I got this as an arc on Netgalley and it will come out in March. Yes really interesting and really good! I didn't find myself agreeing with everything but most of the time I came away with interesting perspectives and things to consider. Very good.

This is a rare glimpse into fandom and disability, written with rich engagement in the fan experience and scholarly literature. The author calls this "cripping" fan studies, or "to see a topic or issue through the lens of disability." The author explores what it's like to be a disabled fan in the "kairotic spaces" that typically make up the fan experience, drawing from Margaret Price's concept that describes the real-time discourse and social activities for which all involved have a vested interest, if not a certain amount of risk. This is a dense read and highly academic, even while critiquing typical academic modes of engagement. For instance, the author spends some time appraising the notion of rigour as a set form of "academic literacy," which was not exactly puzzling, but felt a bit misplaced in a text that is clearly on the critical and social constructionist side already.

Other parts of the work left me puzzled. This is a text by a person who identifies as disabled, about disability. Yet, we have "see" (check out the definition of "cripping" above), which is clearly not inclusive of blind and low-vision (B/LV) folks. The author also uses "able-bodied," a term that fell out of favour a while ago (non-disabled is an alternative). Again, I find myself surprised when the author goes on to consider "rhetoric" and other matters of discourse and language, yet seems oblivious to these slip-ups.

Yet, there is much good to be found here. Even though I've worked and studied in the area, I appreciated returning to certain ideas and learning about new terms that are relevant to disability studies as a whole. "Benevolent ableism" is a useful term when trying to articulate the problem with people assuming that disabled folks need help. How this area of study "makes visible the unseen normal body" (again, the "oops" on the ableist terms returns here). Learning the ins and outs of fandom online and in-person was enlightening and sometimes infuriating. I hope fan communities can move from clueless to concerted allies for people of all configurations.

A surprising inclusion was Ye (Kanye West). This will likely be controversial for many, as he is a challenging and inconsistent character, to say the least. Yet, the author lays bare the good, the bad, and the ugly, focusing on how Ye's various disabilities have tempered fan engagement. I don't think I could've been as moderate, and I'm left with a more nuanced understanding of his fandom.

The text also suffers from its rather peripatetic structure and sandwiching between overlong explanations from the author about how life made it difficult to finish the thing. Still, this is a rich and engaging read that I found hard to put down, and raised my consciousness about the diversity in fandom experiences from the frame of disability.

Important topic; caveat that again I’m in this picture—and I didn’t like a fair chunk of it. It’s definitely true and important that fandoms can celebrate their inclusivity and outsiderness while still being exclusionary, in terms of race, disability, focus on written fanwork and fanworks in English, etc. Some fans get to choose otherness, while others have otherness thrust upon them. Cons are often physically inaccessible, including in overwhelming sensory input, lack of wheelchair access, long hours, and high costs.

My core focus was the platform chapter, which was about some platforms used by fans but, except with the AO3 discussion, not much discussion about the specific practices of disabled fans or disabled users on those platforms. First, I think it’s a mistake to include AO3 sandwiched between Tumblr and Instagram in a chapter called “Platforms, Algorithms, and Digital Kairotic Space” without making incredibly clear that AO3 lacks what people mean when they say “algorithm.” Almost more than being nonprofit, the lack of a recommendation function profoundly shapes users’ experience on the site; Howell spends a fair amount of time criticizing how algorithms can segregate disabled people on Instagram and Tiktok, for example.

On AO3: Howell writes that AO3 “has come under scrutiny [by whom?] for its free-form tagging system, including criticism that the system is too politicized and therefore unworkable.” The supporting quote is from one person: “The archive has failed at its core task. Searching didn’t work, filtering was miserable, and both gave me no results.” I tracked the (legitimate, fair) 13-year-old complaint down in the FFA thread cited, which didn’t mention politicization, other than that software development always involves tradeoffs and therefore choices. I replicated the search …. and it works now, finding the exact fic sought using the search term quoted. Yay for search improvements!

