1. Introduction
[1.1] I have been presenting my work on podfic—fan fiction read aloud and recorded like an audiobook—to diverse scholarly audiences for half a decade. Every time I share my research with fan scholars, at least one person makes a casual comment to the effect of "I listened to a podfic once; it actually wasn't bad." These careless remarks reveal a complex suite of assumptions: that most podfic is bad and most podficcers are inexpert, and further, that it is a compliment to imply a few works in the genre are acceptable according to some objective standard of quality. From those involved in podfic circles, I may receive annoyed or defensive responses from a different angle: "The podficcers that I listen to never have background noise like you were talking about" and "it's insulting for you to say that podficcers aren't good at their art."
[1.2] Regardless of their stance toward podfic, all of these speakers illuminate a shared underlying hierarchy of assumptions regarding what good sound is, how to achieve it, and a hegemonic compulsion that striving for this so-called good sound is the only sensible goal of artistic production. Many fans evidently accept these limited notions of mainstream sonic aesthetics as the only acceptable, real, or professional marker of quality. However, the quiet inverse of these comments—that there is bad podfic or unskilled podficcers—also confirms that there are podfic spaces where these criteria cannot maintain a stranglehold. Sometimes, this is because of the realities of amateur production: Many podficcers simply do not have the experience or equipment to meet professional audio aesthetic standards. More radically, there are podficcers who resist the desire to meet these standards, rejecting the compulsion to accept this single set of sonic norms as the only thinkable kind, instead actively forwarding different sonic aesthetic imaginaries.
[1.3] I propose that these different sonic imaginaries could be a form of digital disability aesthetics. The concept of disability aesthetics, developed by Tobin Siebers, is "not only a critique of the reliance of cultural and aesthetic ideals on the healthy and able body but an appreciation of alternative forms of value and beauty based on disability" (2010, 57). Disability aesthetics are not discrete styles or identifiable by the mere presence of disabled bodies in art; rather, disability aesthetics are critical disabled modes of production and evaluation relating formal elements, bodies, and affects. This approach lets us recognize how cultural imaginaries connect literal human disablement with symbolic disablement, meaning ableism and disabled resistance in art are not determined by the dis/ability identity of artists or audiences. For instance, a damaged statue like the Venus de Milo can evoke human injury, pain, and impairment, speaking to an established cultural imaginary of wholeness as ideal and brokenness as inferior rooted in ableist ideology. I argue that disability aesthetics also manifest in digital art. For instance, the snuffling of a service animal picked up in a podfic recording could be perceived as disabling the quality of the sonic art. Conversely, we could critically read it as a result of disabled creative practice materially encoded into the art object: a digital disability aesthetic.
[1.4] We can locate aesthetic operations of disability ideology throughout fandom. For instance, fans are often accused of being lazy as they ruin canon with their transformative works, terms which gain their power from ableist imaginaries of productivity and health. Rather than arguing that fans aren't sick and their works aren't weaker versions of the original—and therefore should not be disqualified from aesthetic consideration on the basis of having disabled aesthetics—let us reject the ableist aesthetic standard by which this critique operates. We must refuse the assertion that bad bodies produce bad art, that bad art reflects badly on our bodyminds, and that there is such a thing as bad bodies or art. Many fans are sick, literally, and we could embrace our "sickening" affect and processes as a crip calling card, as Halberstam (2011) encourages us to explore the possibilities offered by queer failure. In contrast to art that merely evokes disability, my project seeks politically effective digital disability aesthetics that enliven disability access, engage nonnormative bodyminds, and force audiences to confront ideologies of ability.
[1.5] I develop Siebers's (2010) disability aesthetics beyond the confines of fine art and professional creation to fandom, where amateur communities of makers create digital art such as podfic. Fandom is usefully positioned to inform broader creative communities in cultivating critical disability aesthetics. Fans are greatly concerned with bodies, from more abstract explorations of embodiment through fan fiction (Coppa 2014) to material practices such as cosplay (Lamerichs 2011) and the accessibility negotiations of convention attendance (Howell 2024). Fandom's historical attention to the creative relations between bodies makes it well suited to potentially disrupt ableist aesthetics, encourage disabled creativity, and improve online accessibility practices. I have argued elsewhere that the genre of podfic structurally encourages accessibility in fandom by providing an audio version of existing text (Riley 2024). With this project, I narrow my case study to oral notfic, podfic that is exclusively aural storytelling with no corresponding textual component.
