Jennifer’s Body and Cosplay

Assignment 2 Characters and Cosplay

Ethan Greenwood

VISA 1500

The cosplay character I chose was done by Christina portraying Jennifer Check from the cult classic film Jennifer’s Body (2009). Christina is a tiktok content creator/actress who uses her platform to embody female characters from a wide variety of horror films. Her costumes are generally all homemade and the videos are shot from home. She’s cosplayed quite a few female characters, all of which share an underlying feminist/good-for-her theme such as: The May Flower queen (Midsommar), Persephone, Anna Dressed in Blood and more. For her, cosplay is a way to pay homage to characters she can identify with or that empower her own femininity, while also educating the masses on themes that are often overlooked.

Jennifer Check is the main character in the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body, which in Christina’s words was “… a film that was super under appreciated for its time.” For her, the film was marketed to a male audience in the hopes that Megan Fox’s sex appeal would draw in a viewership. Christina states that the movie was truly a “… satirical take on modern feminism.” This character signifies the emergence of the good-for-her genre: a genre of film that focuses on female leads taking back their power and striking back at the forces that oppressed them. This is a character who quite literally takes the constructed feminine and uses it to tear down the oppressors. This is what makes the character so appealing to female cosplayers like Christina.

The costume and character are highly gendered, purposefully of course. Jennifer is a highly feminized character with all the features that media tells women they should possess. On the flip side, however, Jennifer is quite literally a murderous demon. Cosplay is a way for one to perform a gender or character that relates to them on an internal or external level, and allows them the freedom to explore characters that might exist inside them. Conversely, as Ashley Lotecki (2012) states, cosplay allows for the actor to deepen the mythos or lore that the character exists in. The latter is true for cosplayer Christina, as she seeks to broaden what audiences see when they watch good-for-her films. Her goal is to push viewers to critically analyze the deep feminist themes in films such as Jennifer’s Body that often get missed.

Personally, I think Christina’s method of pushing feminist characters to the forefront to be effective. She stated that films like Jennifer’s Body are often marketed towards a heterosexual male audience which undermines the female driven themes. Her ability to extend the narrative of such characters creates room for deeper critical viewing, and a pleasant by product of this is educating audiences on concepts such as femininity, stereotypes, body idealization, and the constructed feminine. For Christina, her cosplay is a way to satire all of the aforementioned concepts and make them easily consumable and digestible for the masses.

Works Cited:

Lotecki, Ashley, “Cosplay Culture: The Development of Interactive and Living Art through Play” (2012). Theses and dissertations. Paper 806.