Episode 186B: Disability and Fandom: Part 2
In the second and final installment of the “Disability and Fandom” double episode, Flourish and Elizabeth get the perspectives of even more disabled fans. Featuring conversations with Lindsay Mixer and Valerie Gristch, and voicemails/letters from Soph, TallysGreatestFan, Lizard Socks, May Barros, Cora Maria, miscellanium, Bodge, Julia, and Jessica. Topics covered include depictions of disabled characters in erotic fanfiction, conflicting accessibility needs on the web, and how both music venues and artists make concert-going difficult—if not outright impossible—for disabled fans.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:10] Part A/1, featuring 8 of our 19 disability and fandom guests!
[00:02:20] You can find Lindsay on Twitter and as ladymixerlot#3377 on Discord.
[00:02:44] Our interstitial music throughout is “Making a change” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:05:25] Lindsay’s research here has not yet been published, but you can read her Master’s thesis, which is beautifully titled: “And then they boned: an analysis of fanfiction and its influence on sexual development.”
[00:06:21] According to GLAAD’s 2021-22 “Where We Are on TV” report:
“Series regular characters with disabilities counted a decrease, down to 2.8 percent (22 of 775) from 3.5 percent last year. This number falls far below the actual number of those with disabilities in the United States.”
[00:06:49] Lindsay was referencing multiple articles on disabled fan creators here:
[00:12:58] Full disclosure that we haven’t watched Queer as Folk either, but the recent reboot has multiple disabled characters, including double amputee Marvin (played by Eric Graise and pictured here) and Ryan O’Connell, who has cerebral palsy and both acts in and co-writes the show.
[00:15:51] Our “Writing Trans Characters” episode
[00:18:33] Our race and fandom episodes: 2016 Part A/1 and Part B/2, and 2020 Part A/1 and Part B/2.
[00:22:17]
[00:30:46] You can find Soph on Tumblr.
[00:31:45]
[00:34:44] You can find TallysGreatestFan on Tumblr and Twitter, and you can watch the video she made on fandom ableism on YouTube.
[00:44:34] You can find May on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, as well as on her website. She writes short stories and games (and is also on Patreon and Ko-fi).
[00:49:12] Preschool teacher? Yes. Ms. Frizzle? Sorry Flourish….no. She had THEMES and KITSCHY ACCESSORIES and most importantly CURLY HAIR.
[00:51:20] Fact check: it is actually FLOURISH who proposes we make Fansplaining an all-IWTV podcast in our most recent special episode, not Elizabeth, but that’s the odyssey of memory for ya.
[00:53:12] You can find Cora Maria on Tumblr and Instagram. They’re also on the AO3 and FFN, and have a YouTube channel with fanfic writing advice.
[00:54:25] A tutorial for the Reversi dark mode skin on the AO3.
[00:58:50] miscellanium is on Twitter or their personal website.
[01:05:48] You can find Bodge on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and the AO3.
[01:08:46] A dyslexia-friendly AO3 skin!
[01:11:10] You can find Julia on Twitter or her personal website.
[01:14:47] You can find Valerie on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.
[01:16:52] Half Access—and this picture of Valerie tabling for them is the one featured in the episode cover!
[01:26:29] We first talked about this idea of “athletic fandom” in episode 79, “Who Is Comic-Con For?”
[01:32:45] Valerie worked with Frank Turner—you can see her in the bottom corner here! (This concert was pre-COVID—2017—and the photograph was taken by Ben Morse.)
[01:35:06] Flourish DID read the article “Observant Jewish Swifties are pissed about the Eras tour dates” via “The Rec Center” :-))
[1:37:55] L.E.A.D. DIY helps get information about concert visual effects for fans with photosensitivities and epilepsy. KultureCity works with sensory bags—including on Coldplay’s most recent tour.
[01:53:06] Crutches and Spice, a.k.a. Imani Barbarin.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is episode #186B, “Disability and Fandom: Part 2.”
FK: [sighs] I wish that podcast listeners could see my face, because I am never going to be reconciled to this dumbass naming convention that we chose. We chose it.
ELM: I don’t understand why you’re making that face, when it should be a face of pride that I delivered it with such confidence. [laughs]
FK: [laughing] You did. Congratulations. OK, so, as you can probably guess, there is a part—
ELM: A/1.
FK: —A/1, which you should go and listen to, you know, to be fully prepared for this one.
ELM: Right, but if you didn’t listen to that one for some reason, maybe one of your friends is on this, or something, or you didn’t like the—I don’t know, you like to come in on the second half of things, for some reason, a little context: These two episodes are about the intersections of disability and fandom. We put out a call for participants—disabled fans, broad umbrella, anyone who self-defines as disabled—to talk about their experiences and how their disability intersects with fandom.
So in each of these two episodes, we’ve had two anchor guests talking kind of in-depth about their research. And then we’ve had lots—lots and lots of—dozen plus, you know, dozen and a half? Is that a—? Dozen and a half dozen? Do people say that? Nope, they don’t. [FK laughs] Ah, guests who wrote in some letters and also left voicemails and other voice submissions to talk about their personal experiences.
FK: Right! OK, so, do we need to have further ado, or can we just jump right into our first anchor guest?
ELM: I think that that was all the context anyone would need.
FK: OK, great. Our first anchor guest is Lindsay Mixer, who is a PhD student at Widener University in Human Sexuality Studies.
ELM: Right, and I know that when she initially got in touch with us, she said that she works on, in part, the depiction of disability in fic, in particular, in erotic fic. So I am super interested in this topic.
FK: All right, let’s call her up.
ELM: Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, I think it’s time to welcome Lindsay to the podcast! Hurray!
Lindsay Mixer: Hurray! [all laugh]
FK: I did make that awkward.
LM: Do I also hurray?
ELM: Yeah! Extremely awkward.
FK: Ah, well, it’s fine. This is classic. [ELM laughs]
LM: Thank you for having me. It’s great.
ELM: Thank you so much for coming on. I’m very excited to talk to you about your work. And I’m wondering if you want to give folks a little bit of background about, like, your fannish journey and how that led to the academic work that you do.
LM: Yeah. Yes. OK, so I, as many of us, started in fandom stuff when I was a teen with play-by-post role-playing games.
FK: Whoa!
LM: Did y’all ever do any of those?
FK: I heard about them. I never did one.
LM: Yeah, I honestly, like, the normal fanfiction thing did not come until I was in, like, undergrad. [laughs] What I would do is I would go onto websites around certain fandoms and then play a character from the fanwork, or the original work, and then it’s just a post-by-post RPG style.
FK: Oh, oh, like a play-by—not play-by-mail, like a play-by—yeah yeah yeah.
LM: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
FK: Got it. Got it.
ELM: I also interpreted it as mail, and I was like, “Are you Canadian, actually?” [laughs]
FK: Different terms.
LM: Oh, no no no no. No, [laughs] I’m much older than I look. No, it was, yeah, a play-by-post or post-by-post writing RPG.
FK: Yeah, yeah, post-by-post RPG, yeah, yeah.
LM: Yeah. So that was my beginning with fandom. I’ve had my ups and downs with fandom, because sometimes you just kind of, when your show ends, you kind of lose some of your community and oomph to go in there, sort of thing. And then I got back into it [laughs] because of Teen Wolf, the show.
ELM: As many did. [laughs]
LM: Yeah. [laughs]
FK: Many, many, many did.
LM: And I was just kind of—at the same time, I was going back to school for my master’s in sociology, and I was just—I ran into, like, this whole body of work about the sociology of fandom, right? Like, fanfiction, fanart, things like that. Like, a lot of Henry Jenkins’ work about where fandom came from and what it means for people and things like that. So I decided to do my master’s thesis on explicit fanfiction and how people learn about their own sexuality through explicit fanfiction. So I did a massive quantitative research thing. Some people listening might even remember seeing the survey [all laugh] going around. I’ve actually run into people since, who are like, “Oh shit, you did that?! [all laugh] I remember taking that survey.”
So that was that, and then now, I’m getting my doctorate in human sexuality. In doing my dissertation on autism and sexuality, I started also, like, looking into autism in, like, fanfiction spaces and things like that, and this very small, niche area of disability in fanfiction, and how disability is represented, considering—especially considering the fact that disability is so often not shown in media. I think the latest—
FK: Especially in sexual contexts, right?
LM: Especially in sexual contexts, yeah. It’s getting slowly better, but I think the, like, the last GLAAD survey—because they do not just, like, gay and lesbian rep, they also do other marginalized identity rep in media in their survey every year—and it was, like, 1% to 4% of all media had disabled characters, which is such a small amount. And there’s also, like, a very small amount of research being done about disability and fandom and fanfiction.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: So I started doing this content analysis on how disability is used in explicit scenes in explicit fanfiction.
ELM: Interesting. So not just autism, but disability more broadly.
LM: Yeah, yeah. Part of it is just autism. There’s some interesting research being done—a research article that I read, it was mostly about Autistic fan creators making a character who’s not autistic in canon autistic in the fanworks that they’re creating, and then, like, using their own experience of being an autistic person to create that. And I thought that was very cool. I just love people exploring their own identities and their own brains through fanfiction. But yeah, I do—there’s not a lot of autism research, or autism rep in fanfiction, so I did all disability.
ELM: Interesting. OK, so, all right, I have, like, a lot of questions.
LM: OK.
ELM: And I mean, full disclosure, here, I should say, too, in my current ship that I write, is Magneto and Professor X, so I have actually probably read a lot more than the average—and written—of a physically disabled character. So that’s interesting, because it’s also not something I have experience with, right? But I’ve read a lot of—a lot, a lot of erotic fic about paraplegic sex. [laughs] Some of which feels like people are very earnestly trying to show that they did the work. They’re like, “Here. I’ve researched this to a great degree.” And some of it feels like expressing a personal experience. But that’s just to say up top that I’m fascinated with this topic, and I’d love to know, like, some of—not to keep it too open-ended, but I’d love to know some of what you’ve learned in your research.
LM: Yeah, so, it’s actually funny that you bring up the Professor X and Erik thing, because there is—that’s, like, one of the most common ships in the disability tag—
ELM: Oh, talk to me. [laughs]
LM: —especially if you’re looking for, like, canonically disabled characters—
ELM: Yeah.
LM: —in the disability tag.
FK: Yeah.
LM: That’s the one that shows up the most often.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: And it definitely runs the gamut of, like, pretty accurate to very tropey—
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: And not as—just not as accurate as you would like it to be. There’s a lot of—what I was finding is that there was quite a few fics that kind of presume that if somebody is paraplegic, then they can’t get hard.
ELM: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
LM: Which is—and I think that just comes down from poor sex education. [laughs]
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: Because that’s only the case if the vagus nerve has been injured, which, I mean, maybe it has been in these, like, their headcanon of Professor X’s injury. Like, I’ve never seen it be addressed.
FK: Right.
LM: I’ve never seen that be, like, the vagus nerve be—
FK: Mentioned?
ELM: Oh, you don’t remember that scene in the movie, [LM laughs] where they discussed his diagnosis at length—
LM: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: —and then talked about the realities of—oh no, instead they gave him a magical serum that allowed him to walk around in the next movies, so don’t worry about it. It’s fine.
LM: Yeah, let’s just forget about that part. [laughs]
ELM: Absolutely fine.
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s heavy sarcasm, in case anyone can’t get that from my tone of voice, but fine.
FK: Right, but that’s interesting, right? Because it’s like, in—this is potentially a realistic depiction of it, but if that’s just sort of assumed, and everybody’s always assuming that, and that’s not necessarily what’s going on, then you’re like, “Hmm…well…” [laughs]
LM: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely something where it’s like, I think that people just need to learn a bit more about anatomy, especially around, uh, the sexual anatomy of people with penises. [FK & LM laugh]
ELM: I mean, that’s a note for fandom in general, I would say. [laughs]
LM: Yeah, that’s a note for fandom. [laughs]
FK: In general, fandom. [laughs]
LM: Because the vagus nerve does sort of come into things for people who have vulvas and vaginas, because it does impede some of the nerve endings that go down to the genitals, and that is why if the vagus nerve is—now I’m just giving a whole thing [FK laughs] on how the vagus nerve works.
ELM: I led you in this direction. [LM laughs] But I guess one of the questions I would have from this, though, not to focus on, you know, my ship or whatever, and I agree that it runs the gamut on many different fronts in these depictions. But one of the things I always find interesting about that choice that I do believe is a fandom-wide trope is, it does then, reframe the very standardized, I think often somewhat problematic slash…you know, it…in most slash, especially written by people without penises, right? There is a certain, like—there are certain steps that I think people are required to write, or depictions or descriptions, right? You know what I mean? And so this is—it is the only place in fandom that I’ve ever seen people not prioritize sort of penetrative, heteronormative sex. You know, so sometimes it feels like an opportunity to explore non-normative sex. And I’m wondering, you know, not to give it too much credit when there’s anatomical inaccuracies, or whatever, but I’m wondering if that’s something you’ve also encountered, and also something you’ve encountered with other depictions of disabled characters.