[1.6] Oral notfic is not unique or the only place in fandom or digital culture where we could locate disability aesthetics, making my findings usefully transportable to other online communities interested in pursuing disability access and art. Oral notficcers' embrace of a fully sonic medium against the grain of ocularcentric culture produces interesting implications for disabled creators and disability access, which motivated my choice to focus on this subgenre. The sonic-only fan work complicates my past claim that podfic is structurally accessible, as oral notfic may not be accessible to Deaf or Hard of Hearing audiences, among others. However, oral notfic's medium specificity allows it to attend to a different, radical critique of disability art and the in/accessibility of creative practices. I first explore the disability literature I am bringing into conversation with fandom, then introduce my method and case study, then analyze the sample of oral notfics and discuss digital disability aesthetics through four dimensions: subjective accessibility, critical inaccessibility, creative process, and misfit aesthetics.
2. Complicating accessibility, cripping aesthetics
[2.1] Working from Alison Kafer's (2013) model, I understand disability as political and relational, recognizing the social construction of disability and ableism while maintaining space for the material realities of impairment as experienced in the "bodymind" (Price 2015). Crip theory highlights disability's intersection with other identities, especially queerness, reclaiming and mobilizing the term "crip" as the verb "to crip" (McRuer 2006). This allows scholars to build on queer theory and examine how people actively crip texts, ideas, and systems. Disability accessibility must include what Elizabeth Ellcessor (2016) terms cultural accessibility, where media are not just technically usable by disabled audiences but emotionally and politically relevant and inclusive of diversity. In contrast to this disability justice approach, Desiree Valentine (2020) identifies "accommodationist access" as the hegemonic imaginary that reduces access to "a practical and isolated thing or event" (78). The Borg Collective, an online disability creative group, similarly suggests the word "compliancism" to describe the noxious experience of accessibility imagined only as a technical obligation (2024).
[2.2] John Lee Clark (2021) critiques this dominant neoliberal formulation of legally compliant accessibility as just another iteration of what Siebers (2008) terms the "ideology of ability," a baseline assumption that able-bodiedness is always preferable. The concept of providing access implies a provider and a recipient, an active able creator meeting a passive disabled audience seeking to join the able world. Clark argues that the conventional model of accessible versioning, such as producing transcripts of audio works like podcasts for those with hearing impairments, can actually hamper disabled people's efforts to engage the world on their own terms and so enacts ableist harm. Access workers confirm that the ideology of ability shapes their labor: Georgina Kleege (2016) argues that the professional mandate for "objectivity" in access description of visual media actively disrupts disabled audiences' access to essential narrative elements and affective meanings by forbidding the necessary human work of interpretation by the describer. For instance, workers recording audio descriptions of films are discouraged from noting an actor's race or body size as these are perceived as unacceptably subjective descriptors, producing an infantilizing and extremely circumscribed so-called access measure. This assumption that subjectivity works against accessibility condescends to disabled audiences' capacity to interpret accessible media versions as texts themselves.
[2.3] These radical crip perspectives on accessibility reveal obscured interrelations between aesthetics and ableism. The aesthetics of ableism have historically manifested in very concrete political and legislative violence, such as the "ugly laws" forbidding disabled people from existing in certain public spaces (Schweik 2010), the mobilization of visible disability or difference used to sort immigrants by their bodies at Ellis Island (Fox 2021), and Nazi vilification of "degenerate" art as symbolic of inferior disabled bodies (Siebers 2010). Contemporary professional design practices still prioritize "concealment" (Pullin 2009, 23), reinforcing the stigma of disability by attempting to make its accommodations invisible. Although modern art draws greatly from the rich aesthetic and rhetorical imaginary that is disability and impairment, it does not automatically follow that these artistic trends actually empower the real people whose bodies supply these images of "deviance" (Silvers 2002, 230).
[2.4] Ableism obscures disability as a critical political framework—rather than an immutable biological or medical reality—and so it requires effort to "elaborate disability as an aesthetic value in itself worthy of future development" (Siebers 2010, 3). In the realm of sonic aesthetics, commercial audio standards of "cleanliness" reflect gendered, classed, racialized, and dis/abled notions of what constitutes good sound versus bad noise (Stoever 2016). Disability can work at angles to these cultural biases to generate new modes of communication and disrupt what it means to sound or speak "good" (Davidson 2022). Disability pushes the field of aesthetics to recognize "the infrastructure of care, collaborative labor, and political economy" as fundamental aspects of art making, especially for disabled participants (Mills and Alexander 2022). Disability aesthetics are therefore not a static style but a suite of broader interventions that center disabled creators, attend to nonnormative embodiments throughout creative processes, and expand and redefine traditional modes and goals of artistic production.
