Wonder Women of America
By Lisa Fary
Wonder Women of America made me want to don a costume and walk down the street.
OK, maybe not a street in my neighborhood. I’m not going to Trader Joe’s dressed as Princess Aura from Flash Gordon (the 1980s Aura who had sparkly headdresses and a pet dwarf, not the whiny, Sci Fi Channel Aura), but I’m more inclined to show up at a convention that way.
My biggest obstacle to costuming has always been insecurity about my body and that feeling of being a nerd among geeks (even in geekdom, there are cool geeks and nerdy geeks).
But, seeing 192 glossy, color pages featuring women of all ages and sizes and their costumes at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con helped assuage those fears.
Ruth Wiggins and Russell Waterman, the team behind the project, say, “Wonder Women of America is a visual celebration of how women choose to express themselves, their interests, their freedom and their sexuality by dressing in costume.” Along with the photos, many of the women explain what motivates them to get into costume and what they get out of it.
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| Image © Ruth Wiggins, from Wonder Women of America by Ruth Wiggins and Russell Waterman, AMOS, 2008. |
Sarah from Encinitas, CA, who dresses as The Monarch says:
“The mundane rituals and robotic tasks of life require to a degree that we silence our minds and bite our tongues, never allowing our imagination flight. To act in a way outside the bleakness of the norm is to invite ridicule and harassment. A costume frees you from this. A costume strips away the need to be polite, to be modest and humble, it rids us of the burden we must bear as a member of the machine. . . In a costume we can celebrate passion, rage, sorrow, sexuality: a whole gamut of emotions and sensations we have forsaken in the name of upholding our social face.
Ruth Wiggins is a writer who takes photos for fun. She has previously had her photos used in European fashion journals, and a selection of her work was published in the 2002 art book Where is Silas? and exhibited in the corresponding exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.
Russell Waterman co-founded Silas and Maria, the influential fashion/ streetwear brand for whom he contributed to, and co-edited, the Where Is Silas? art book. He also co-founded Amos, the publisher/toy company responsible for releasing the work of popular illustrator James Jarvis, with whom he co-wrote the children’s comic book adventure, Vortigern’s Machine and the Great Sage of Wisdom.
Wiggins and Waterman will be at the Con this weekend to promote Wonder Women of America. You can find them at booth #4629, which is on the edge of the Toy Growers Cultyard, right across from the Fantasy Illustrators section. (See your Exhibition Hall map).
Wonder Women of America is published by Amos and is available for purchase in Europe through the Amos online shop. In the United States, you can purchase a copy at the STRANGEco booth at SDCC or at the STRANGEco online shop.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:32 am
[...] Wonder Women of America — pinkraygun.com Ruth Wiggins and Russell Waterman, the team behind the project, say, “Wonder Women of America is a visual celebration of how women choose to express themselves, their interests, their freedom and their sexuality by dressing in costume.” (tags: cosplay) [...]