LM: It does, yeah. I think that one of the things both that I’ve found within the, you know, Professor X and Erik ship, and outside of that in other fandoms as well, is how—I was surprised, actually, by how much, especially with physical disabilities, how much came into play when the characters were having sex. It would either—like, I’ve read quite a few fics now where—and this isn’t even my ship, this was just, like, random gathering from AO3, right?
ELM: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
LM: But quite a few of the fics with, like, Professor X and Erik would have Xavier explaining to him, like, “It might just take a little bit longer, or you can—I can get the same amount of pleasure from, like, other parts of my upper body being touched,” and stuff. Which is actually a very accurate—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —thing that can happen, especially if the vagus nerve has been impacted. People—because, like, most of your sexuality is in the brain. Most of your ability to orgasm is in the brain. So if you can get your mind in the right place, and you can get the other physical sensations of body parts you can feel going—and it mostly came into play with paraplegic characters. So there was fics from the show Queer as Folk—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —which I admittedly never watched, [LM & ELM laugh] but, like, one of the characters is—there’s an accident in the show—or is at the beginning, I’m not sure because I’ve never watched it—but is paraplegic, and there’s a whole thing of, like, rediscovering of his body—
FK: Hmm.
LM: —that happens in these fics of being like, “Oh, we’ve had this change, and now we have to get through this together as a couple, sort of idea.
FK: Hmm.
LM: There’s also some fics that I would read with, like, characters who canonically haven’t—like, were amputated—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —so they have a prosthetic, and the process of dealing with the prosthetic when they wanna have sex would either change the type of sex that they were going to have, or it would just slow things down a lot, which is really interesting.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That is really interesting. What about, um, other kinds of disabilities, non-physical disabilities, in your research?
LM: Yeah, so there’s…[sighs] I’ve seen things—I feel like a lot of the non-physical disabilities that I was finding, they were not canon, interestingly enough.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: Like, it was more likely to be a non-canon thing.
FK: In the sense of, like, people sort of armchair-diagnosing a character, and saying, “Well, there are—things in canon make me think that they have this disability, even though it’s never been said,” or in the sense of like, “This character doesn’t have anything that makes me think they have it, but I’m going to write them as if they do.”
LM: Both.
FK: Do you see which—OK, both.
LM: Yes, yeah. For things with, like, neurodiversity—so, autism, ADHD—it was a lot of, “I’m autistic and/or ADHD, and I feel like this character is too, so I’m gonna write them that way.”
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: There were also, for things that were, like—I guess this is still technically a physical disability, but for characters who were being written as blind or deaf—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —where it was being added to that—
FK: Gotcha.
LM: —without the author noting if that’s from their own experience or not.
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: [laughs] There’s one Good Omens fanfic that I found that had Aziraphale, like, do a minor miracle to make Crowley mute during their sex play.
FK: Whoa.
LM: Yeah! So I was like, “Oh, OK, so this is you actually making this happen to create—to make the sex more intense,” because it ended up being up being a very intense experience for Crowley, and I thought that was fascinating.
ELM: That’s really interesting. So are you finding—I mean, this is reminding me a bit of when we did our—an episode of folks writing trans characters, and it’s a similar sort of thing, right? Where, you know, some people are saying, “Well, I headcanon this,” or “I feel I have a lot of evidence, this character seems trans to me,” et cetera. But one thing that was notable in that is folks saying, “I’m trans and so that’s why I’m doing this.” And I’m curious how much of that disclosure—it sounds like some of that is happening. People are saying, “I’m overlaying my experience onto this character, or relating to them, and that’s why I’m doing this.” And it’s like, how much of that is explicitly stated?
LM: I can’t remember if I did a number on that, but when it came to, like, mental illnesses and, again, neurodiversity aspect, it was more often to be explicitly stated than if it—or a chronic illness.
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: So characters who had chronic pain conditions. Sometimes it wasn’t even just, “Oh, I headcanon this.” It was just, “This is my experience and I relate to this character, so I wanna make them reflect my experience better, because there’s no other way to get that done.” It’s interesting, because now—so I did this—I was gathering all this research last year. I’m now shopping for journals and stuff. But now that Our Flag Means Death has come out, which is my current obsession, [all laugh] I’m just constantly seeing it in that fandom, of Stede Bonnet being autistic.
FK: Mmm.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: Which, like, I mean he is. But also, the actor who plays him has said that he’s on the spectrum as well, which—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —you know, increased that. And then also with Ed Teach’s character having a brace on his knee in the show, then there’s also—I’ve never seen as much physical disability coming into play as I have in this fandom. It’s wild. It’s all over the place. But yeah, it’s kind of, like, a mixture, depending on what the disability is and how much of it is in canon or not, you know, that, like—like, Stede Bonnet isn’t autistic in canon, or at least it’s not said so, but everyone’s kind of decided that he is.
ELM: So it’s interesting, and obviously I’m thinking about this from my perspective as a, you know, a person without any physical disabilities writing a—I mean, I almost always write Charles as a wheelchair user. I’m curious if you encountered in your research instances of folks, like, quote-unquote “getting it wrong,” and pushback against that? Because this also makes me think of, you know, our race and fandom episodes, and folks talking about, like, you know, white people being scared to write characters of color because they don’t wanna quote-unquote “get anything wrong,” et cetera, et cetera. You know what I mean?
LM: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ll say that when I was doing this study, I wasn’t looking at any responses to the fics, because that’s—I mean, some of these have a million comments, and—
FK: Yeah. A whole new can of worms.
ELM: Yeah.
LM: Yeah, I was like, “I don’t have time for that.” [all laugh] But in terms of getting it wrong, yeah, there were quite a few. It was actually less than I expected, but there were a few fics where somebody—like, the character would have a disability sort of similar to my own. And I should say real quick—so I have fibromyalgia, I’m autistic myself, I have PTSD and anxiety. Like, I’m very familiar with what it means to be disabled and to live as a disabled person in a disabling world. And part of it with my fibro is that I, for a time, I was walking pretty consistently with a cane, because my fibro’s centered in my joints, and it hurt to walk.
And one of the fics that I found in this was a—it was a Pacific Rim fanfic. Hermann, in the movie, walks with a cane and a very pronounced limp. And in the fic, they’re, like, going at it, they’re having sex, Hermann’s on the bottom on his hands and knees, and nowhere does it come up—
ELM: Mmm.
LM: —that he’s in pain. And I’m just reading this like, “Mother—” Like, that would hurt so much. You would be incapable of keeping that up for more than a few minutes, because it’s just—when you’re in a level of pain where you’re limping and you’re—
FK: Using a cane, yeah.
LM: —using a cane, and things like that, like, you have to be very aware of what position you’re in at all times, even when you’re just relaxing, and you’re constantly having to shift, because nothing doesn’t hurt after a while, and especially if someone’s just going to town on you. [all laugh]
ELM: Yeah, it takes some strength—
LM: Yeah!
ELM: —to stay—even if you’re just doing yoga in that position, it takes, you know—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: —and there’s no one putting any pressure physically on you. [laughs]
LM: Yes! It’s awful. And I will say, so this is actually, just a quick note to anybody out there who is directing actors, who is an actor yourself: look up how to walk with a cane, because no one gets it right. [ELM laughs] And then that goes into the fandom as well—
FK: Yeah.
LM: —because they have them use the cane on the side the actor is using it, and I’m like, “No, that’s not how you walk with a cane. That is fucking—that would hurt so much after a while.” You have to—whatever side is bad, you have to use a cane—the cane needs to be on the other side. It needs to be on the side with your good leg.
FK: Mmm.
ELM: Mmm. Interesting.
LM: So that as you’re walking forward—yeah, it’s a whole thing, and I have literally never seen an actor get it right.
FK: Wow.
ELM: Yeah, now you have me thinking about my beloved Frasier, and I think he does—because the dad uses a cane—
LM: Yeah.
ELM: I feel like it’s on the wrong side, then.
LM: It—
FK: Dr. House is definitely on the wrong side.
LM: Yeah, Downton Abbey—
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
LM: —Bates is on the wrong side.
ELM: This feels like it would be an easy note to give folks, you know? Like—
LM: Two seconds of Google.
ELM: Yeah. [laughs]
LM: Which I did when I got a cane. [laughs]
ELM: Like, actors are so aware of their bodies that that is interesting to think about. And it’s insidious, and obviously this is new information for Flourish and me—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —so I feel like it’s a pretty good example of, like, you know, just with all the other marginalized identities we’ve talked to folks about this stuff, you know, how much of this stuff comes from kind of unthinking choices within the broader media landscape that then just are a part of fandom, just because that’s what you see on—you know, even talking about, you know, 1% to 4% of characters, or whatever, right? And I’m thinking, you know, you’ve seen that talk by Jay Edidin about the character from Leverage who is autistic-coded? I’m saying words—Flourish is nodding, Lindsay, you’re being like, “I’m intrigued here.”
LM: I’ve never seen that, no. I don’t know—
ELM: There’s, like, a TED Talk from Jay Edidin, who’s one of the hosts of the “Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men” podcast, and this has been going around my dash for the last few weeks, because it’s talking about looking for autistic characters in media and about how rarely it’s stated. And just thinking about that, and also thinking about the characters that are explicitly stated on-screen as autistic are not often ones that fandom is gonna sexualize, right?
FK: Yeah.
LM: The infantilization and desexualization of anybody with a disability—this is in character or in reality—is actually a big part of my dissertation, which is on autism and sexuality, of just how many autistic people aren’t allowed to be sexual, or to even have a sexual orientation—
FK: Wow.
LM: —because they’re autistic. And this presumption that autistic AFABs are going to be victims of sexual abuse, that is—I mean, and not to say that that doesn’t happen. It’s actually very common, but it’s by non-autistic parents and caretakers and things like that, it is a presumption. “This is going to happen. If we leave them alone for two seconds, or let them near anybody of the quote-unquote ‘opposite sex—’”
FK: Yeah.
LM: “—they’re going to be sexually abused.” But autistic boys? They’re going to be sexual abusers.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Hmm.
LM: Because they’re so out of control and insatiable, and they’re going to be—
FK: Yeah.
LM: Yeah, and so that is just assumed as a fact that will come true eventually for both, and never allowed to just have their own sexual agency. And then also, [laughs] not taught anything about sex education or consent or anything like that, which would help prevent either of those things from happening—
FK: Yeah.
LM: —but they’re too autistic to learn, so…it’s really exhausting. And that’s one of the things that I love about fandom, is that you can find fics where the characters are disabled and they’re still having sex, because even if it’s quote-unquote “inaccurate,” or poorly depicted, it is at least, like, I’m able to see somebody with a disability similar to mine enjoying themselves—
FK: Yeah.
LM: —and being able to kind of get out of their own body for a bit, because that’s—especially with chronic pain, we’re just so in our own bodies all the time. I mean, everybody is, but in a different way, where it is—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
LM: —like, I’m constantly aware of how much pain I’m in, and it’s exhausting, and sometimes I just want to get out of my own body for a while. Or, like, be able to enjoy my body in a way I’m not able to in my day-to-day.
FK: Yeah.
LM: And so getting to see characters with chronic pain or chronic illnesses enjoy themselves is a big thing to me and to a lot of other people.
ELM: It’s interesting, I mean, do you—what you’re describing about these obviously horrific stereotypes about autistic people, too, I’m wondering, autism in particular, in fandom—I mean, I think probably chronic illness and chronic pain also are probably disproportionately represented in fandom. But, you know, I’ve seen a lot of armchair anecdotal analysis suggesting that fandom tends to be proportionately more autistic. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually encountered any research on that.
LM: No.
ELM: You’ve seen these—I’m sure you’ve seen this commentary. [laughs]
LM: I have, yeah. And I mean, maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. No one’s doing—I mean, first of all, it is near-impossible to get a comprehensive look at fandom, in general.
FK: Yeah, how do you measure that?
ELM: Sure, sure.
LM: Yeah, like, the study I did for my M.A. thesis has—it was quantitative. I got almost 1,500 responses to it, which is unheard of, in quantitative research. That is a phenomenal amount of research. And I am sure I barely touched into the depth of fandom, because it’s just—there’s no place to go to even get an idea of what the numbers are.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Sure, sure. I guess—I know we’re running short on time, and I guess as an overall sort of wrapping-up question, you know, we’re talking about, like, the disparities between the way that disabled characters are depicted or not even mentioned on, you know, on screens or in books or whatever, versus fandom. And I push back, I think—you know, Flourish and I both aggressively push back against the, like, “Fandom is correcting [FK laughs] the flawed—blah blah blah, it’s so progressive—” et cetera, et cetera. But I’m wondering how it does look from your perspective, having looked at, you know, across a lot of different fandoms and people writing themselves and their bodies and their minds into these stories. I’m wondering if, in a way, it does feel that way to you, or it seems like it’s balanced out by, you know, the less sensitive portrayals, or the unthinking ones, or the guy on all-fours [laughter] not experiencing any pain whatsoever, you know what I mean?
