From Marie Antoinette to The Handmaid’s Tale by way of the Suffragettes We can expect a tough year ahead. The cost of living, the assault on reproductive rights, online abuse, crop failure, male violence against women, the menopause, gender equality in sport……….the list is endless. But, because it’s August and we have all been lying about helplessly panting in the heat, here’s an opportunity to escape from from the lunacies of the patriarchy and consider the increasingly popular and interesting phenomenon that is COSPLAY. It’s an ugly word, a portmanteau of ‘costume’ and ‘play’. It emerged from Japan in the 1980s and has usually been linked to Comic-Con events. These are highly popular comic book conventions, where dressing up as your favourite superhero has long been a thing. More recently the word has crept into the mainstream media, often within a political context. Really though, it’s something that women (and men) have done for ever. When Elizabeth 1 gave her speech at Tilbury,