[2.5] In this aesthetic study, I mobilize Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's (2011) crip theory of the "misfit." The disabled misfit reorients our perspective away from the alleged error of disability and toward how ableism systematically devalues that which does not fit within preexisting ideological and material structures. The misfit celebrates the value produced via the subjugated knowledges of disabled people who have learned how to live within these inhospitable environs. These knowledges include everyday crip practices of media making, which can render legible the obscured operations of ableism in physical environs and cultural imaginaries (Dokumaci 2018). Given the continued dearth of disabled creators in professional media spaces (Ellis 2016), it is more urgent than ever to celebrate amateur disabled creators and unearth the presence of disability in everyday digital media, gesturing to fandom's utility as a case study. The infamous catchphrase "fandom is beautiful" orients fandom's good qualities toward the aestheticized—looking good more strongly implied than doing good. An ableist valuation of capacity completes the framework by drawing together the looking and the doing as one and the same: Fandom is beautiful because it does good, or conversely, fandom is ugly because it does evil (Stanfill 2024). Yet, fandom also has the potential to disrupt these ableist aesthetic logics, mobilizing community-based tactics of crip resistance (Leetal 2019). With this study of digital aesthetics, I reveal how fan practices like oral notfic can contribute creatively to disabled resistance online.
3. Disability as method and the case study of oral notfic
[3.1] Virtually every scholarly work on disability aesthetics has taken for granted that its natural subject is fine art (Fox 2021). I take a cue from Halberstam's (2011) focus on pop culture to argue that the everyday digital creations of fans offer more widely applicable points of development and use of disability aesthetics than singular, established fine art pieces. The power of diversity against hegemony suggests that politically potent disability aesthetics need not, indeed, should not, cohere into one recognizable thread. Instead, disability theory suggests attention to process over product. My sample includes diverse formal sonic aesthetics even between works with apparently similar structures, such as the totally raw sound file and sometimes difficult-to-follow group chatter of the "Star Wars/Harry Potter Mash-up" (cantarina et al. 2018) compared to the highly edited style of "Trolley is a TARDIS: an Oral Not!Fic" (aethel-multivoice et al. 2019), which seamlessly blends manifold music and TV sound clips alongside participant discussion. Yet, consistent elements of digital disability aesthetics as realized through crip processes manifest throughout these formally divergent works. My case study therefore seeks not to identify a singular digital disability aesthetic but to explore what oral notfic offers to the development of digital disability aesthetics.
[3.2] Julie Avril Minich's (2016) "disability as method" allows us to study disability as a process rather than a mere object. In this article, I mobilize disabled methodology to conduct a crip aesthetic analysis on my sample of podfic. This does not mean scraping audio content for signs of marginalized identity such as a hormone-cracking voice or a stutter, which only reinforce normative imaginaries of queerness and disability. We cannot define what marginalized voices sound like without harmfully circumscribing the very people whose voices we seek to amplify. Although we may enjoy and feel heard in the company of voices of people who share our marginalized identities, it is politically unwise to continue down a path that prioritizes identification—entangled with surveillance and categorization—as the basis for political action. Instead, crip and queer listening must value effects over identities; that is, listening out for modalities that support queer-disabled lives and ways of living. Disability as method assumes that disability can act symbolically and ideologically, setting necessary groundwork for engaging disability aesthetics without first demanding normatively legible disability identification. As such, my aesthetic analysis may read as unfamiliar to an audience expecting something akin to filmic formal analysis of visible elements. Instead, my disabled aesthetic analysis centers understudied aesthetic elements like community, process, and affect.
[3.3] My case study is a sample of oral notfic from the digital, fan-run Archive of Our Own (AO3). A notfic is a fan story "written in a particular style—generally more like a story outline or summary than a traditional fic, and with a liberal sprinkling of chatspeak, lolcat and references to various memes" ("Not!fic," Fanlore wiki, https://fanlore.org/). These notfic stories are typically differentiated from conventional fan fic by their fragmentary nature, violation of common standards of literary coherence or seriousness, and centering of social practices of shared fannish references above normative plot progression. In other words, notfics are stories that violate the aesthetic norms of fan fiction writing styles. Oral notfic is a term developed by podficcers that can describe many different works within the wide practice of audio storytelling that do not originate in a textual piece. One performer from this article's dataset describes oral notfic as "a bunch of fans making up a story together out loud" (klb et al. 2022). It resonates in the general category of notfic but generates its own aesthetic practices in its native audio form. The term is distinct from notfics that have been podficced, which still fit the traditional podfic format of recording a textual work. Oral notfic is aesthetically varied and a single-medium outlier in the typically accessible podfic genre, making it a provocative case study for examining digital disability aesthetics.