LM: I think that…[sighs] I think that in a lot of ways, it’s been getting better over, you know, the years. I think that, you know, similar to mainstream media having more representation, I think that it is coming out in fandom. I think that the internet has done a lot, because disabled people are so often stuck online, because they can’t access the able-bodied world as easily, so there’s a lot more disabled people writing fanfiction than, like—within the fandom community, than I think there probably is of any other demograph—like, marginalized demographic, just percentage-wise—
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: —because that’s often a way for them to actually be able to communicate with others and have a social life, is fandom. But it’s a mix. It’s a hodgepodge of, like, good and bad. I think things are getting better and people are talking to each other more about, “Hey, you didn’t get X, Y, or Z correct, and here’s some resources that you can go to, to correct.” I think for the most part, especially if you’re not on, like—if it’s not happening on Twitter, I should say, if it’s happening on AO3 or fanfiction.net or Tumblr even, it’s a lot more respectful [laughs] than you might see on Twitter.
ELM: RIP to that great platform.
LM: I know!
ELM: It’s brought so much joy. [laughs]
LM: And I think that things are—I think that people are getting more and more fed up with media not presenting disabled characters, and saying, “Fuck it. We’re gonna do it our fucking selves,” [laughs] which I think is great. I think it’s kind of going the same way of, you know, getting better BIPOC representation, getting better queer rep.
FK: Mm-hmm.
LM: Now we’re kind of in the era of better disability rep, and fandom is always going to be ahead of the curve.
ELM: Mmm.
LM: But I’m also very hopeful.
FK: Wow. Yeah, that’s a very hopeful note to end on. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your research with us. I hope that we can talk again sometime.
ELM: And when it gets published, we’d love to share it with everyone.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So can you please let us know?
LM: Yeah, when I eventually find—this is the problem with getting—with my area, is that it’s so niche that it’s either too much about sexuality, not enough about disability, or not enough about sexuality and too much about disability. [laughs] Goddamn academia. [LM & ELM laugh]
FK: Well, we believe it’ll happen.
LM: Thanks.
FK: And thank you so much for sharing it with us.
LM: Thank you for having me on. This was fun.
[Interstitial music]
FK: A wonderful conversation. I am so glad we had Lindsay on.
ELM: Oh you know I was—I mean, I was trying to make it all about myself, [laughs] my fanfiction. [FK laughs] But, like, obviously I’m interested, you know? It’s fantastic to hear from an expert who has, like, studied this in a broader level, because it’s been interesting on a—you know, coming into this just from that one lens, and there are so many ways that, especially, as I was saying, like, it really fractured in a way that I really appreciated, the kind of rote, normative depictions of sex that I had seen in fanfiction in the previous 20 years I’d been in fandom, right? It didn’t prioritize ejaculation, for example, right? You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: It acknowledged there were a lot of different ways to have sex. So I feel like, obviously there’s very fair critiques, but I also think that there’s a lot of power there.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: For all kinds of readers and writers.
FK: Yeah, totally. OK, so we have a bunch of people who wrote in who are talking about seeing disabilities in, to some extent, fic, and also especially headcanons. So should we read the first one of those?
ELM: Yeah! Do you wanna read it?
FK: Sure thing. OK, this is from Soph.
“Hi, I’m Soph. I’m from the U.K., and I’m a white, nonbinary, queer, physically disabled and neurodivergent fan in my 40s. And I’m really interested in the interactions I have as a disabled, neurodivergent fanfic writer.
“I write a lot of fic featuring disability and neurodivergent headcanons. In disability studies, we would call this cripping the text. Some of my headcanons are very close to canon, especially when I’m imagining characters as neurodivergent—there are a lot of TV shows out there that don’t realize that they are clearly writing autistic characters and characters with ADHD or mental health problems. Or maybe they do realize it, but they’re not saying it.
“When I re-imagine characters with physical disabilities, though, those interpretations can be much more removed from canon, because there are so few physically disabled characters out there that I can identify with. In the TV shows I watch, physical disability tends to be associated with the villains more than the heroes of the piece. So I’m really writing against the grain when I imagine, say, an Arrowverse superhero as a wheelchair user.
“I really wish there were more characters like me on screen or in comics. One exception is the incredible Oracle—Barbara Gordon. Her story is problematic in some ways from a disability perspective, but she’s also a badass who fights from her wheelchair and makes me very happy when she does. But she was written out of the recent Birds of Prey movie in favor of Harley Quinn, and I was left without a hero again.
“Fan reactions to disabled and neurodivergent headcanons in fic can really vary. I’ve had really positive comments on my fic from other disabled and neurodivergent fans—we seem to enjoy seeing our shared disabled headcanons written in fic—a lot of us can see the possibilities for reimagining our favorite characters as disabled. But I’ve sometimes had non-disabled and neurotypical fans take offense when their favorite characters are written as disabled. There is still a huge amount of stigma around disability, and that exists in fandom as well as anywhere else.
“I want to see more characters like me on screen, and to have them identified in canon as disabled or neurodivergent. But until that day comes, I’ll keep writing characters that look and think and act like me.”
That’s from Soph.
ELM: Soph, thank you so much for writing in. I really appreciate these thoughts. And it’s interesting thinking about—you know, and I don’t know why this hadn’t kind of struck me before, even though I feel like we’ve been swirling around some of these themes throughout these conversations. You know, when you think about racebending or genderbending or genderbending in terms of transness—[laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean? Or—all sorts of things, right? Or any kind of queering the text, or whatever. You know, you’re making an argument—like, you’re either just being like, “There’s no argument there.” You’re like, “He’s Black now.” You know? Like, “I’m going from there.”
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Or you’re, like, saying, “Here’s the subtext, and here’s why I actually think this character is closeted, and in this, they’re gonna be gay,” or whatever, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Physical disability—there’s no—obviously, literally any character could become physically disabled, right?
FK: Yeah, for sure.
ELM: Not—obviously not if it’s a genetic disorder, or something like that, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: There’s obviously some physical disabilities that you’re born with.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But many are ones that are the result of accidents or, you know, conditions that you develop later in life, or whatever, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: And so it’s like—it’s kind of a different overlay, and it’s really, like—any time I feel like, you know, people are complaining about those kind of deviations from canon, it’s like, “OK, buddy, really?” But that one seems like an extreme kind of telling on yourself. It’s like—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: What—like—he lost an arm, and this is what bothers you? Right? Is it just because—
FK: Yeah, you’re mad about that?
ELM: Yeah. It’s like, he can’t do the things exactly the way you envision it? Like, you know what I mean?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: So I find that interesting. And that kind of hadn’t clicked before, because I was busy thinking about these as analogous to all those other things, but actually that’s even a bit different.
FK: Yeah, it really is. You know, it’s interesting, also—so the next person that I wanted to have us listen to is also talking about sort of the way that fans are reacting to characters with disabilities, this time I think in canon. So should we take a listen to that? Because I feel like they sort of speak to each other.
ELM: Yeah, let’s do that. So this is from TallysGreatestFan.
TallysGreatestFan: Hello, Flourish and Elizabeth. As an autistic, mentally ill woman, I notice the rampant ableism in fandom, and this is a topic that is barely talked about. It is especially visible in the fandom I’m in for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and it was especially bad in the first year after the show ended.
There are two canonically disabled characters in the show, and it has lots of flaws, but also lots of potential too, and these two characters have an epic, sweet romance. There are many double standards in the fandom, because abled characters are praised for things the disabled characters are criticized for, and the mainly disabled fans of said characters are even harassed for.
Entrapta is a chief engineer of the villains, and she’s autistic, and most of the fandom infantilizes her. I saw so many takes about her having the mind of a child, being unable to care for others or having no morals, and that she should not be allowed to make her own decisions, or have a romantic relationship. She’s an adult woman, but her relationship to the other disabled character is constantly called pedophilia, and her fans are called pedophiles, just for treating her like the adult woman she is.
Her love interest, Hordak, is—he’s the only one who always stands up for her and treats her with respect, and he’s physically disabled and also the leader of the villains. His trauma is constantly erased and antis constantly call him gross and a creepy old man and claim that he manipulates Entrapta, and this is possibly because of the conflation of physical disabilities with old people.
It was a very, very sobering experience, because this always just reminded me that for these people, I’m not really human, and I deserve to be abused, according to them, and I should not have relationships and should not have a place in the queer community. They also constantly erase that Entrapta is bisexual. They very often also suicide-bait, or make death threats.
I saw it in other fandoms, too. For example, there is a quite extreme double standard between the autistic-coded Lennier in Babylon 5 and other characters, but in this fandom it was the worst. I also made a YouTube video about it, but I would love to hear your opinions. Lots of love, TallysGreatestFan.
FK: Wow, that’s…that’s a lot. But when I heard Soph talking about people being mad at characters being written as disabled in various ways—I mean, I’m including neurodivergence in that—I assumed it was because they were like, “Oh, well, we don’t want this person to not be able to do X thing or Y thing that’s part of my headcanon for them.” But hearing from TallysGreatestFan, it makes me think, if this is getting mixed up also with questions of infantilization, you know, all of this stuff, that could quickly get so, so toxic, right? Like, it could become—I mean, I don’t know. I guess this makes sense to me, hearing it, but I’m still blown away by it.
ELM: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I really appreciate TallysGreatestFan talking about that, because this is hard. This is, like, you know, kind of heavy discourse, right? And I really appreciate that perspective from a personal level, because obviously in the abstract I understand why that would be very hard, but to hear it from someone directly affected, I appreciate hearing that experience.
FK: Absolutely. I think that the next person who I wanted to hear from is Lizard Socks, and they are also autistic and had some more thoughts about fans, you know, headcanoning characters as autistic. So should we listen to that?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it.
Lizard Socks: Hey, this is Lizard Socks. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now, and I’ve always wanted to try calling in on the phone, so this is partly an excuse to do that. But it was also something that came to mind for me when you mentioned neurodivergence and disability.
I’ve noticed it’s pretty common in the cartoon fandoms I’m in for fans to headcanon certain characters as autistic. I’m on the autism spectrum, and I think most of these fans are as well. But I don’t connect strongly to these sorts of headcanons the way other people do. And for a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Characters like Pearl or Peridot from Steven Universe, or Marcy from Amphibia, these are all characters I like and understand pretty well, but I don’t really feel connected to them through being on the spectrum, the same way I might with a character written that way on purpose, like Norma in Dead End. I tend to be drawn more to characters like Amethyst or Anne, who read as more neurotypical to me, but have internal struggles that seem very relatable, at least to me.
I don’t know if it’s because the characters that fans headcanon as autistic tend to be more outwardly expressive and effusive than I am, or if maybe it’s just because there are other parts of my identity that I think about more. But I’d be interested to hear other people’s perspectives.
Thanks for everything you do with the podcast. It’s always such interesting listening.
ELM: Thank you very much, Lizard Socks. Can I just say, I love when someone starts off a voicemail being like, [laughing] “I was looking for an excuse. Like, I’ve been listening and looking for an excuse—” It’s not the first time that we’ve gotten one of these, and I really appreciate it.
FK: We love voicemails, by the way, as much as you love giving us voicemails.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: So more please!
ELM: You don’t need an excuse. Just call in. Just tell us your thoughts. This is interesting, because it’s immediately making me think of the scarcity thing, right? You know, and, like—
FK: Mmm.
ELM: “Oh, there’s only one character of color in this, and that’s the one I have to relate to if I’m a person of color,” or whatever. Et cetera, et cetera, right?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Like, oh, there should be more, because—to see your response reflected. But this is particularly interesting, too, because we’re talking now about, like, fanon and headcanons, right? You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that’s another level, because, like—I mean, it also goes to show how popular headcanons can kind of become the stand-in for, you know—suddenly it feels like, “Now I have to read against that, too? [FK laughs] To find something that’s relatable?” You know what I mean? It’s very interesting.
FK: Yeah, completely. It also made me think about how, you know, I mean, ultimately a lot of the things that we write draw on—I mean, I’m not saying that this is true always, but, like, draw on some kinds of stereotype, right? Like, that’s how we make sense of the world, right? If you tried to get me to say that I didn’t have stereotypes about people, like, obviously I do.
ELM: You stereotyping me, Flourish?
FK: Yeah! And they’re usually rooted—it’s not that they have no truth in them in any way, shape, or form, right?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: That’s the point of it. And so this made me think a lot about how, particularly neurodivergence, but also sort of the way that we write characters in general, yeah, you might not identify with them, right? Because people have such varied experiences. I really liked the point of, like, it’s not every moment that your particular marginalized identity is the thing that’s most important for you to identify with someone on.
ELM: Sure.
FK: It’s not that it’s not important to have that option. But it’s not always the thing that everybody needs to focus on. We can still love characters across difference.
ELM: Yeah, no, I think that’s very well put. And also just, you know, there’s a massive neuro—I mean, it’s such a broad umbrella, neurodivergence or neuroatypicality, or whatever, right? You know?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Yeah, people—I mean, I’m just thinking about Rebecca talking about the DSM, too, and, you know, this kind of trying to regiment the way people’s, you know—in that case, mental illness. You know, and it’s just like, there’s so many different symptoms that could be, like, 17 different things, and it seems so kind of arbitrary, where they’re putting these lines, or whatever, and—
FK: Right.
ELM: You know?
