Fandom and dis/ability: imagining a politics of inclusivity through Marvel global media fandom

The default fan subject of media fandom and fan studies is often assumed to be white, Anglo-American, and able-bodied. While research about racially and culturally diverse fans is usually relegated to ‘foreign’ or specifically transnational and transcultural fandoms, such as K-pop fandom, minority fans including fans with disabilities and non-white fans are also part of global fandoms based on Western texts. I focus on one such highly popular global media fandom, Marvel superhero fandom, which has significant influence and fans world over. The superhero genre and its fandom provide a rich space to examine understandings and experiences of disability. Although superheroes are typically associated with hyper-ability rather than disability, stories about superheroes often involve the transformation of a physical disability or the introduction of a mental disability or illness. Focusing on both representation and lived experience through analysis of fan narratives, discourses and practices, I examine fan representations of disability and their impact. I also explore how media fandom can be enabling and disabling for fans globally. I develop an affective decolonial methodology that combines theories of affect with strategies for decolonising. This directs attention to the racialised politics of emotions and illuminates how hegemonic systems of ability undergird unequal fan relations and can be resisted. An online qualitative survey and interviews with fans are used to directly incorporate their voices and diversify the subject of media fandom and research, privileging those who identify as people with disabilities and/or people of colour. Establishing fandom as an important (trans)cultural resource of disability and using an intersectional approach, I expand understandings of disability that often presume Global North perspectives and identify interactivity as a major strength of fanfiction communities. Disabled and non-disabled fans across varying cultural locations engage differently with disability narratives and fan politics, producing particular meanings and experiences of ability and disability. Noting the affective engagements of minority fans through their embodied participation in fan spaces, I reveal their structural limitations that influence fans’ experiences of exclusion by reproducing global inequities. My findings indicate that fans are both empowered and disempowered in ways that are reliant on their positions of race and ability. Nevertheless, fandom holds significant value as a pedagogic tool, and socio-cultural and therapeutic resource, particularly by decolonising ideas and practices of care within fandom. Addressing the significant disabling limitations of fandom communities and platforms, I propose some practical interventions to make them more inclusive of minority fans. In so doing, this research theoretically and empirically complicates prevailing perceptions about media fandom’s positive and negative role in fandom and scholarship and contributes to their decolonisation.