[3.4] All works cited here were publicly available at the time of analysis, not locked to only registered AO3 users. To balance the exigencies of conducting critical scholarship with ethical responsibilities to the fan communities of which I am a part, these fan works are cited but without direct links. This reduces the potential for this scholarship to bring harmful excess search engine visibility to these creators while also not obscuring credit to these artists for their labor (a practice drawn from conversation with Kristina Busse and her body of work on ethics and fandom, see Busse and Hellekson 2012). Attempting to systematically locate oral notfic within the text-only AO3 presented challenges, as there are few canonical (searchable) tags within the genre of podfic. The tag "oral notfic" was in use across at least thirty-eight works, as of searches conducted in November 2024, indicating that this is a cohesive offshoot of broader notfic practice with shared meaning in the podfic community on AO3. The vast majority of works tagged as oral notfic include multiple creators. This appears to be inherent to the medium, which typically involves back-and-forth collaboration on the lines of improv theater or direct message role-playing, and so often involves two or more people talking, laughing, doing bits, developing characters, and adding to the plot.
[3.5] I included only oral notfics which listed three or more creators, producing a selection of five works. This choice follows fans' interesting departure from the standard single-author model of conventional writing, pursuing a commitment to collaborative storytelling resonant with interdependence, a key principle of disability justice (Berne et al. 2018). These five works are not representative of all podfic practices or even of all oral notfic, but they are not intended to be, nor is this crip analysis concerned with the alleged rigors of neutrality and big data that frequently constrain marginalized analysis (Muñoz 1996). My sample proves the existence of the practices under question—and for an idea to exist in public digital space is all we need to expand our imaginaries. This purposefully limited sample values work done by small groups and individuals with the potential to push the boundaries of disability access and aesthetics. As so many past studies of disability aesthetics linger on a single professional artwork, I consider these five podfics as collaborative artworks worthy of individual inspection for their contributions to digital disability aesthetics.
4. Access aesthetics: Subjectivity and affect
[4.1] Oral notfic can reimagine access as an aesthetic resource rather than a creative bane. Instead of avoiding disability as a stigma that would cripple their art, these fans demonstrate the creative value of creating access and use disability to establish the digital aesthetic. We can hear this in "Episode 2 - Art Study: Caco's Mythology Masterpiece," as the performers frame their entire production around verbal description of and engagement with a visual piece of fan art (Flowerparrish Pod Collabs et al. 2023). This oral notfic is aesthetically constructed around the act of providing sonic access to a visual art object, even more consciously than how podfics of existing texts perform similar functions. The speakers describe the image fully and joyously, not merely providing a neutral laundry list of visual items but exploring the art's affective effects through its personal resonance for them. They draw attention to their favorite flourishes—the quirk of a rabbit's ear, a specific shade of bright green, the visual doubling of a pair of cuddling doves echoing the relaxed posture of the two central characters—aspects that make the art feel especially queer and therefore affectively satisfying to them. They gift the listener a detailed portrait not just of the artwork's literal content but of how it feels for these particular observers to experience it. This fulfills the crip need for radical subjective access, access that is affectively rich and so provides disabled audiences with equal opportunities to critically interpret and emotionally relate to the creative work.
[4.2] These works produce what I term subjective access, building on the affective dimension of cultural accessibility and incorporating radical crip critiques to reject the ideal of so-called objectivity in access labor. Subjective access resonates with what transformative fandom already celebrates: that change is not just inevitable but desirable as all perspectives produce a wealth of creative interpretations and practices that may not appeal equally to everyone. Podfic especially enlivens subjective access, embracing rather than eliding the process of transformation in translating a story or idea from one medium to another. For instance, the creators performing voices of the usually gravelly Witcher only mimicked the TV character's macho vocal performance to humorous effect; they were not concerned with achieving imagined textual fidelity by obscuring the naturally higher pitch of their voices or their ironic affective orientation toward the often-serious subject matter. This stands in contrast to commercial audiobooks, which conventionally seek to divert listener attention away from the embodied specifics of the performer and toward transparently conveyed content (Wittkower 2011). Podfic, and especially oral notfic, render such standards of professionality or transparency nonsensical.