FK: Right, yeah. “Am I diagnosed with panic disorder, or am I diagnosed with anxiety?”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: You know? Like, “Well, I don’t know.” You know? [laughs]
ELM: Right. And you and another person could have the same diagnosis but your personalities could be very different. The way that you respond to situations could be very different. You know? But because you both checked a couple of those boxes, then that’s the—you know what I mean? And so it’s like, you and a character, right? And so it’s like, you may not find that person relatable at all, because you’re like, “That’s not the way I would react in that situation.”
FK: Exactly. Exactly. You know, and then also we get into, like, the question of diagnoses as ways that insurance works, you know?
ELM: Eugh. [laughs]
FK: I’ve had times, when I was talking to my therapist, and I was like, “Well, what is the diagnosis, officially?” And she was like, “Oh, well it’s this, but that’s because insurance requires X, Y, Z. And, like—”
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: “—I don’t think you need to focus on that.” And I’m like, “Oh, well, yeah, you’re right, I don’t want to focus on that. But it’s also weird to just straight out come out and say, like, ‘Yeah, I needed to say this, because you need therapy, but they won’t pay for it unless we categorize you in X way.’” You know?
ELM: Right.
FK: It’s like, gee.
ELM: Right. Yeah.
FK: All right, all right. Before we get too far down this rabbit hole, there’s one more person who had what I think is a relevant comment, and I’m really excited, because this is Mayara Barros from Brazil. And I’m always excited to hear from folks from Brazil. I spent some time working in the entertainment industry down there, and I don’t know enough about fan studies there, and I love to find out about what’s going on, so I’m excited.
ELM: You are just—I didn’t know Brazil made you light up so much. You’re like, [laughs] “Oh, wow!”
FK: I had some brief, wonderful times there, and then I haven’t been very much—you know, I haven’t had very much time with anybody from Brazil or been in Brazil recently, and so every time I’m like, “Oh! I wanna know about this!” You know?
ELM: [laughs] Brazilian fan studies!
FK: OK, great.
ELM: All right. Well, let’s hear from Mayara.
FK: OK.
May Barros: Hi, I’m May Barros, from Brazil. I am 30 years old, and I was just diagnosed with ADHD. I’m also a fan enthusiast, and I researched fanfic and creativity for my master’s degree. Brazilian fanfic culture is basically online culture right now. And the way that intersects with my ADHD is that I see, when I write fanfiction, that even before I was diagnosed, I tried to write the characters that I liked with traits that I saw in myself, without realizing I made them disabled, in a way, because I put the ADHD traits that I had in the characters that I related to the most. So if I was writing Inuyasha fanfic, Kagome and Inuyasha would probably be disabled in some way.
It was a way for me to explore that feeling of connection and relatability in characters that I already liked, and that evolved because I also write my own original stories, and I’ve noticed that I do the same thing with my own original characters. So that really started when I was writing fanfic as a teenager in the 2000s.
It’s not really talked about here in Brazil, this intersection between disability and fanfic and fandom in general. But I do see a lot of ways in which fandom is exciting and welcoming to disabled people, especially neurodivergent people, because a thing that I noticed is that it’s really easy for fandom to become a hyperfocus for people with autism and ADHD, and it’s a really welcoming environment for that kind of hyperfocus, because we can talk about those things in depth, and it’s welcomed, and we can make art and write fanfic and cosplay, and it’s considered a positive thing, in a way that’s not really treated the same in other aspects of life.
So I feel like that’s a really big reason of why disabled folks, especially neurodivergent folks, get really, really into fandom, because it’s a way for us to express ourselves, that’s seen as positive and that doesn’t really get celebrated as much in other areas. It’s a space where we can explore ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t be able to in other areas of our life. And I really, really want fandom to be a place where disabled people can find acceptance and space for their struggles to be heard. And I know we’re not there yet. But that’s a hope I have for the future, in general. Yeah. Thanks.
FK: Thank you so much, Mayara. It was wonderful to get your perspective.
ELM: Yeah, and, you know, the disability question aside, I also—we really should do an episode about Brazilian fan studies. There’s a massive fan culture there. And a lot of difference between the ones that we—I mean, obviously, there’s many regions that I would like to do, but it’s on our list. So we really appreciate your thoughts.
FK: Absolutely. All right, so I think this is now—we have now come to the time for the break. [ELM laughs] So let’s take our break, and we’ll come back, and we’ll listen to some more people, OK?
ELM: We have now come to that time. Indeed.
FK: [laughs] Yeah! You know? Like, I’m just gonna say it in a very—I could make it more baroque. The way I say it.
ELM: You know I love the baroque.
FK: All right, let’s take a break.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back! And what do we talk about when we come back from our break, Elizabeth?
ELM: [laughing] Have you been practicing to be a preschool teacher?
FK: [laughs] You know that I dress like one, so maybe it’s meant to be.
ELM: I usually say you dress like an elementary school teacher, but you’re right. You could also be a preschool teacher. I don’t think there’s a—
FK: Thank you.
ELM: That’s all within the same—
FK: It’s within the same realm.
ELM: Under 10—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —is a general realm that you’re dressing for.
FK: There’s a slight Ms. Frizzle element, maybe, on my good days.
ELM: I don’t wanna hurt your feelings, but I—
FK: No Ms. Frizzle element?
ELM: —I am not—I don’t know what you are—maybe it’s a stealth cosplay. Maybe this is, like, you’re just, like, kinning Ms. Frizzle, but it’s deep inside you, but—[laughs]
FK: Kinning Ms. Frizzle! [laughs]
ELM: But I—
FK: All right, all right.
ELM: I do not get those vibes.
FK: Suitable. It was an offer, and it’s rejected.
ELM: I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. [laughs]
FK: Not those vibes. That’s OK. You don’t need to be sorry. I was testing it out as a possibility. Anyway—
ELM: No, you remind me more of, like, Bernie Sanders on a cold day.
FK: Oh, I like that too, actually. [ELM laughs] Am I grumpy?
ELM: Just, you know, like, it’s just—you got a very New England—like, an older white person in New England vibe, I think. You know?
FK: Yeah. OK.
ELM: The clogs, the handknits. You know, like…
FK: Yeah, you’re right. There’s clogs, things that have been mended, clothing that has been, like—
ELM: The practical jackets…
FK: Yeah, all right.
ELM: Everyone’s getting a vision of Flourish right now.
FK: What we actually talk about at this point is Patreon. Patreon.com/Fansplaining, which is how we make this podcast, and feed information about my sartorial choices [ELM laughs] into your earholes.
ELM: So there are a lot of Patreon levels, as you well know. $5 a month, you get a little enamel pin. $10 a month, you get a Tiny Zine. We still have a couple of Tiny Zines left from our most recent one that we sent out a few weeks ago that’s got ficlets from Flourish, Betts, and Britta Lundin. Super cute. A hit with the fans. But most importantly, we have a special episode out about the greatest television show ever made, Interview with the Vampire, and you know, I just wanted to just say those words out loud again, and maybe just think about it some more.
FK: Great. I don’t think that we need to think about it out loud on the podcast, because we already did that for an entire special episode, [ELM laughs] which you can get for $3 a month or more.
ELM: There’s a part at the end of that episode, where I propose that we just change Fansplaining to an Interview with the Vampire podcast. [laughs]
FK: And, you know, I mean I don’t think that’s a totally bad idea.
ELM: [laughing] You don’t hate it.
FK: Um—
ELM: So you get that at $3 a month, and you get the 26 other prior special episodes, including an episode with, I mean, not that many similarities, but Phantom of the Opera. I feel like we’ve got a theme going on in this, or just in general realm going on this year.
FK: A mini theme. A mini theme here, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But then also, a series that we did starting in the beginning of the pandemic, called Tropefest, where we talked about, like, enemies to lovers, canon-divergent AUs. Somewhat critical conversations about these tropes. And I think we might have another one in the New Year, but I don’t want to say what yet. That’s a little teaser.
FK: Also, if you don’t have the money, or don’t feel like giving us your money, you can still support us by spreading the word about the podcast or by subscribing on your favorite podcatcher. Or by writing in! [ELM laughs] As all of the wonderful people did to make this episode possible, so that’s fansplaining at gmail.com. You can also reach us on our website, fansplaining.com. There’s a, like, form that you can fill out that you can do anonymously. On Tumblr, we’re @fansplaining. Our ask box is open, anon is on. Or, of course, you can send in our favorite thing: a voicemail. 1-401-526-FANS.
ELM: And then finally, as we said in the first episode, it’s worth repeating. We’re recording this a few weeks before it’s going to go live. We have literally no idea if Twitter still exists and, um, we are going to be talking about Twitter at some point in the future, so if it’s still around, we’re still there. We’re not gonna—they will have to delete Twitter. We will not delete our account.
FK: Great. Correct.
ELM: So that’s it. That’s it. Clown shoes squeaking, [both laugh] as they say.
FK: All right, well, let’s kick off this second part of the episode with actually listening to someone who sent us in a voicemail, Cora Maria.
ELM: Let’s do it.
Cora Maria: Hey, my name is Cora Maria, and I am an avid fic reader and writer who runs a YouTube channel where I offer advice about writing and posting fanfic. Since I’ve been having chronic headaches since February, I want to talk about the accessibility measure that has been most important for me to continue to indulge in fanfic: dark mode.
Something that can agitate my headaches is bright screens and white backgrounds, which is why I go with the dark mode option as often as possible. Fanfiction.net has one of these options, but only for the text of the story itself and never the whole website, which is really disappointing, since I prefer to use its interface over AO3’s to save my drafts. On the other hand, AO3 has a very impressive dark mode skin called Reversi, easily found in the footer of the website. And that covers the whole website, aside from the rich text box.
Since I’m guessing that other fanfic writers who are listening want to know how they can make their fics more accessible to people like me, I’d just like to thank them and offer some tips. First, try posting your fic on websites with a good dark mode, like AO3. Second, if your fic includes any visual elements or work skins, consider how they look when paired with the Reversi skin. Might this cause an issue for someone like me, who needs less white space in their fanworks? Could you post your images with an invisible background, rather than the default white? How would that look aesthetically?
Ultimately, I know that there are a lot of very specific accommodations that people need, which can conflict with someone’s creative vision. For example, a fluffy fan comic with a default black background would probably feel like a tone clash. However, if you find that there’s a way to make your fanworks more accommodating without taking away from the works themselves, then I encourage you to go for it.
ELM: I absolutely love this. I love the very helpful service—you know, the service journalism tone of this. [FK laughs] One thing that I find somewhat ironic and, I think, is kind of an illustrative point about accessibility—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —is, um, since, for the past five years, I have been struggling with the effects of a concussion and some subsequent photophobia, I literally cannot look at dark mode, right?
FK: [laughs] Huh! Yeah!
ELM: Which has actually been a problem in my professional life. You know, I work with code a lot, and a lot of—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: A lot of engineers really, really, you know, there are—
FK: They love dark mode.
ELM: —text editors that are, like—I was using Sublime Text around that time, and thankfully, they have a whole bunch of different color schemes. Like, one of them is not dark mode. [laughs] At the time, I don’t know, the version that I was using, there were, like, 20 choices of different kinds of dark mode, and then one that was a soft cream color that I was able to use.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: So I think that the—I really appreciate, everything that Cora’s saying is absolutely correct, and I think an addendum to that would be to understand that there are a lot of different ways that visual and, like, neurological related to vision issues manifest.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And true accessibility is about flexibility. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, it’s not a, “Oh, everyone needs high-contrast, oh everyone needs low-contrast, everyone—” Right? Because there are—literally the thing that harms Cora is the thing that helps me, and vice versa.
FK: Absolutely. Absolutely, that’s a great point.
ELM: One thing this also reminded me, too, of is I’ve seen people saying, if you are a fic writer, and you post on the AO3, to please be mindful of people using screen readers. Particularly when you’re doing the breaks between sections. Because you know when you read a fic—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: —and they put the, like, 20 “@” symbols, or something, or, like, a bunch of tildes, or whatever.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And so then the screen reader is going like, “tilde tilde tilde tilde tilde—” [FK laughs] It’s like, this—it never—it always looks—it doesn’t look good, either. I don’t understand why people do, like, a full line of characters across the screen. Like, just do one or a couple, you know? Or use the horizontal—
FK: Yeah, or use a break.
ELM: Yeah, use the horizontal—
FK: Use the HTML that lets you put a break in there—
ELM: Exactly.
FK: —that the screen reader can really handle.
ELM: Exactly. Yeah.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I always associate that with, like, people’s sort of aesthetic feelings, you know? Like when, back in the Stone Ages, you used to dress up your I.M. away message with lots of characters and things.
ELM: Oh, yeah, sure did.
FK: But, at the time, I didn’t know that screen readers existed, and now I do, so even if I still liked that aesthetic, [ELM laughs] I could do better.
ELM: Do you still like that aesthetic? It’s nostalgic.
FK: Sometimes.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s a little nostalgic.
ELM: Yeah, yeah yeah.
FK: You know, I’ve been thinking about redoing my website, maybe with a nostalgic aesthetic.
ELM: Hmm.
FK: But I need to figure out a way to do it and not screw over people who use screen readers.
ELM: Well, ironically, the early web was much more accessible than the current web, so…
FK: Well, that’s also true.
ELM: Just channel the ’90s in all ways.