Some of this criticism is fair, and some quite perplexing: “AO3 welcomes users regardless of ‘appearance, circumstances, configuration or take on the world.’ The lack of a mention of actual marginalized people [in the diversity statement] reinforces a default assumption of a white, abled, neurotypical user. Canonical tags, or tags that autocomplete when typing and have been linked to others in context by tag wranglers, also reveal this lack of inclusivity. [Because? How?] The OTW philosophy places an emphasis on capitalism [Hunh?] and legality, and access appears to mean simply that the perceived barrier to entry to a typical person is low. A philosophy that mentions ‘all fans,’ however, should explicitly account for fans who are non-white and who have disabilities.” One challenge that the author may undercount is that fans are increasingly non-US-based, and may understandably reject antiracist frameworks that are nonetheless US-centric.

Howell continues: “Whiteness and ability also exist as defaults when users post” because of the required archive warnings, which she equates with trigger warnings. “Notably absent are markers of identity-based triggers—one may post racist, ableist, or otherwise oppressive content with no warning.” I understand that this is a difficult topic, but for that very reason it is facile to criticize this decision without engaging with the reasons behind it, which Howell does not. None of the existing warnings are “identity-based” for some pretty good reasons, well discussed by the Policy and Abuse Committee in the recent discussion about why no such mandatory warnings were added in the recent round of TOS revisions—they’re unenforceable, inherently arbitrary, and reporting is easily abused in ways likely to harm marginalized and minoritized groups.

If you say that the AO3 was designed with whiteness and ability (along with “no censorship”) as “key values,” as Howell does, then it would help to at least gesture at what design that didn’t have those things as key values would look like. From things she says, she may think that “choose not to warn” should not be an option—although it’s worth discussing why creators shouldn’t be able to put the choice onto audiences. Also, creators have accessibility needs too, and just as one person’s need for a quiet space can conflict with another’s need to stim, one person’s need not to perseverate over whether they’ve tagged properly can conflict with another’s need for warnings—but Choose Not to Warn at least gives the latter a sign. She quotes another analysis stating that almost a third of works use choose not to warn, “meaning that a significant proportion of Archive users are actively refusing the warning system in its current iteration.” Maybe … but maybe they are using it? It’s a fair criticism that we undervalued blocking/muting at the start, but that’s a different decision than making a racism or ableism tag mandatory.

I have come around to accepting the criticism that we shouldn’t equate really offensive or triggering content with “badly spelled” content in the TOS, and so it’s good that the new TOS removes that phrase. But you still have to be prepared for either or both in any given AO3 work. So, the author says that “[t]he value systems in operation in the TOS are almost radically oblivious to the ways in which actual human interactions take place and impact users. In fact, the users only seem to be valued or considered in the sense that they are intended to self-govern, or even self-design, the interface.” I think it would have been more helpful to treat this as a conscious, not oblivious, choice: yes, especially at scale, we cannot curate a safe experience for you; we can only encourage you to read the tags and use others’ bookmarks to find content that works for you, because that is the nature of human variety in response to content.

“Users who operate under the idea that AO3 should preserve fanworks regardless of content or function and who refuse to use archive warnings bump up against those who find themselves sorting through overt and implied racism; whitewashed ships; harmful content; and the OTW’s steadfast insistence that the system works and will not be changed.” Yes, this is true. But the implicit suggestion that creators (“users”) should be compelled to use Archive warnings—or other warnings—needs justification, especially since it is not the default in the rest of the creative world. Tags can be accessibility tools—but they are also other things, and the ability to avoid using tags is also an accessibility tool, in a classic example of competing needs.

Howell also uses the fic with more than 1700 navigation tags as an example of the “inaccessibility” of the tagging system, which prompted a change in the allowed number of tags. “It is unclear whether virtual1979 was an intentional disability activist, but intentional or not, their tags have created change.” It seems somewhat odd to characterize a person who “used chapter notes to make threats against other Archive users” as a disability activist, however unintentional, and the fans who volunteer for AO3 as capitalist shills, but I recognize that comes with the territory.

I think this is a suggestion? “Conducting a user review and a site audit will recenter the fan in the value system of AO3.” I am not sure what the author thinks that the Accessibility, Design and Technology Committee does currently, or the user testing that precedes code deploys, but I am pretty confident that (a) there is no such thing as “the fan,” which is where our trouble begins, and (b) volunteers (aka “fans”) pretty uniformly center fans in their value systems.

