour are trying to make their communities more equitable. I'm looking at how people of colour are calling for more representation within the media they consume, how they're creating new media themselves that's inclusive and expressive. I'm looking at how they're re-imagining characters and how they're calling out the stereotypes surrounding brown characters within the media that they're watching.

Through doing so, I hope that my research can disrupt some of the stereotypes surrounding what people can consume so that people, no matter what they look like, can enjoy their hobbies without being called weird, or deviant, or being made to feel odd for doing so.