FK: Uh…but maybe not with 10,000 tildes. [ELM laughs] OK OK OK. The next person that we have is also talking about accessibility in different categories. miscellanium. Would you be willing to read the letter?
ELM: [laughing] I would absolutely be willing to do that. What if I said no? I’m not willing. No.
FK: Ah, then we would have to fight.
ELM: [laughs] So, miscellanium writes:
“I just thought it’d be worth sharing a little bit about being deaf in fandom, because I feel like it’s something that gets overlooked, even in fandom discussions about accessibility (which usually focus on things like image descriptions). It’s easy to not realize just how reliant a lot of fan culture can be on audio, and it doesn't always impact my enjoyment of fandom, but it does make it very different in places.
“Having so much of fandom life be online/text-based these days is great for me, but there's still gaps that can make it difficult to really share in the same fandom energy as other people. If an actor’s filmography has some more obscure stuff that was never released with captions, I'm either at the mercy of people who take the time to caption it (for free or for money) or I just can never discuss that stuff with fans.
“I was part of ‘Welcome to Nightvale’ fandom for a bit when it was just starting out, but I quit because I felt it was unfair of the writers to not release transcripts. They shouldn't have relied on fans to do that, especially since the episodes weren’t improvised, and also relying on fans meant there would be a delay between episode releases and my being able to actually listen and follow along with the script, so I was basically missing out on all the most potent discussions of the latest developments. Even if the fans I did speak with were sweet, it was still pretty demoralizing overall and not worth staying in that space.
“If someone is referencing a song that would have gotten a lot of airtime on the radio, that reference will go over my head, and when a lot of fandom is about shared references, well.... You can see how that might make me feel excluded pretty quickly, even in spaces where I’m the same age group as everyone else. Just the other day I was chatting with someone who referenced an Eminem song, and I had no idea what they were talking about, which derailed the conversation in an embarrassing way.
“Even though I’ve made AMVs/fanvids in the past, they’re often inaccessible to me when made by other people—not always, because I can look up the lyrics, but if the vid artist doesn’t note the song information then I’m out of luck. (And if the lyrics just aren't available online, then...) Sharing TikToks is the same problem unless they’re hard captioned. I’ve defaulted to blocking posters of fancams on Twitter, because in my experience, they never list this information and it’s just a waste of my time and bandwidth. They could post a gif for the same effect without being as annoying. Filking isn’t as common now, as far as I know, but again, if the lyrics aren’t posted, then it might as well not exist for me.
“It also limits me going to conventions—before the pandemic, I enjoyed going to cons but didn’t do it as often as I could, because either the con would be too small to budget for interpreters (meaning all discussion panels or anything being shown in English were off limits to me) or I’d have to be strategic about which panels to attend because of the limited interpreter availability. I’d also have to make sure I had a friend with me so I wouldn’t miss any important PA announcements or anything like that. A lot of people make connections (friendly or professional) at conventions, and that’s basically not an option for me.
“Thanks, miscellanium.”
FK: I mean, great point.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah.
FK: I know deaf people, but it hadn’t occurred to me until just now, I’ve rarely heard deaf people being discussed in fandom except in, you know, convention accessibility contexts. And in convention accessibility contexts, in my experience, it’s almost always been a question of, “How much money can we scrape together? Is it worth it? Do we actually have someone who’s deaf who’s coming? We need to find out ahead of time, because then we can try to prioritize—” You know what I mean?
ELM: Mm-hmm.
FK: And that’s it. And that’s actually a lot. I mean, it hadn’t occurred to me, like, of course you could watch fanvids with the lyrics, if the lyrics are available, if you can get captioning for them, right?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I definitely have heard people talking about the transcript situation, but also that’s more broadly about podcasts, right? You know?
FK: Yeah, yeah. I mean, of course I’d heard about that.
ELM: Yeah. And that’s interesting to me, too. There are—God, what NPR show was I just looking at, and they didn’t have transcripts, and I was just like, “That’s…what are my pledge dollars going for? [laughs] This can’t be that hard.” Or I was looking at, I think it was This American Life, and they had a note that their transcripts were mostly auto-generated, so there might be errors, and it’s like, “You don’t make that many episodes. I think you could have someone proofread this.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I’m not saying this to pat ourselves on the back, but we do produce a transcript for these episodes every time, and it takes a few hours to proofread it against the transcriptionist, just to make sure they heard all the words correctly. But it’s a few hours to make sure you have something solid, not just for accessibility, but that exists written, on the internet, you know what I mean? That’s, like—I don’t really understand how podcasters—in fandom and elsewhere, but we’re talking about fandom here—don’t just think of that as part of making the product.
FK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that for a lot of people, there’s a level of effort that they’re willing to go to, and they just make it past the making the podcast, because it is a lot of work, right? You know what I mean? And then it’s like, oh, they don’t see the transcript as a central part of it. So then if that feels like it’s too hard, it gets pushed to the wayside. And that’s not right. We should view them as, like, if you’re gonna do an image, you should have an image description. If you’re gonna do a podcast, you should have a transcript.
ELM: Right. And not to belabor this, too, but I also—it’s worth pointing out, transcriptions, in our experience, you know, mostly I’ve heard from people saying, “I appreciate this, because I just—I’m not a listener.” Right? They can hear. But they just don’t process audio that way.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Or maybe they’re not an English speaker as their first language, and we speak quickly, we speak colloquially, in an American, extremely online way, right? And it’s much easier to see that written down. Or, like, my parents watch with subtitles, you know?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I think a lot of people are doing that now, because they just find it a lot easier to process.
FK: I always watch with subtitles.
ELM: You watch with subtitles?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: I didn’t know that about you.
FK: Yeah, well, I don’t do it all the time, but whenever I’m watching on my own I do, yeah.
ELM: Fascinating. Yeah.
FK: It’s just easier. I love—the thing that I love about it is, I can actually remember the characters’ names when I watch with subtitles, because I see them written, and it really helps me remember, like, who they all are.
ELM: Brains are so different. I’m so—for context, as Flourish knows, I am so audio—like, I listen to—I get all my news from the radio, right? And it just sticks in my head. Like, I hear everything, so that’s very interesting.
FK: I find that wild, because it goes in one ear, and out the other.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: In fact, I love listening to audiobooks, but as you are quickly discovering, I’m not the most reliable person. If you asked me what happened in an audiobook, sometimes I’m like, [shruggie noise].
ELM: Yeah, and that’s so hard when Louis de Pointe du Lac is such an unreliable narrator, and then you’re an unreliable narrator to me.
FK: It is, isn’t it? [ELM laughs] OK, OK. We should get on to the next person, also relevant to what we’ve been talking about. This is from Bodge.
“I am a fan with both physical and learning disabilities. I have a back injury that limits the feeling in my left foot and pain down my left leg. I will say that when I was learning to deal with the early years after my accident, the Marvel character Hawkeye was learning to deal with his deafness, so fandom helped me with my transition.
“I also have dyslexia and a sequencing disorder, and this has kept me out of fan spaces. Tumblr offers limited fonts and background color on mobile, and that makes it impossible to read. My main fandom now is centered in Tumblr, and even in the places I can read, includes many links and discussions about things that are on Tumblr. The only thing that’s keeping me active in the fandom are friends that copy things into DMs or Docs that I can change the font. My learning disability has been getting worse because of post-concussion issues.
“Lastly, I have PTSD (many people who have chronic pain have PTSD) so I am more likely to leave a fandom over a website responding to me with ‘we don’t offer serif fonts, because people don’t need them’ (something I hear as ‘you don’t have a real problem, you just need to try harder’) than other people.”
And that’s from Bodge.
ELM: Bodge, I really appreciate—similar to the last letter, I feel like these are really, you know, I don’t want to say that disabled people should have to make these kind of—you know what I mean? Say, “Oh, you need to tell me all the ways that, you know—” But I do feel like it’s illuminating for people who don’t have these experiences. There’s so many things that you’re not thinking about. And if you work in web development, you should be thinking about them, right?
FK: Yes, you should.
ELM: I can say, as someone who has been working in web development for the last few years, you know, any designer who’s even halfway decent—this is a core part of their job, right? You know? And it’s not an afterthought, you know? But you see all over the web people thinking they’re doing it for the vibes, right? They’re prioritizing—it’s cooled off, now, but, like, 10 years ago, just going wild with, like, just flashy stuff—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: That made it impossible for anyone who couldn’t consume it in exactly the way that the people making it could consume it, you know? And the idea that you can’t offer different fonts to make it easier on people with, again, probably different and conflicting reasons why—you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: Because brains are different and physicalities are different, or whatever.
FK: You can’t even write it in a way that would let someone change the fonts, you know? By, like, forcing CSS—
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah, not that complicated.
FK: You know, like—
ELM: It’s just that you don’t want to, because you have, you know, you made a design decision, and that’s not what’s in it, right? And it’s like—
FK: Right.
ELM: This doesn’t hurt anyone. Just do it.
FK: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it quickly runs into people yelling about things like, you know, brands and their look, and this and that. And it’s just like, “Decenter yourself for 0.1 seconds.” [ELM laughs] You know?
ELM: So bringing it back to fandom, though, as Bodge does here, you know—and I think in both of these letters, talking about the labor then that friends have to do within fandom to, like, you know, act as that go-between, right? I mean, I feel like that’s a theme that we’ve been seeing throughout, and while it’s great, you know, it’s so hard because it’s like, fandom is now really tethered to these huge platforms in particular, right? And so—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —it’s much harder to make fan spaces customizable, right? Bringing up the Reversi skin on the AO3, there’s skins made for dyslexics too, right? You know, like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —where they change the way—beyond the font, even changing the way it’s displayed in general, because AO3 is pretty stripped down, and so it’s easy to skin.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But, Tumblr?
FK: Ehh…[laughs]
ELM: And Tumblr, even—I remember very distinctly, you know, they introduced—they changed colors, and it was, like, not to bring myself into this again, but it was too intense for me to look at. It hurt me to look at Tumblr, and I was like, “Maybe I’ll just power through this.” And then thankfully they introduced a few other ones, including a low-contrast mode. But it was just like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: The fact that I was like, “Oh my God, maybe I’m just gonna not use Tumblr again and have to not do fandom on Tumblr, because I literally—I don’t wanna—it’s not—these gifs aren’t worth getting a headache every single time, that lasts for hours,” you know?
FK: Absolutely. I think that what this really brings home to me is how, because of there being so many overlapping disabilities, and people having such different needs, everybody actually needs to take part in making things more accessible for other people. And when you do that, you’re doing a good thing, and you should feel good about yourself, right? Instead of framing it as, like, “I resent doing X thing. I resent the fact that I have to do this—”
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: “—I resent the fact that I have to do that.”
ELM: “Ugh, another step. Ruins my aesthetic.” Yeah.
FK: You know, I mean—Right. Right. I mean, I think about how there’s a lot of research that says, that it feels good when you, like, do an act of kindness or charity, and I really—I wanna work to make sure that whenever I do those little things that sometimes I, like everybody else, feel grouchy about, I wanna reframe that and think, “No, I’m not grouchy about this. I’m happy that I’m getting the opportunity to make something more accessible for somebody else.” That’s really cheesy, but I feel like it’s—I dunno. Like, I wanna do that.
ELM: I didn’t know you got grouchy about it. [laughs]
FK: Well, sometimes! Sometimes I’m like, “I just wanna throw up a picture.” You know what I mean? Like, “I don’t wanna bother doing a—” You know?
ELM: Sure. Yeah. And I think that—
FK: “I’m in a hurry.”
ELM: I’ll be the first to admit, you know, like, I don’t always cap—I mean, I’m really trying now, but, you know—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —in the past I haven’t always alt texted my—and obviously, like, I’m reblogging things on Tumblr all day, everyday—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: —and most of them have no alt text whatsoever, right? And, like—
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: You know, so it’s like, yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of us have a lot of space to try a little more.
FK: Yeah. All right, well, may I ask you to read our next letter?
ELM: I’d love to do that. So this is from Julia, and I will say, clarifying one thing up at the front, this is a first-person narrative of her teenage self. She is in her 20s now. She’s not 17 years old, currently. Just wanted to put that out there.
FK: OK. Good to know.
ELM: This is a reflection.
FK: All right.
ELM: OK. So Julia writes:
“I am 17 years old, and I am attending my first Bruce Springsteen concert. Bruce usually performs for over three hours, and so my dad and I are on the platform reserved for audience members with disabilities: my legs can’t hold me up for three hours. Most people on the platform are thrice my age. When Bruce performs some of my favorite songs, I feel elated. During ‘Born to Run’ my voice gives out because I’m singing along so loudly. I don’t think about the fact that I, myself, cannot run at all. I look down at the people below, dancing and jumping up and down, people my own age on their functioning legs, and I don’t think any of them could possibly be any happier than me.
