The author argues that Black female figures disrupt the normative constructions of genre and gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play and turns body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black women at play, she asserts, cosplay (i.e., comic book and pop culture costume play) and masquerade (i.e., as during Caribbean Carnival) are rhetorical and performative cognates. She suggests that Black women at play highlight the paradoxical dilemma of their visibility and invisibility so that, in public (whether virtual or actual), their presence becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. She finds that, because the category of "Black women" in this research includes people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, Black femme praxis addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate the overlap between cosplay and playing mas (masquerade), she includes excerpts from interviews with science-fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, cultural theorist Emily Zobel Marshall, and content from various Black female cosplayers on social media.