[4.3] One way that oral notfic produces subjective access is through centering the much-maligned affective component of media—incompatible with the ideology of objectivity and stigmatized for its association with the body and so with the disabled, feminine, and queer—as a key vector of aesthetic pleasure. Affect is sometimes valued as proof of authentic commitment or intercultural credibility (Hills 2002), but the embodied, emotional, maligned, "creepy" (De Kosnik 2016, 266) affect that characterizes podfic as a genre is definitively not this profitable variety. Fandom's gift economy (Hellekson 2015) teaches audiences to center gratitude and affect in their evaluation of aesthetic works. In fandom, responders don't necessarily identify formal elements they value in a fan work but instead note which enjoyable affects the work generated for them. For example, one commenter on the "Star Wars/Harry Potter Mash-up" (cantarina et al. 2018) shares how they "shrieked so loud" at their favorite hot takes and wanted the creators to know "what joy your work has wrought." Not a single comment captured in this sample complained about what could be considered widespread normative aesthetic failures such as the hiss of background noise, unedited silences, or the echoing quality of cheap mics. Such critiques of form are not central or even relevant to podfic fan aesthetic evaluation practices, especially regarding purposefully free-form oral notfics, where such remarks would likely be considered an insulting violation of community norms. Each work in this sample received comments celebrating their affective success as they made the listener feel their "feels." This fan approach to creative evaluation—affective connection as criteria of aesthetic achievement—holds great queer-disabled potential for developing more equitable digital aesthetics.
[4.4] Able bodies are all the same; details are the "pathology" of disability (Siebers 2010, 125). Subjective access allows us to imagine that access versions cannot be identical to the original or each other and that this necessary variation is not harmful but useful. A transcript can't be the same as the podcast whose spoken content it seeks to replicate, as it fails to deliver the infinite signifiers such as gender, race, class, ability, and nationality encoded in the voice, the affective intensities of performance, and the layered cultural references that may be included through untranslatable music or sound effects. The framework of subjective access suggests that we focus on providing access to the subjective experience of the media object rather than fruitlessly pursuing textual fidelity. For instance, listening to "[Oral Notfic] Witchers Eat Pussy" (carboncopies et al. 2021) is not the same as participating in a text-based Discord server conversation about the extended Witcher franchise universe with those speakers. However, it may provide fulfilling access to the underlying subjective experience of such for someone with print disabilities. That is, the listener can accessibly engage the communal, unedited, giggle-heavy affective experience of discussing arcane details of obscure spin-off Witcher novels with a group of people similarly steeped in the canon as themselves, without having to use inaccessible text-based media.
[4.5] Subjective accessibility allows us to imagine user-driven access where the participant seeks a shared affective experience across divergent texts, demonstrating that objectivity and textual accuracy need not be central factors in creating equitable disability access. Instead, the echoing, giggling, improvisational nature of a piece like "Podfication 2018 Oral Not!fic: Star Wars/Harry Potter Mash-up, or Amilyn Holdo, Noted Squib From the Unplottable Wizard Planet, & Her Untrained Jedi Girlfriend" (cantarina et al. 2018)—whose very title rejects normative stylistic limitations and embraces an affective overload—invites us to perceive how accessibility could invite audiences to share in the subjective play of media interpretation. Fandom could model access as about participation and creation rather than passively receiving normative, secondary, dully objective products. Subjectivity reorients access away from enforcing able-normativity and toward celebrating the agency of disabled audiences.
5. Inaccessibility aesthetics
[5.1] One especially provocative and effective crip critique implicitly forwarded by oral notfic is its apparent inaccessibility. The sound-only nature of the genre can give able-bodied audiences a taste of the feeling that the Borg Collective (2024) terms "access alienation." Some disabled consumers may find oral notfic inaccessible, but they definitionally will not experience the disorientation that marks access alienation. Their crip-situated knowledges have prepared them to deal emotionally and practically with the common experience of encountering an inaccessible single-modality media. Conversely, an able-bodied fan who has rarely been forced to consider their own abilities may be jolted by oral notfic's unflinching embrace of oral traditions. Interested in an oral notfic's AO3 description, they click on the link to find that it is only available in sonic format. They are disoriented by the clash of expectation and reality. Socially, they have been conditioned to always expect a textual version of any work on AO3 to be available for their convenience. Now, confronted with this lack of access to their preferred medium, they may feel decentered, annoyed, and excluded—alienated by inaccessibility. Conventional podfic draws attention to accessibility via providing an alternate modality of access, while oral notfic draws attention to the absence of assumed ocularcentric access.