“That same year, I am at an Elvis Costello concert and this time I am on my feet, clutching the edge of the stage for support and carefully shifting my weight from my better leg to my worse leg to the beat of the music. At the opening notes of my favorite song, my system floods with adrenalin, and I start jumping up and down feverishly, still clutching the edge of the stage to hold myself upright. It feels as though I have transcended my body, my body which is so flawed and limited, as though the music has transported me to a place of pure sensation and joy. Still jumping, I consider the risk I am taking: the fragile joints in my ankles are creaking and protesting with every thump on the floor, but this only adds to the excitement: each leap into the air, each expression of excitement, could be the last jump I ever make. In that moment I am not a disabled person, because I am not a person at all: I am only a fan. When the concert ends, when the high goes down, I almost crumple to the floor and find my legs wrecked with exhaustion, but it was still worth it.
“Concert spaces are not built for me: they do not allow audience members to transfer from sitting down to jumping up within the timeframe of the concert. You choose your role, the excited fangirl or the person with the disability, and you are consigned to it until the end of the show. No matter how strongly you are overcome with the desire to dance or to rest your legs, you’re stuck. I always have to make this choice, and it rarely feels like I made the right one.
“This adds an edge of anxiety to the fannish experience of live music. At the same time, other, often online, spaces in fandom allow me to lose this anxiety, to forget about my physical otherness or limitations through my favorite songs or stories. I turn to fanfiction to facilitate this forgetting. I go online to escape the frustrating, painful confines of my body. Fanfiction about disability usually hits too close to home. Instead, I read fic that explores the experience of alienation, isolation and otherness in other contexts, almost like reading metaphors of what it feels like to be me. In reading and writing such fanfiction, and in my membership in fan communities, I become most myself.”
FK: That’s so beautiful. I am so, so glad that Julia wrote in with that.
ELM: This is so [laughs]—all our letters are great. This is so beautifully written, and I would love, if people want to write us this kind of, like, fiction-y, narrative—it’s not fiction, obviously, memoiristic narrative, you know, like, I would really be down to get more letters like this.
FK: Oh my goodness, absolutely. And—OK, I particularly wanted to put it here, because I feel like it just speaks so perfectly to what our next anchor guest is gonna be speaking about. They really, you know, march together totally. Would it be OK if we just moved on to the next anchor guest, and sort of had—because they just—they match.
ELM: [laughs] Right. So why they match is because our final anchor guest is Valerie Gritsch, and she is a fan studies scholar, but she’s also the president of Half Access, which is a nonprofit dedicated to making live music accessible. So it’s literally about this topic.
FK: All right, let’s call her up.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, welcome, Valerie!
Valerie Gritsch: Hey, thank you for having me.
ELM: Thanks so much for coming on. We’re really excited to talk with you. So, to start things off, I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your fannish background and, specifically, you know, in the theme, or the spirit of this episode, like, how that intersects with disability.
VG: Sure. So I have always been a chaotic music fan. Music is everything to me. It’s what keeps me going and, especially live music. When I was 16 years old, I hurt my back, and I had herniated discs, and I would go to physical therapy after school, and then go straight to a concert afterwards, and undo basically all the work I did in physical therapy.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, that sounds like a very 16-year-old choice. I salute you.
ELM: Oh no. [laughs]
VG: Yeah. Like, “No, I’m still gonna go in the mosh pit, and I’m still gonna, you know, be on the barricade and have thousands of people crushing up against me and think it’s fine for my back.” Spoiler alert, it wasn’t fine! And [laughs] a few years after that I had my first spinal surgery. It helped for a little bit. I still kept going to shows. [FK laughs] I tried to be more careful and mindful of my body and limitations that were now on it, as a disabled person going to concerts and whatnot.
But I continued to get worse, and I developed other comorbidities, like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and other autoimmune diseases that have nothing to do with pain, thank God. [laughs] But it was just steadily declining and getting less mobile, less able to enjoy live music in the way that I had previously and that most people do. So I individually was having a lot of arguments with booking agents and promoters and venue managers, trying to find a way to go to a concert and not die, essentially. Or not die actively at the scene and in the days afterwards.
And then in 2017, I found out about Half Access, which is the nonprofit I now work with. I’m serving as president of the board for them, and they are dedicated to making live music accessible. So we have a database of information that is crowdsourced that tells you anything you might need to know about access needs at a music venue. And that’s really helpful, because it’s taking people like me, who’s doing all of that independent work to figure out if I can go to a concert and survive, and it’s collecting it all, so that my knowledge is not just my knowledge. It’s now available for anyone who needs that information, because unfortunately, venues do not willingly share that information on their own websites, because that would make too much sense. And this way we can kind of help one another just try to navigate a space that should be accessible, because music is something that can touch so many different people in so many different areas of life, and it’s very, um, gatekept, almost, from people with disabilities.
FK: Wow, that—I mean, this is just showing that this has never been a problem for me. It really surprises me, although I guess it doesn’t when I think about it too hard, that it’s so hard to get that information. It seems like such a basic thing that you could just put on a website. Even if there were multiple setups for the space, right? You would normally, like—places know what is there. That’s just wild.
VG: It just doesn’t occur to people to be like, “Oh, we have a restroom, and there is an accessible stall, but it’s up a flight of stairs, and you can only get there by the flight of stairs.” So it’s like, “Well, that doesn’t do anyone who needs a mobility aid any favors. Thank you so much.” This venue, you know, the main space is, again, up a fight of stairs, there’s no elevator. Your website doesn’t tell anyone that. A fan gets there and they cannot climb a flight of stairs for whatever reason. Cool. Are you gonna refund them now? Like, what is the protocol?
And then, if you wanna try and be a bitch, like I am, and be like, “Hello, the ADA is over 30 years old. You are violating the federal law,” [laughs] usually they will give me a chair, because I can’t stand for long periods of time, now that I’m two spinal surgeries in and use mobility aids and everything. Half the time they will give me a chair that is in the back, and I generally go to general admission shows, so everyone is standing in front of me. I have a fantastic view of everybody’s asses, and, you know, the sound is bad because I’m lower than everybody else, I can’t see the stage, I’m in danger because there’s nothing separating me from the rest of the crowd, and, like, all it takes is one crowd-surfer going the wrong way, and I’m out. [laughs] I am down for the count. And they just—they don’t care, because they’re showing that disabled people are not welcome in their space, so disabled people aren’t going to their space.
ELM: Do you feel that, with music venues, are significantly worse than other kinds of public spaces? Because, you know, I’m thinking about—you know, accessible seating areas in theaters and stuff like that, and obviously it varies widely, but, like, you know, in a lot of theaters I’ve been to, it’s up front, very central, very set aside, like, plenty of space. And I haven’t had the experience of being a wheelchair user and using those spaces, so they might not be good. But it does seem like with a lot of theaters in particular, maybe sports venues—
VG: It really depends.
ELM: —there has been, you know—purposeful.
VG: Yeah.
ELM: You think it even varies a lot for that, and not just—
VG: Yeah, and especially with arenas, for instance, which are, you know—most of the time, they’re set aside for sporting events and then concerts just co-opt them here and there.
ELM: Sure.
VG: It’s such a small percentage of the seating that is available is set aside for ADA.
FK: Hmm.
ELM: Hmm.
VG: And if they sell out of ADA, you are shit out of luck. Also, most of the time at arena shows, they’ll have the floor be general admission or even seating—
FK: Right.
VG: —but if you ask for ADA, they’re still gonna stick you all the way in the back.
ELM: Mmm.
VG: And if you’re lucky, you’ll get a raised platform to sit on, so that you can actually see the things that are happening. Most of the time, they just don’t care. It’s upsetting, and it makes you not want to go out and participate in the things you want to do. Like, I live in New York City, so I’m very fortunate to be around so many Broadway theaters. Half of the Broadway theaters are historic buildings. They’re grandfathered in. They don’t need to make accessibility construction. And I go to see Hamilton, and their idea of an ADA section is one tiny half of a row in the back of the orchestra, with just normal chairs, if you need a chair and you don’t have a wheelchair. And it’s like, “Well, this is OK, but it’s still not great.” [laughs] So it really depends on the venue and how new it is, how willing they are to actually construct their spaces with disabled people in mind.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I know a little bit about the rules around this in New York, because my church went through a big process to sort of try to become accessible, and it seems like there’s so much legislative stuff that also needs to happen to make that process easier on buildings, which is obviously a cop-out, right? Like, because you can still do it. It’s such a hard question, right? Because it’s like, well, there’s first of all, people’s unwillingness to do it. And then there’s all these legal roadblocks when you talk about historic places and things like that to doing it, right? It’s such a sticky problem, and what you’re doing sounds incredible, but it must be really frustrating, also, because there must be so many venues where you’re just like, “No, it won’t work.”
VG: Yeah. You kind of have to just take whatever you can get, unfortunately. Otherwise, you know, your option is don’t go. And there’s tons of venues, especially, that I will not go to, because I know it’s not gonna be worth the hassle that I have to go through to go to a show there. I know from my own experiences, from other people’s experiences, that it’s just going to be a pain in the ass. The venue staff are gonna treat me like shit, and the crowd—the other fans are gonna treat me like shit.
FK: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna ask about. I’m thinking about some of my own experiences in fandom, and how I’ve seen music fans rally around certain, you know, things like the Harry Styles fans who are trying to get him to talk about Black Lives Matter. Has there ever been a time when able-bodied fans actually had the back of disabled fans in this way?
VG: Uh, not that I can think of, which is frustrating in its own way. And I unfortunately see this in so many—in every area of fandom I’m in. I see this with sports, I see this with music, I see this with comic cons, and any kind of media property fandom that I’m a part of. There are some people who will be really awesome, and they’re usually the people who are disabled themselves or have a loved one who is disabled. And then the vast majority is just going to be really in their own little privileged world of, “Well, I’m able-bodied and—” or “I’m not disabled enough, so it doesn’t apply to me. I don’t need to worry about that yet, so it doesn’t matter.” And they question whether you need those accommodations. They give you dirty looks for trying to get through with your mobility aid. They question the legitimacy of your need of a mobility aid, and just, like, generally are really rude. Like, they don’t hold the door open for you, or, if you’re all waiting for an elevator, they’ll, like, jump in front of you. And it’s like, “I’m wobbling here with a cane, but OK.” Just basic kind of politeness and manners just disappear in these fan spaces, I’ve noticed.
ELM: Do you feel like that’s more pronounced than in daily life? Because, you know, I’m thinking, like, it seems like there’s this baseline level of rudeness and doubt from able-bodied people around people’s accommodations, or whatever. Like, “Do you need that scooter?”
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: In the store, or whatever. That kind of thing. You know, like, obviously that low-key vibe—or maybe high-key, for some people. But, you know, if I think about a con, and people getting ma—you know, being like, “Well, I care about this so much, and now you’re just gonna cut in the line?”
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: You know? That kind of thing. Like, that very heightened possession of the fannish object that people bring to that experience and, like, kind of the narcissism people can bring to it.
VG: Exactly, yeah.
ELM: Do you know what I mean?
VG: And, you know, it transfers over with music fans who are gonna queue for hours or days to get front-row, and then, OK, but the venue for once has said, “If you need ADA, you can cut the line. You can go in first, and we’ll set you up, and then we’ll bring everybody else in.” Everybody else on that line doesn’t know that, so all they see is the broken person hobbling up to the front of the line and going in first. And they’re like, “What the hell? I’ve been here 12 hours. I’ve been here 24 hours. Why are you cutting line?” Even though I’m not on the barricade clearly. Not anymore, anyway. [laughs] But, like, clearly it’s not a competition here.
Or even, I go to Supernatural conventions, and they do the same thing, where they, like, hold me off to the side, so I don’t have to stand in the mega lines, and then they let me go in for my photo ops, or whatever. And people will be giving me dirty looks, because I’m sitting off to the side and, like, “cutting the line.” It’s like, I’m waiting the same amount of time, I’m just not having to stand in a line, in this instance. But I think it’s because that’s their fannish object. That’s what they are in love with, in whatever way, and you’re paying an exorbitant amount of money for those things, especially with conventions, that it just doesn’t matter. They just see that somebody is getting something that they feel entitled to, or getting something that they cannot get for whatever reason. So there’s this, like, bitterness, almost, involved.
FK: Yeah, this makes me think also about the way that I’ve seen some people, especially people who are really dedicated to the line—
VG: Mm-hmm.
FK: —in whatever context that is, seeing it almost as, like, an athletic contest.
VG: Mm-hmm.
FK: They who wait the longest and have the most physical—
ELM: Flourish has this—I love this framing—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: The athletic fandom, right? Like, “Well, I didn’t go to the bathroom for a whole day,” you know?
FK: Yeah! Exactly! You know?
ELM: “Look at me, I love it the most.” You know?
FK: This is legitimately something I’ve observed, is people talking about how many hours they held it or, like, whatever it is.
VG: Mm-hmm.
FK: I think that everybody is familiar with that, but then it makes me think maybe people who are really investing a lot of their identity in that are looking anybody who is—even if you might want to do that, but physically can’t—
VG: Right.
FK: —as being, like, “No, you’re not part of this contest. And this was a contest—”
VG: Yeah.
FK: “—even if you didn’t sign up for it, and no one else thinks that.” [laughs] You know?
VG: And when I was younger, I used to subscribe to that entirely. Like, my back was already fucked up, and I was still out there sitting on the fucking sidewalk for hours, like, “No, we have to be in the front row” and, you know, “you’re not gonna cut me in line, and I’m gonna be on the barricade, and screw all of you, my back’s all messed up, but I’m still here!”
