Behind the Scenes Minis: Cosplay and Shakers

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Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you missed in history Class A production of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we met at a time when we were both doing costume things. We sure did, so this one makes all the sense on earth to me. Um. Do you remember, though I'm not sure how I know, you were involved a lot with a local costuming group here in Atlanta, but I have for a long time been involved with a lot of costuming message boards. And do you remember when the term cosplay in lieu of costuming got brought up in fan groups and like the massive debates and arguments over it. Yeah, most of the debates that I recall, we're about whether there was a difference between cost doming and cosplay. And there was an argument that if you were in cosplay, you were role playing as a character, not just wearing a costume. Correct. That came up a lot, and I think a lot of it too. Um was an old guard thing, right, people that had been in it for a long time doing like you know whatever, m fan groupie costuming. There was also a tendency to see cosplay as an a largely automate thing and not other more mainstream pop culture things. Boy, I remember how he did. Those discussions got and now I just look back and go, who cares? None of that was important? Why did we waste valuable life energy arguing about whether this word was appropriate for people to use or not a lot of gatekeeping involved. Oh, of course who was a cosplayer and who was a serious costumer? Right? Yeah? Uh, you know what, have fun doing your thing. That's all that matters. Life is, or grab your joide vie wherever you can get so because you're not hurting anybody else, go crazy where things act like the character or not. I don't care. I support you and whatever you do. I um, I of course love costuming. I love the costuming community. I met my very best friend on a Star Wars costuming forum twenty three or twenty four years ago, so it's one that's close to me. And I actually met Andrew several years ago. Um. He mentioned in our interview that Dragon Con he was taking some of the pictures and doing some of the interviews and research for the book, and he and I met to just like have a drink there and catch up because we had kind of known of each other, and so I met him then when he was working on the book, and I remember thinking it was a great project, and so I'm glad that despite the many setbacks in many projects that have happened due to the pandemic, that this book is finally coming out and ready for the world. There's a lot of really good history and imagery in it, and it's a really like I was kind of blown away by how deep into history he goes, especially because cosplay is, as we said, a modern term. I at first was like, I would love to have you on the show, but I really need to read the Galley Verse make sure this actually feels like a natural fit. And it really does. That m Jules verned party that he talked about I was obsessed with when I was reading that chapter so nice. I loved it. It's a very fun read if you like if you like clothes costuming, and also just if you like you know the history of how people have taken on different visual personas to to say things and be the you know, we talked about protest costuming in in that conversation and how long that has been going on, and just you know, all of the ways that people kind of change their perspective by just dawning a different outfit that is outside of their norm. I love all of that stuff. I love the psychology of it. I love the workmanship that goes into it. I love you know, I am a clothes horse. Let's be honest. So, UM, I'm so grateful that that Andre're gonna got to have that conversation and and reminisce about many things and talk about how Star Wars brought us together. You talked about mother Rebecca Cox Jackson this week and the community of UH predominantly Black Shakers that she established in Philadelphia, which is not a place that you would normally think of their being like a Shaker village. Villages is usually what goes along with the words Shaker in the context of places that people lived. Yes, I mean we talked about in the episode how how most of the places where um Shakers had gathered were rural. Yeah, Philadelphia not rural at all, not at all. UM. And so there's only one one active community still remaining that has had two or three members over the last several years. UM. A lot of the other places that used to be active Shaker communities are now Shaker museums. There are several Shaker museums scattered around the u s that folks can go to. There is also a museum at this one that is still active in Maine, although I'm assuming because of COVID the museum is not currently open. One of the interesting things that I found about about Rebecca Cox Jackson is that she wrote so much about uh dreams that she would have and visions that she would have, and these experiences that she would have that to her were just like intrinsically holy and involved hearing something she out directly from God, and all of that is incredibly personal, right, But at the same time, they weren't uh like, like, they weren't written about to write them about them in an introspective way, so we like don't necessarily know what her feelings were on things, or like what thought process led her to make particular decisions. It was sort of like I had this vision and that this is what I decided to do. So people who have written about her have had to kind of speculate about, um, you know, why why did she decide to do this one particular thing. And one of the sources of speculation is that, as we said, the Shakers had as a core belief that people were equal, so this included racial equality um. At the same time, though, Shakers in the nineteenth century did not really conceive of themselves as like citizens of the United States, so things that were legal matters or matters of citizenship within the United States, like slavery. Slavery was something that's Shakers objected to on moral and ethical grounds, but there