[5.2] Oral notfic disrupts hegemonic relations of accessibility and so draws to the surface the usually obscured operations of ableism and assumptions about a normate audience. Sound is conventionally perceived as a secondary mode for accessing stories, an accommodation, even a rip-off of the inherently original text (as many podficcers have been accused of plagiarizing when they record existing text works, even with permission from the author). Yet, text is equally exclusionary in only providing a single mode of access to fan works; it is just so normative as to become invisible. In refusing a textual form of their stories, oral notfics upend audience expectations of conventional access options. For example, the creators of "[Oral Notfic] Witchers Eat Pussy" recognize that a transcript may be desirable but write in their AO3 entry that "due to the nature of the challenge it was recorded for, there isn't a written version we were working from. Apologies for any inconvenience!" (carboncopies et al. 2021). The convention of including text in a fan work is so strong that its absence must be noted, even apologized for, as if the genre of sound is not permitted to stand alone. These fans feel that in addition to posting a single mode of access (as the vast majority of text creators do), they are expected to also labor to produce a second modality. In contrast, I have virtually never seen any textual fan fic apologize for not having an audio version.
[5.3] In diverging from the conventional access practices of universality enshrined in the hegemonic approach of universal design, the inconvenience of oral notfics to mainstream text audiences encourages a reconsideration of which audiences are typically valued by media productions. Namely, the able audiences usually unconscious of how deeply the media environment has been shaped to be as convenient and accessible as possible for them are forcibly acquainted with the experience of access alienation. There are certainly also disabled audiences unable to consume these media, producing straightforward inaccessibility. But given that the oral notfic genre makes up approximately 0.0006 percent of the podfic available on AO3, it is not a statistically pressing access problem. In contrast, there are more than fifteen million general works on AO3 and fewer than 70,000 podfics, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of textual fics have provided an alternate modality of consumption to aid accessibility. These critical disability perspectives on access reveal that discomfort with oral notfics' unrepentant celebration of sound is potentially more representative of a discomfort with an unconventional aesthetic practice—with what I term a digital disability aesthetic intervention—than genuine concern for disability access.
[5.4] One work in this sample included a textual counterpart. The participants in "A Whole Lotta Hot Air" (klb et al. 2022) typed up a simple transcript of their conversation and included it in the AO3 posting. This transcript reproduces the spoken words of the discussion but no other sounds, affective elements, or edits for written flow or clarity. Although certainly valuable as a conventional access measure, it is also a clear example of the ableist danger Clark (2021) notes: an obviously inferior copy of a media experience transferred mechanically to a less suitable sensory realm. Reading that transcript does not provide access to any of the oral notfic's affective richness, only to its literal spoken content. If we were seeking to produce subjective accessibility, that transcript could hardly be considered an access measure at all. In contrast, Flowerparrish Pod Collabs, kbirb pods, and cac0daemonia's (2023) suite of sonic, visual, and textual modalities linked in and around their oral notfic produces a vibrant collection of diverse access points to a shared creative universe, even as each separate work does not exactly replicate the other's literal content.
[5.5] The burden of producing such transcripts to complement existing sonic work also reveals a difficult labor issue embedded in digital accessibility. No work of art, especially that created with zero budget in such close-knit community circumstances as fandom or disability art, needs to be for everyone. As disability critics of universal design discuss, the universal is often mobilized at the expense of the specifically disabled (Hamraie 2016). Yes, oral notfic may be inaccessible to some, but to others, it is a rich and rare form of thoughtful accessibility often neglected in a digital context where machine text to speech is presumed to be interchangeable for actual human vocality. These oral notficcers ask listeners to do work to meet them where they are, whether by engaging exclusively in sound, looking up knowledge for cultural references, or bringing an open and understanding attitude to the unedited aesthetic of unpaid performers' recording practices. These creators share a fannish aesthetic unconcerned with universality or reaching a large audience that resonates with the access intimacy of crip cultures (Mingus 2011). The subjectivity and community-specificity of oral notfic reject the condescending ableism embedded in many professional media access versioning standards that presume that disabled audiences won't be able to parse interpretative nuance. Instead, these works show audiences respect by assuming their agency to make their own choices about whether and how to engage AO3's complex system of creative works.