FK: Yeah! Yeah. [laughs]
VG: There’s a lot to unpack in that. [laughs]
FK: Yup. [ELM laughs]
VG: But, like, it’s really this just wild mentality that you get into, when you look at fandom and you’re so entrenched in that fandom, in that, like, “I need to be the biggest fan. I need to prove it to, not just myself, but to everybody else. Everybody else has to know how big of a fan I am, because if they don’t know, then what’s the point in me doing it?”
ELM: So I’m curious, bringing it a little bit back more to your personal experience, did you go through a process of feeling like you were losing what made you a good fan, as you were physically less able to do the things that you did when you were younger? Like, is that something you had to reconcile with and personally reframe?
VG: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I always kind of prided myself that I was the dedicated sort of fan, especially with music. That when my favorite bands came through to town, I was at every show. If they were someone I really loved, I went to multiple shows, and I traveled, and I would find a way to get there.
And that was a lot easier before I became as disabled as I am right now, because, you know, options were cheaper for traveling. I could still navigate subways that weren’t accessible. I could still sit on a bus that was an eight-hour bus ride from state to state. If I did that now, I would not be able to walk at the end of that bus ride, because it would just cramp my muscles up so badly.
So then it becomes more expensive for me to do the same things I used to do. So if I could still make that journey, maybe now I need to take an Amtrak train, because they’re bigger, they’re more comfortable, I can move around easier. But now I’m spending more money to prove to myself and make myself feel better, in my identity as a fan, that I can still do the things and support the artists I love in this way that I’ve always kind of put in my brain that I need to do. No one ever told me that. It was just, “This is what I do. This is how I prove that I love this band so much and I want to see them all the time.”
And not being able to do those things or having to pick and choose what I do for financial reasons, for accessibility reasons, what have you, that all was really rough. And it’s similar to how I felt at the beginning of the pandemic, with, “OK, there’s no live music. Who the hell am I, if I’m not going to these concerts and I’m not—” You know, I used to go to, like, five concerts a month in the good days. So it’s like, “What do I do now? [laughs] Who am I?”
ELM: What did you do now?
VG: Panicked a lot. And— [all laugh]
FK: Relatable.
ELM: Yeah, there were other things to occupy you, you know? [laughs]
VG: Yeah. Panicked a lot, but, um, one thing that the pandemic did do right was that it brought livestreaming to the forefront. So that made music way more accessible. And I’m very sorry and upset to see that’s kind of going away now, because people are convinced the pandemic is over, which obviously it isn’t. But, like, it is the easiest thing in the world to do a livestream and there’s so many fans that, in many cases, are housebound for whatever reason, or just cannot get to a show for—you know, they don’t have transportation to the venue. They don’t have the financial ability to spend that extra money it needs. The subway may not go there, so you have to take a taxi. A taxi’s way more expensive than the subway.
And, like, that’s an access thing involved in your fandom that no one ever thinks about, but by making livestreaming available, suddenly it’s more of a level playing field. And more and more artists are stopping their livestreaming, so it’s like, “Oh, you’re killing me. You were so close to getting to the point and making it more equitable for everyone, and then you’re like, psych! [ELM & VG laugh] It was cool for a year!’”
ELM: I wonder—I mean, it’s probably too early to say, because I feel like the entertainment industry, the film and television industry, has been going through kind of swings back and forth on this, you know? And now—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —I feel like we’re seeing a lot of experiments about dual—I mean, Flourish, you know this better than me, but, like, you know, releasing, like—
FK: Yeah, when is it gonna release, how is it gonna go, does it get a week in the theater and then elsewhere? Like, Glass Onion is coming out, like, a month before in theaters, and then, only then streaming. Like, who knows what any of that is happening.
ELM: Right. So this hybrid model, because I think that they’ve—I get the sense that they’ve seen that cutting people off from the home viewing experience is shooting themselves in the foot, because it’s not like those people are gonna—they’re just gonna watch something else. It’s not like they’re like, “Oh, the thing I—” you know what I mean? And I wonder—
FK: Yeah, if you weren’t already gonna go to the theater to see Dune on the big screen—
VG: Right.
FK: —then you’re not going to, like, decide to do it.
ELM: I’m wondering if you’ve seen any kind of movement like that, of—I know it’s early days for the, like, quote-unquote “post-pandemic,” you know?
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: Like, in the eyes of industries, right? Do you see any of that kind of hybrid stuff coming back?
VG: Off the top of my head, I know over this past summer, the musician Frank Turner did that. He livestreamed one of the shows from his tour, and he allowed it to be replayed after the fact and things like that, and there was a live chat feature. And I think that that is something that gets overlooked, when there’s this discussion of the livestreaming. Not just anything that’s, like, video on demand, but when it’s an actual livestream, that live chat feature is so important, because to me, it gives me that community feeling that I felt at an actual music venue.
So when COVID first hit in 2020 and I was really isolated and panicking about my identity and whatnot, I could still go in a chatbox and be with the people I would have been with anyway, plus additional people who, because of the geographic limitations, I wouldn’t have been with. And, you know, we could talk during the sets and do, like, emoji clap hands and whatnot. And that was really fun, and I think that’s something that was really special that not a lot of people paid attention to, and that’s just another way to give that sense of community that we love in fandom to people who cannot go out.
So it’s really cool when artists like Frank Turner do something like that. And I hope other artists continue to do it, because I think it’s so, so special, and, like, nobody gets into fandom just because of the thing they like. You get into fandom because of that community, and if you don’t have access to that community, then what is the point of being in that fandom? [laughs]
FK: Right. That brings up two things for me. One of them is just that—and then I see the complexities here, because I also can see, like, why venues would be worried about moderation for live chats, and all of these things, you know? Which, I mean, the cost for actually streaming something can be fairly low, especially if you have a very steady camera, or whatever. But moderation is really sticky and difficult. So then I’m like, “Aw, that’s depressing, there’s all of this stuff! There’s all these barriers.” But then the other thing it makes me think about is how some of these things are—it’s the classic thing of, like, make it more accessible for disabled people and it’s actually better for all kinds of people. Thinking about how recently, Taylor Swift, I think it was, was getting kind of lambasted because all of her shows were on Fridays or Saturdays, so that no observant Jewish fans could possibly go see her—
ELM: Hmm, yeah, did you learn about that in “The Rec Center” newsletter, Flourish?
FK: I think I did! [ELM laughs] I had forgotten where I learned about it—
ELM: Sharin’ some content! [laughs]
FK: —but then you said that, and I was like, “That is where I learned about it!” Is in your newsletter, Elizabeth.
ELM: Yeah. Every single concert was a Friday or Saturday.
FK: Yeah, and then that makes me think about, you know, having, like, even if it’s a non-livestream, but maybe a replay. A set date that you still have a quote-unquote “live experience,” like, that’s huge, right?
VG: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think it’s really important because, you know, like you said, for religious reasons, for financial reasons, for ability reasons, there are so many different factors that could play into that, and it’s enjoyable to watch the thing on your own, in your home with your own friends and family, of course. It’s enjoyable to watch it on your own entirely and sing along as loud as you want, and no one’s gonna tell you to shut up because you’re singing out of key. But I think it’s way more enjoyable when you can kind of replicate that community, whether it’s actually live or after the fact. And I think a lot of people just don’t realize that that’s what fans are yearning for. Like, if you don’t give us the space to make a community, we’ll just take our, you know, ball and go to some other playground and [laughs] build it over there, someplace else and, you know, shake our fists at you.
ELM: I’m curious, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about physical mobility issues with access. I’m wondering about other disabilities. And partly—and not to center myself, but I had a concussion five years ago. Flourish gave it to me, and—
FK: That is not true! [ELM laughs] I did not give it to you. We were doing a project together, and you banged your head on something. And I will admit, I didn’t know how serious it was at the time. I have said I’m sorry a million times. I didn’t give it to you.
ELM: One of my pleasures is reminding Flourish of this experience. One of my—
FK: Because I feel so bad for how, like, I was just like, “Walk it off!” [VG laughs]
ELM: OK, all right, one of my displeasures is a lingering thing, which actually still persists, although it has improved, like, incrementally, is photosensitivity, photophobia, and, like, I can’t look at strobe lights anymore, and I can’t look at fireworks and stuff, right?
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I was never a live music person, so it’s not, like, any great loss, you know? I liked looking at fireworks. And I’m thinking about that, or I’m thinking about, you know, friends I have with auditory issues, right? Or visual issues, and stuff like that. And I’m wondering about the work your organization does, and also if there are other organizations like that, because some of that stuff to me is just like, I don’t know how you get around that. Like, I—a venue could be physically be reconfigured to put aside a safe, well-positioned space for people to be seated.
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But, like, I just could see people who wanna do strobe lights in their, like, cool music show to be like, “No. That’s what live music is. It’s strobe lights.” You know? Right? And so, like—
VG: Right.
ELM: That’s that, I’m never gonna go to one of those concerts, right? You know what I mean?
VG: So there’s an organization called L.E.A.D. DIY, and they focus specifically on photosensitivities and epilepsy. Like Half Access, the main thing they’re kind of focused on is information and informing people that this is an issue. And one thing that they do is they send out signage that the venue themselves or artists themselves could then post and say, “Hey! There’s gonna be strobe lights in effect here. There’s gonna be high strobe lights, there’s gonna be moderate strobe lights, there’s gonna be no strobe lights.”
ELM: Mmm-hmm.
VG: To post at the front door, because people don’t think to do that. So again just, like, letting people have that information so they can then make the informed choice for themselves. There are other organizations like KultureCity who work with sensory bags. So people who may get overwhelmed or need a fidget stim toy, they might need noise-canceling headphones, they can get these little bags from venues, and Coldplay actually has partnered with them for their whole tour that they’re having right now to make sure that they’re more accessible in that way. So that’s really cool that somebody as big as Coldplay is making sure that those are available to people.
And it’s so wild that people don’t realize that there’s all these other ways that disability could present itself. But it’s not that farfetched, when you realize that literally one in four people have a disability. And like you said before, Flourish, make it better for a disabled person, it’s better for literally everyone. Like, no one likes taking the stairs. Everyone loves an elevator. [ELM & FK laugh] Like, wow, that benefits everybody. [laughs] Like, curb cuts! No one wants to drag shit over a curb. Benefits everyone. So it’s really frustrating to see that these simple things, like just providing information, that literally cost venues or promoters or bands zero dollars, and they’re so resistant to even providing that bare minimum.
ELM: Yeah, I mean the, like—the idea of providing, like, you know, a stim toy or noise-canceling headphones, or whatever, is such a minimal financial commitment at the scale we’re talking.
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And just think about all the—this is pure capitalism, in a—and I’m saying this in a weird complimentary way—there’s a capitalistic opportunity, here. Like, you’re keeping out potential customers, right?
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And if you just spend a little bit of money, you could broaden your customer base. I sound like a businessman right now, but, like, it’s true. [laughs]
VG: No, exactly. It’s 25% of the population. They work jobs. The government fucks us over but we do have some spending cash. Why don’t you want us in your spaces? Why don’t you want—if you cater to us, you’re cornering quite literally the market, because no one else is catering to us. Disability intersects every single other marginalized identity. It’s the only one anyone can become a member of at any single time. And it’s stupid. It’s bad business to not cater to them.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
VG: And I don’t understand, like—who do I—which billionaire do I need to shake—
FK: Yeah.
VG: Like, please give him to me. I will shake him and yell at him. It’s fine.
ELM: You want—do you want to shake Elon Musk? Because I’d be happy if someone shook him.
VG: Yeah! Bring him out. [ELM & VG laugh]
FK: Wow.
ELM: You know, just a—[laughs]
FK: Uh, on the note of shaking Elon Musk…[ELM & VG laugh]
ELM: You know, I guess this is kind of what I was saying before, and I’ll come back to it again, and I think is what you’ve been saying all along. It’s like, it wouldn’t be that much of a financial commitment, but, like, would it ruin the vibes, right?
VG: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I feel like this is a theme that we see, I’m hearing throughout your answers, and in our other guests as well, this kind of idea of, like, making things accessible, you know, not just easier, but doable, period, for sometimes just a few people, but some portion of fans, like, “ruins” the experience of other fans. And I feel like we see this not just in the IRL spaces that we’re talking about now, but, like, we certainly see it in online spaces, too. And I’m wondering—I mean, it’s not your responsibility to tell non-disabled fans how to fix themselves. But, you know, like, I don’t know—what would you say to those people, who are like, “This is ruining my concert, or whatever, if I don’t have the, you know, freedom to—”
VG: Cope.
ELM: Yeah! [laughs] Yeah? Just deal with it.
VG: I literally tanked a virtual fan convention that I spent over a year working on with people just a week and a half ago, because they were not doing accessibility properly.
FK: Woo!
VG: They didn’t —
ELM: [laughing] Can you tell us more? You tanked it?
