Access Fandom

Disability and/in/through Fanfiction is the theme of the current issue Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Vol 8 No 2 (2019). It’s available free online PDF/HTML

http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/issue/view/26

Topics of possible interest to community members include

• fic as a gateway to disabled lives
• hurt/comfort bingo
• non-disabled fans creating disability-theme fic
• keywords and search discovery: when you’re looking for disability and all you find is impairment

Articles I appreciated with sample paragraphs

• Shipping Disability/Fanfiction: Disrupting Narratives of Fanfiction as Inclusive
  Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge

  Since fic is commonly based on deeply beloved characters, the reader generally begins from a starting point of devotion and loyalty. When fans are committed to a beloved character, they would likely stand by them not only against supervillains, but against those who cause them pain through bigotry, so that even non-disabled fans may overcome some ableist notions. Reading about other beloved characters treating disabled characters with appreciation and respect, alongside the author behaving in that way, provides an example of how one should understand and behave towards disabled people. It also negates the notion that ableism is natural and universal.

• From Slash Fan Fiction to Crip Fan Fiction: What Role Does Disability Have in Fandom?
  Derek Newman-Stille

  The power of fan activism can be an effective vehicle for promoting change, but that activism, as Jenkins indicates, needs to arise from within fan culture and fan interests and tie into what is already being practiced. Effective fan practices around disability would require that fans look past what they see as positive depictions of disability such as transcendence narratives (often portrayed in ‘inspiration porn’), cure narratives (which are often seen by fans as a positive thing for the disabled protagonist), and care narratives (which are often unintentionally dependency narratives). A critical remapping of disability would require fans to become aware of the damage that these tropes do to existing disabled people rather than the simple assumption that portrayals of happy people cannot be damaging.

• Reflection: Autistic-coded characters and fans in fandom
  Christa Mullis

  While it's easy to explain how autistic-coded characters could come into existence, the public perception of autism as "less than" still stops many other fans, and often the creators themselves, short of the realization that one of their characters is likely autistic. Autism is too far removed from who ordinary characters can be in fiction. It is something definitively Other from their own lives as well. Autism is a rare, isolating, tragic disorder. Autistic people are Over There, and they’re not going to be freely cropping up in our fiction Over Here. Autism is a dysfunction and not the calling card of fully fleshed-out, interesting, relatable human characters in diverse genres of stories.

• ST:DS9 Fanwork: Made From Something Different Hannah Orlove

  I’ve read about Alexander Siddig’s portrayal of Bashir, of his work turning him from someone deliberately unlikable into one of Star Trek’s beloved characters. I’m familiar with Bashir’s backstory and growth, his canonical developmental disorder and his transformation from fresh-faced graduate to hardened, mature officer. And throughout it all, I’ve always wondered, did they mean for him to sound like me? And then there’s a 1900 word fic exploring various types of disability

• Normalizing Disability: Tagging and Disability Identity Construction through MCU Fanfiction
  Adrienne E. Raw

  The exploration of identity is a common practice in fanfiction, and scholarship has consistently investigated this fan practice. Yet, despite the presence of disability and disabled characters in fanfiction, this aspect of identity exploration is only sparsely represented in scholarship. This article explores the intersection of disability studies and fanfiction studies through the lens of labelling and tagging, key elements of both fields. Labelling and classification in disability communities are often associated with medicalization, stereotyping, and erasure of individuality, while tagging in fanfiction provides a communicative framework between authors and readers. These differences in functions of labelling and tagging provide the foundation that enables tagging in fanfiction to function inclusively as a normalizing force, despite the problematic role of labelling in disability communities. Three trends in the ways disability is tagged in fanfiction are explored through a close reading of a selection of fanfiction from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: (1) disability is primarily tagged when it is a significant component of the plot, (2) the disability of canonically disabled characters is primarily tagged when that disability directly influences the plot of the story, and (3) mental disability/illness is significantly more represented than physical disability.

• Bodies of Knowledge: Politics of Archive, Disability, and Fandom
  Chelsea Fay Baumgartner

Comparing TV Tropes and AO3’s handling of "injury" vs "disability"

This paper examines the distinction between disability and injury in my life, its cultural construction in the west, and the way that this relationship is both challenged and maintained within English language fannish cultural production. I examine this continuum through an engagement with disability and fan theory. Additionally, I probe the ways that my subject position as a gay woman with cerebral palsy has affected these readings of theory through three personal vignettes. Older disability theory has universalized disabled experience to create a basis for obtaining rights, but has often brushed aside embodied experience. Newer work argues that “thinking from the critical social and personal position of disability” re-invigorates theory. Thus the personal narrative provides a way to access the subjective as well as the theoretical. Writing and structuring these personal italicized vignettes led me to examine my own internalized ableism. These moments of recognition complicate my opposition to ableism by demonstrating the internalization of bigotry.

• Enabling/Disabling: Fanfiction and Disability Discourse
  AmyLea Clemons

Thus, while fanfiction ostensibly provides a safe space to explore and challenge ideologies about any belief media texts reify, a review of fan studies literature shows little attention to disability from scholars in the field. This erasure seems odd, since Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction archive associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, lists “disability” in its list of “most popular” tags, and most fandoms include a significant body of texts that disable its characters (“Tags”). Blindness, deafness, injuries leading to mobility impairments, and other visible and invisible disabilities feature strongly as tropes in fanfictions themselves. Clearly fandom has something to do with disability of all kinds: physical, cognitive, and emotional. While it may be easy to dismiss this relationship as escapism (in which disabled fans engage with media texts to avoid coping with social and physical difficulties) or to see disability as an easy trope on which fanfiction writers can base their stories (such as the “hurt/comfort” genre that often involves disabling a character to provide grounds for emotional intimacy), this relationship between disability and fandom is significantly more complex.