6. Process aesthetics
[6.1] "Thank you as well to our sponsor, still ADHD, for this episode," the performers conclude their recording with a laugh (Flowerparrish Pod Collabs et al. 2023). This humorous sign-off succinctly illustrates how nonnormative bodymind experiences can productively frame the process of media making, resulting in digital disability aesthetics. These creators make references throughout this oral notfic to neurodivergent experiences and explicitly reflect on how disability shaped their production choices, such as not binding themselves to follow a script and stopping speaking when they reached a point of bodymind exhaustion. These aesthetic choices welcome listeners into a space of creating media from a nonnormative perspective and exemplify what it means for digital disability aesthetics to center process over product. Digital disability aesthetics are not static, formal signatures but aesthetic results of crip process that may be overlooked without a disability-attuned method, yet which have a clear bearing on aesthetic evaluations of quality or beauty. These digital disability aesthetic elements of process can result in formal changes, be enabled by community practice, and shift our understanding of aesthetics to include care work itself.
[6.2] Digital disability aesthetics value those formal elements that imply a crip process behind their production. For example, the woof of a dog may indicate the presence of a service animal, or the squeak of a seat cushion may indicate that the performer chose to sit comfortably or must always sit while recording. The mere fact of posting an unedited recording opens space to imagine as acceptable and desirable crip creative practices constrained by ability, time, financial discrimination, and other factors of ableism and impairment. Including sounds like thoughtful hums, notification dings, a timer going off, sirens in the background, or the rustling of clothes encourages listeners to broaden their aesthetic horizons and consider what role such sounds may have to play in terms of creativity, not just as damage to a normative style or excess to be removed. Especially by retaining coughs, sniffs, breaths, and mouth sounds, oral notfics interrupt the ableist assumption that the sounds of humanity disable a work's aesthetic quality and instead suggest that the presence of (disabled, queer, fannish) humanity actually lends aesthetic value. For instance, the participants of "[Oral Notfic] Witchers Eat Pussy" (carboncopies et al. 2021) make themselves laugh so hard that they completely devolve into nonverbals for quite a few seconds, trailing into sniffs and huffs as they try to wind down their laughter enough to keep spinning out their hypotheticals. Such works make disabled aesthetics imaginable by rejecting pressures to comply with plot-centrism, sonic normalization, or emotionless objectivity.
[6.3] Beyond individual interventions, all of this sample's works were part of broader communal structures like collections or events, demonstrating the potential to systematically encourage more diverse aesthetic processes. Several of these oral notfics were part of Voiceteam challenges, an annual event where creative teams make as many podfics as possible according to various specific criteria in a particular span of time. Meeting this challenge of quantity often manifested in an aesthetic of no editing whatsoever, encouraged by the process of making many audio works quickly. Specific challenges within the Voiceteam event also provided structural interruptions to the hegemony of sonic cleanliness, such as the challenge to "Shoot Without A Script" (carboncopies et al. 2021), which encouraged an improvisational approach. Such works draw attention to the presumption that sonic storytelling should be preplanned, edited, and based in a written narrative, and then reject this limitation. Given the specifically disability-inaccessible issues of sound editing (requiring fine motor skills, accessible editing software, concerns of crip time and exhaustion), promoting imaginaries that value non-editing-based sonic aesthetics has specifically crip value.
[6.4] Mills and Alexander argue that we understand "care work as constituting disability art itself, not just a way of making that art possible" (2022, 41). In this way, we can understand that the digitally networked collective of fans doesn't just support but is part of digital disability aesthetics. While podfic may not be an exclusively disabled space, it can nonetheless be an accessible space where diverse creators institute and support ways of making community and art that support disabled living. For instance, one podficcer in their creator's note thanks "everyone who was in the room with me and every single person who listens" (aethel-multivoice et al. 2019), equalizing creators and audiences rather than hierarchizing the diverse creative roles of fandom media participants. Listening is recognized as a valued part within the ecosystem of creative labor. Community also manifests literally through aesthetic style in the case of shareable work skins, pages of styling code that users activate on AO3 in order to change the site's visual appearance. For example, "Episode 2 - Art Study" (Flowerparrish Pod Collabs et al. 2023) uses an AO3 work skin developed by another user and shared for open use on GitHub, applying CSS to generate a flexible two-column layout more useful to their podfic aesthetic needs than AO3's default layout. In these ways, we can imagine that the creative care work of fandom goes far beyond what can be captured in the media posted to AO3. The interpersonal support of creators and audiences is inseparable from the process of creation and the aesthetic results of digital disability art.