Other chapters include one that considers Ye as a disabled Black genius, treading gingerly around his antisemitism. “His continuing public vulnerability regarding his treatment, his mental illness, and his grief over his mother’s death and his divorce both subverts racist portrayals of Black men and allows Ye space to publicly validate his anger.” Howell concludes that “Ye’s embrace of right-wing ideology undermined the fan perception of Ye as authentically Black. In many ways though, fans still embrace Ye’s troubled or mentally ill genius persona.” But could he be a shitty, antisemitic, talented, bipolar person? Could his fans be antisemites? I can’t tell whether Howell was making any argument that these attributes reflect on each other.

There’s also a chapter about gatekeeping over autism, and JohnLock conspiracy theorizing as gatekeeping, in the Sherlock fandom. “Members of the dominant fan group disable others, harassing them into mental and physical illness and calling them crazy.” (This is her ending summary, but she also posits that the ultimate collapse of the JohnLock theory was so distressing that it resulted in disability for at least some true believers.)

Another chapter considers hurt/comfort as a space for disabled expression. I liked it best, probably because it considered a lot of existing work on h/c. E.g., “Rachel Linn labels h/c as a body genre, placing it in the same group as pornography, melodrama, and horror—all considered lower forms of literature and art. Body genres ‘traditionally display the female body and elicit audience interest and excitement by promising to dissolve the distance between the displayed body and the viewer.’ Body genres involve excess, whether it be excess ‘sexual ecstasy’ or ‘terrifying violence’ …” But bodies in h/c tend to be male or masculine (which made me wonder about applying this analysis to mainstream gay porn), so “[a] male or masculine body offers the opportunity to collapse the distinction between the lower arts’ feminine sensations and the higher arts’ intellectual stimulation.”

H/c, “like all fanworks, ‘often reproduces disability tropes uncritically,’ and disabled fans who challenge ableism in prompts may face backlash. “To complicate matters, many fans who were doing the silencing self-identified as having a disability, or having experienced trauma . . . [D]isabled fans left those particular spaces, and made their own elsewhere. These fans disrupted the notion that writing h/c was ‘therapeutic’ and in doing so were accused of creating ‘unsafe spaces” for other fans.’” Maybe they’re all correct, since meaning is never univalent. Howell goes on to summarize and quote Cristina Bruns without noting the tensions here: “the existence of fics where characters experience non-canonical harm indicates fans’ desire for that type of representation. Bruns goes on to note that ‘Writing and reading depictions of physical and emotional pain serve to express or externalize distressing inner states while also exhibiting mastery over them.’”

Canonical scenes of torture also invite us to bring their homoerotic subtext to the surface. Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge argues that sexualized h/c fic “can be quite a subversive experience for many people who do not see themselves represented in mainstream culture. For disabled fans who can finally see themselves sexually represented . . . it is also quite rare to see someone like you, as a source of erotic pleasure in media, over and over again.” Dean Leetal considers this a kind of activism of care: respecting the emotions surrounding pain and caretaking. Howell suggests: “Maybe fic communities’ little-explored link with disability is the reason fic communities have, for example, been using content warnings (trigger warnings), often necessary for accessibility and the basic safety of neurodivergent people, long before the topic became as widely discussed as it is now.”

Howell reads these authors as recognizing h/c as “a radical form of disability representation” because it “centers disabled people and places their enjoyment in a primary position; in Duchastel de Montrouge’s words, it’s “disability deployed as play.” This seems to me like a rewording of the “trope” critique that was endorsed above—again, it’s possible that both are right because meaning is complicated, but it feels like Howell is saying “it’s good when the right people like it and bad when the wrong people like it.”

Similarly, a later discussion of Instagram and Tiktok, including Black/disabled influencers, includes the sentence “Those who critique fandom, branding, and capitalism as postfeminist undercut the agency of marginalized women who pursue branding, commodification, or other types of postfeminist activities.” Then, a few pages later, “Opel states, correctly, that the culture labeled as postfeminist, or culture that focuses on the self as a brand, elevates white femininity.” What exactly is postfeminist here? Maybe the problem is that she’s not identifying the “those” doing the critiquing or labeling of things as postfeminist. Putting actors in sentences can force some decisions on your writing.

Another chapter looks at anti-fans/people who investigate others who claim to have disabilities online, often ostensibly in the service of defending the “real” people in need. As she points out, “[T]he ideological anti-fan rarely states where these resources would otherwise be allocated, but instead insists on monitoring and disciplining the disabled body online.”