VG: I accidentally—like, it wasn’t my intention to tank it, but it didn’t happen. It was a Destiel-themed virtual fan convention to talk about fan creators and fic writers and artists and whatnot. I was on the planning team as their accessibility advisor. My guidelines had never changed over the year I worked with them. It was a week and a half out, and they wanted to move half of the things to Discord, where you don’t have video, you don’t have captioning built in. They were putting out posts on our official channels without alt text. They were doing just, like—it was an entire afterthought. No one else was doing accessibility. And when I pointed it out, they turned on me and said that, “Well, you need to be doing these things.” And I’m like, “No. The marketing team—”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Mm-hmm.
VG: “—who’s doing social posts needs to do alt text. It is not brain surgery. It’s not a highly skilled thing to do. [FK laughs] You describe what’s in your image.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right.
VG: “I’ve told you from day one that you should be using Zoom, because it has captioning, because you don’t want to pay for an ASL interpreter.”
FK: Yeah.
VG: “So, like, why are we suddenly on Discord?” And they wouldn’t listen to me. Then another member of the planning team was, like, ridiculously ableist and abusive towards me in DMs. They all stood by that person, and I was like, “I’m literally the president of a nonprofit for accessibility. I cannot stand by and let my name be associated with this, if this is how you’re gonna run things.”
ELM: Hmm.
VG: So I pulled out and made that all public, like, as a whistleblower, because they wouldn’t change anything. And then it all collapsed.
FK: Woo.
ELM: Wow.
VG: So that literally was a week and a half ago. [laughs]
ELM: Wow.
FK: That must have been incredibly, like, stressful and hard and—
VG: It was awful!
FK: I’m sorry—I mean, I guess I want to express, like, admiration for you standing by what mattered to you, and being like, “This matters to a lot of people.”
VG: Well, thank you. I mean—
FK: “So peace.”
VG: And I really want them to succeed, and I want it to come back when they get things done properly.
FK: Yeah.
VG: But, you know, it’s literally the bare minimum of making things accessible, and it has to be something that everyone keeps in the forefront of their mind, because like I said, it affects everybody.
FK: Mm-hmm.
VG: If it doesn’t affect you now, don’t worry, it will one day, when you get old and your body falls apart. [laughs] So it’s something that people just need to care more about and, you know, putting captions in and alt text and stuff like that is something that takes an extra minute or two out of your day, but to make it seem like it’s the end of the world to request that and that I’m ruining everybody’s fun, oh no! Like, OK, deal with it. Cope. Like, you know, how much fun am I missing out on in my daily life because I can’t do X, Y, Z? Oh, you didn’t get to do this thing. Too bad.
ELM: I really appreciate this. [VG laughs] This is a very, very strong final answer.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely.
FK: Yeah, thank you so much. Like, that’s—it’s an incredible answer, and you’ve been a wonderful guest. [all laugh]
VG: I’m glad.
[Interstitial music]
ELM: You know, I—I really appreciate Valerie’s no-fucks attitude here. I feel like this [FK laughs] a cool spirit to leave on. [laughs]
FK: Absolutely none. Extremely New York. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s why I’m like, [affecting New York accent] “Yeah! That’s right. That’s the right attitude right there.” But—
FK: Wow, what an accent.
ELM: [laughs] That’s just my spirit, deep down, so…it’s Italian-American. Anyway, because I think there’s an element to it where it’s like, you know, with all of these things, with people talking about accessibility or making spaces more welcoming or just not being ableist or whatever. There’s sometimes an element of, like, doing people a favor.
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And I don’t think—it doesn’t feel the same as, like, I don’t know, straight people feeling like they’re doing queer people a favor by just—you know what I mean? It’s just like—
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But there is something that’s, like, maybe infantilizing is the word? Like, “Oh, OK—”
FK: Hmm.
ELM: “You can’t get at this—” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I feel like a great response to that is just to be like, “Fuck you!” You know? [ELM & FK laugh] Not like, “Oh, thanks, like, sorry.” You know what I mean?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: And obviously, not everyone—it depends on your circumstances, and not everyone will have the opportunity or the privilege to be able to just say “fuck you” in some situations, right? If that's gonna, like, lead to, you know, you being unsafe in some way, you’re gonna just deal with it, right? You know?
FK: Mm-hmm.
ELM: But obviously, it’s, I think, a very important spirit that I think that abled people should just take in the spirit that it’s meant, which is just like, “No.” You know? [ELM & FK laugh] Like, “Fix this! It matters.” You know?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. I agree completely. All right, so we have one last letter, and I feel like it covers just a wide variety of things, and I think it’s a really good sort of, I don’t know. To some extent summing up, but also just touching on a lot of stuff that we’ve covered already in the past two episodes.
ELM: All right, you wanna read it?
FK: I will. All right, this is from Jessica.
“When it comes to issues of disability and ableism, fandom has a long way to go. First, I’ll outline some of my primary concerns when it comes to how fandom spaces treat physical disability (focusing on physical disability, because it’s within the realm of my own experience!) and how it’s reflected in the media that we’re so frequently fannish about.
“First off, when it comes to portrayals of disability, people hesitate to portray the truth of disability and prefer instead to tokenize it or to simply use it as angst fodder that is easily solved, usually by an able-bodied person. What I mean by the tokenization of disability is the prevalence of characters whose disability is essentially a superpower for them, or doesn’t have the same impact on their life as real-life disabled people; in treating disability as superpower, people shy away from engaging with it in a way that real people with disabilities do. This is echoed by the very media that we consume—think characters with robotic limbs that in no way impact their daily functioning (Luke Skywalker, Bucky Barnes), or disabilities that turn into superpowers in and of themselves (Matt Murdock, Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender).
“There is also a prevalence of disabilities as being an indicator of evil or an origin story of someone turning evil that people have a tendency to dismiss or argue with disabled people about it not being such a big deal after all—characters like Otto Octavius from the recent Spider-Man games, the antagonist from Detective Pikachu, the Chairman in Paprika. In my experience, fans are unwilling to grapple with their own ableism and the ableism that popular media reflects, preferring to objectify us and to outright argue with disabled fans in order to defend their favorite pieces of media, all the while fetishizing our experiences and revealing their own misguided thoughts on the matter.
“This is particularly glaring in progressive transformative fandom spaces where they spend much of their time extolling their own diversity and virtues without wanting to look deeper into the complexities that go beyond the marginalized groups that they themselves belong to. You can also see this in the way that fans grow incredibly defensive at disability activists pointing out issues endemic to some of the biggest and most popular franchises around; just recently, I watched as a disability activist on TikTok pointed out that disabled actors should be in disabled roles, even if she believes that the actor who originally portrayed them did a fantastic job. One such actor she brought up (and said she was a fan of!) was Charlie Cox, and I watched as her fellow fans mercilessly bullied her for weeks on end, resorting to bigoted opinions, such as that hiring real disabled actors would be too costly, too difficult, and that there was no way that disabled actors would be as skilled or as likeable as the likes of their able-bodied colleagues, wholly ignoring the dearth of opportunity for disabled actors. They are unreceptive to our lack of opportunities in creative fields and would rather defend a fictional disabled character than to embrace a real disabled person.
“Another such example was the huge blow to the community that was the loss of Oracle from DC Comics, as fans and the company alike agreed that Barbara Gordon was able to do more good out of her wheelchair, and that reversing what was such an incredible inspiration and gift to diversity was in fact better—and even more feminist, choosing to cloak their ableism in progressive language. The able-bodied fandom community is eager to reverse and underplay fictional disabilities in order to protect their own discomfort or to cater to their own fantasies, and it’s been very hurtful to watch this happen in real-time. People can’t seem to grasp that we are not passing personal judgment on them by critiquing nerd properties that they enjoy (and that we enjoy!) and too often resort to defensiveness instead of sitting down and listening. These attitudes are frequently portrayed in fanworks, where they’re eager to ‘fix’ disabled characters, to objectify them, or to portray physical differences as being villainous and ugly in nature.
“Similarly, I’ve seen some distressing attitudes as they arise in fan gatherings offline. I don’t go to many conventions myself, but I’ve heard some alarming stories come out of very recent conventions; wheelchair users report being physically moved out of the way or trampled in others’ eagerness to get into convention halls (i.e., people going to see Dream at Twitchcon), or exhibit little to no care about presentations and displays being moved to different halls that are not accessible for people with mobility impairments and largely being unmoved by our desire to attend the same fan events as them. Real life fan meetings do have an accessibility problem, and it’s disheartening to see how little people are willing to fight for their fellow fans.
“I am not a cosplayer myself, but I have heard similar stories from disabled cosplayers; the feeling that they are pigeonholed into cosplaying characters like Oracle or Professor X, or watching as other cosplayers don mobility aids as costume, which is a controversial topic at best, and takes advantage of accessibility measures that are not there for them at worst. I am not myself blind, but will speak on behalf of a blind fandom friend of mine that the popularity of image-based fandom has made things incredibly inaccessible to them, and efforts are not put in to help them participate in the same way.
“In terms of accessibility, if we bring up issues that impact us that happen to be perceived as critiquing a public figure that people are fans of—like when Beyonce’s team was sued for the inaccessibility of her website for blind people—then disabled people are attacked for being too sensitive in favor of a public figure who will likely never see their fans’ defense of them. We saw very similar things being brought up when it came to ableist slurs being used in song lyrics, and how so many fans who brought it up in a kindly way were attacked en masse. The song lyrics are a space with nuance—there were discussions about AAVE involved, which is not my lane—but I would have preferred to defer to Black disabled fans (like Crutches and Spice, an invaluable resource to our community) rather than attack disabled people outright.
“Those are my biggest complaints! I’d also like to touch on some of the wonderful things about being disabled in fandom as well. Fandom has been a wonderful community to get involved in—so many of us are unable to participate in real-world spaces, and to have a comfortable home in online spaces has been a source of huge comfort, community and solace for me. I know so many people who have been receptive to the issues I bring up, who will take measures to make their spaces more accessible, to be a warm place to land. I’ve seen people using transformative fiction in order to relate more deeply with characters, or to go into more detail about the realities of disability for characters whose disabilities aren’t expanded upon in canon, like hearing aids, blindness, chronic pain, and trauma, to provide guides on how to properly draw wheelchairs and other mobility aids, and people who have shared their own experiences and people who will listen. I’ve met some wonderful people who have been invaluable to my mental wellbeing in times of incredible physical isolation and whose kindness and empathy have changed my life.”
“As with all communities, there’s good and bad involved, and I’ve watched people fight for us, from the inclusion of wheelchair users in Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games, to the championing of disabled characters that mean so much to us as a community. Seeing the likes of Matt Mercer and the most mainstream nerd content creators champion us is incredibly heartwarming, and to watch the ripple effect through the entire tabletop community has been quite something to watch.
“I’ve seen art of us romanticized in ways I will never see in mainstream media, and a willingness to approach us on our own level. When it comes to venues that exist online, through text, it is the great equalizer; I get to participate in ways that feel even in ways that I will never get to in physical spaces. I often think on the history of disabled people and what an incredible privilege it is to have internet access and to belong, to have a space for myself in what would have been an incredibly lonely experience just a scant 20 years ago. To me, fandom has always been welcoming to outcasts and so in this space, the above issues aside, I get to have a space where I feel like I belong.”
ELM: What a letter, Jessica! [laughs]
FK: Yeah! You see how I felt like, you know, this is a note to end on, right?
ELM: Hittin’ everything! Yeah.
FK: What I’ve learned from all this is, it’s like, it’s totally shitty, and it’s also totally great sometimes, and both those things are living together completely.
ELM: Yeah. I think this is—there’s nothing we can add to this. I feel like this is just—this is the place to end. So—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I can’t—I’m so, so grateful for everyone who participated in this and gave their time. I’m very—I don’t know. I’m hopeful that there were experiences in this episode that will resonate with, you know, listeners and readers of the podcast.
FK: Me too. Me too. I also—I mean, I agree.
ELM: [laughs] I was like, ‘What are our takeaways?” And then I was like, “No no no, we’re done. We don’t need—” I feel like we—
FK: We’re done. Those are the takeaways.
ELM: We gave some takeaways throughout. I don’t think you need more of our opinions on these subjects, so absolutely people should please continue to share, you know—we are open to more letters, to more voicemails. Fansplaining at gmail.com or 1-401-526-FANS, so we can continue to include disabled fandom voices in future episodes, because I hope this is only the beginning of this conversation on the podcast.
FK: Yeah. Absolutely. We’ve had disabled fans on the podcast before, and this is not the only time that we want to talk about disability, you know?
ELM: Yeah yeah, no, obviously, [laughs] we’ve had many disabled fans—
FK: I’m just saying! You know, like, I wanna make it clear in case somebody is coming here, and they’re like, “Oh, this is a new podcast—”
ELM: Oh, yeah. All right. Totally fair.
FK: This is not our only, like—we’ve done it before, we wanna do it again.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: We also want to highlight issues of disability as well as all other kinds of things that you might be interested in talking about.
ELM: This is a good clarification, yes. I’m just saying that, if anyone has any thoughts specifically about these subjects—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —absolutely. Please, you’re highly encouraged to contact us and share them.
FK: For sure. All right, well. [ELM laughs] Lovely talking with you, Elizabeth.
ELM: Yeah yeah! Pretty great, Flourish.
FK: I will see you next episode!
ELM: [laughing] OK, bye!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]