wasn't like an outwardly facing we have to go get slavery abolished like that wasn't that that wasn't really part of the world view that was going on. And so there's been this speculation that maybe one of the reasons that Rebecca Cox Jackson wanted to leave and be somewhere else that she could do more direct outreach, was so that she could have more direct influence and impact on these kinds of things that we're seen as like more mundane, uh non spiritual matters that most of the Shaker community would not have been personally involved in. Right, It's like the difference between belief and activism right right, Right, there was a core belief that everyone was equal, with the caveat that Shakers, like everyone else, had been raised in the same society that everyone else had been raised in which was a racist society. So surely there would have been people who still had implicit biases, uh, and you know, attitudes that they may be needed to re examine for themselves. But like there's a difference between that and actively saying, Okay, we have got to work to abolish slavery for the rest of the country. I will say that, um, as we mentioned in the episode, life in a community such as that sounds incredibly difficult. Yeah. So yeah, the the one village that's still actively operating is called Sabbath Day Lake. It's in Maine. They have a website and they have a lot of videos from one of the folks that are still actively living there as a Shaker. And he has also done interviews and things like that in interviews and videos and other contexts. And one of the things that he talked about that I did not have time to like go back and explore very thoroughly is that there was a period where Shaker leadership made an intentional choice to not focus on recruiting more adult members, but to instead focusing on like adopting children and raising them as Shakers, with the hope that then as they grew up, they would continue to be Shakers, which did not really like there were some folks, like some children that were adopted or foster fostered or whatever who did continue to be Shakers, but a lot of people left and sort of making the point that the way of life was so difficult and so specific in what was required that you could only keep this going if you continued to have more people coming in, and if you weren't actively converting people to come in, it was inevitable that the membership was going to dwindle in the communities were going to start fading away. Basically, I'm resisting urge to make this a discussion about jedi um. Now that you mention it, I can see that there are some parallels for sure. Um yeah, I think the way of life definitely. I'm sure sounds as alien too many of our listeners as it does to me. And I don't mean that to sound pejorative, but it just sounds so completely different from the way most of us live our lives that it's very hard to parse and imagine oneself living in that manner. So I'm I kind of could just sit here marveling. I also, for the record, could not live as a Jedi. So you know, it's aside from having no force abilities. Um, but it's um, it's fascinating to me. I there's part of me that's like, but if you recognize that there is an inherent lead towards your membership falling back in numbers, are you sure that is what a divine being would want? Right? But that is my ignorant self talking. So I have no idea. Um. You know, I have difficulty imagining a life other than my own. Apparently I think all of us have that do at least some extent. Um. As I was as I was researching this and I was reading some of her writings, she reminded me a lot of in a lot of ways of some of the medieval religious women that we have talked about on the show, like Christian mystics from the medieval period. Um. I felt like they had some parallels there. Oh. Yeah. I did not do this on purpose, but when we were in Italy, there was this little church in this little medieval town that we went to had all this artwork, and there was monuments to a young woman who had died during the medieval period, and there was a little pamphlet about her, and I started reading it and it was you know, it started off talking about how she had been very devout and she was very beloved by her community, and then she became very ill, and I had this moment where I was like, oh, I'm about to learn about a like very obscure mystic and that same prior and tradition um. And then it turned out that was it was a much more straightforward and sad story. She she became very ill, and then she passed. She died, so that was the sort of the end of the story. Then, you know, her memory became the thing that that people connected to this, and I was like, oh, I had hoped to have another article or another podcast to research along those lines. Swoops, I don't. And then I got home and was looking for something that was not related to Italy at all, because I had just written the Marino Filierro episode and stumbled onto this name somewhere and then was like, oh, this, by total coincidence, winds up being sort of some of the things that my brain had been mulling over while we were in Italy. I was not able to read every single passage from her writings. While I was working on this because there are quite a lot of them, but I still have that book from the library. Usually when we get to the end of an episode, the thing does not get like unless unless we do our q A step on the episode and I'm like, oh, I think I mess something up. I gotta go look that up. Like I don't return to the subject matter, but in this case, I think I might. I might continue reading the things that she wrote in her journals and uh, and then Rebecca Parat's journals, um, just because I find them interesting. They are very different from my own experience in the world. Uh, and I'm glad she wrote them all down. If you would like to send us a note or a history podcast that I hurt radio dot com And uh, this is Friday, so whatever is happening on your weekend, hope it's good. And then we'll be back Saturday with the Saturday Classic and then next week with brand new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.