7. Misfit aesthetics
[7.1] Aesthetics play an important and underanalyzed role in political discussion, where getting comfortable with discomfort isn't just a critical, intellectual, or social effort, but a creative one. Getting used to and even coming to enjoy the sound (the aesthetic) of awkward things—silences, strange words, unfamiliar ideas that speakers stumble over articulating—prepare listeners going forward to more readily engage with the uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Disability is especially historically associated with the awkward and ugly, making an aesthetic intervention into such conceptions particularly valuable to disability politics. Oral notfic's statistically and socially misfit medium can contribute to the creative expansion of listeners' aesthetic comfort zones and so prepare them to expand their political imaginaries. Art does not always or directly change hearts and minds, but it can make legible ways of thinking not rooted in the imaginative limitations of the normal—necessary groundwork for social change.
[7.2] Garland-Thomson's (2011) "misfit" provides a useful framework for considering the formal disability aesthetics that result from the physical/sonic act of misfitting in podfic. Incorporating diversity into popular culture products is often critiqued on aesthetic terms as an ugly, unnecessary, shoehorned misfit. This is usually thin cover for straightforward racism, sexism, and so on, but suggests that it's worthwhile to consider how the nonnormative aesthetics produced by misfitting impact the ways that audiences engage with nonnormative people in media. Fans have long cultivated and valued such aesthetic misfits. In this sample of oral notfics, creators enjoy corny, goofy, niche, and/or cringey memes (extensive use of XD emoticons, "get 50% off your next IBS diagnosis with our code" in a parody of podcast advertising), the pointed use of queer terms and unflinching embrace of sexuality (a planet of Jedi lesbians, where it's very important these women lead the rebellion and have sex with one another), the unlikely and uncool crossover between franchises with different corporate owners (children's TV icon Mr. Rogers versus The Master from Doctor Who), and very personal reference to diverse bodily functions treated as casually funny rather than unmentionable.
[7.3] Misfitting infuses the process and product of oral notfic. The term "notfic" is itself an awkward negative, describing its genre by what it's not, while the necessary addition of "oral" reveals its misfit from the unspoken textual norm (and produces a great deal of elbow-knocking, eyebrow-raising humor). Even oral notfic work titles tend to be delightfully clumsy, such as: "Podfication 2018 Oral Not!fic: Star Wars/Harry Potter Mash-up, or Amilyn Holdo, Noted Squib From the Unplottable Wizard Planet, & Her Untrained Jedi Girlfriend" (cantarina et al. 2018). This unwieldy beast does a great deal of work, situating the creation in its cultural and communal context, establishing its fictional universes of interest, and declaring its intent to queer neglected female characters from those canons. The imaginative force (or Force) required to do such work is illustrated in the tag "Star Wars but make it queer," as these creators have to "make" this notably homophobic and sexist universe produce a sapphic interpretation. The tacked-on nature of these normatively rejected elements is aesthetically prominent as a participant speaks into the silence following a basic description of the premise: "…and lesbians" (cantarina et al. 2018). Lesbians do not narratively or stylistically fit into that homophobic fictional world as it is, so these creators force the concept in despite its misfit shape. They do not obscure but revel in the aesthetic of critical awkwardness produced by exposing the degree to which these commercial universes were not built to contain whole communities of people.
[7.4] The aesthetic misfit is an especially intriguing and difficult conundrum for identities that have been considered invisible (or inaudible) and so apparently have no aesthetic signification at all. For instance, neuroatypicality and asexuality are often figured as absences rather than present identities linked with recognizable styles. The unselfconscious weirdness of oral notfic can allow us to embrace how, due to these dynamics of in/visibility, making disability and queerness signify is forced. It is aesthetically unnatural. The "natural" system of aesthetics was purposefully constructed without room or conventions to support the communication of these identities. A creator has to prioritize the choice to make audible the historically marginalized, and it is political, which is not inherently antithetical to good storytelling or art. For instance, Flowerparrish and their cocreators make neurodivergent identities legible through crip humor and praxis, laughing that "we need our Adderall" and noting when they "think this is all our ADHD brains can do right now" (2023). Without making sonic space to explicitly mention their experiences, these invisible disabilities would not signify in this audio discussion of Star Wars fan art. By forcing in audible recognition of how disability shapes creative processes, the aesthetic product carries important disability significations.
[7.5] Fans have long been comfortable playing in spaces of misfit, even terming a whole genre "crack" to name one established fandom practice of embracing the absurd. Several of the oral notfics in this sample are tagged as crack due to the purposefully misfitted nature of their premises, from an alternate universe where the ordinary human characters of Ted Lasso (2020–) spontaneously become sentient hot air balloons (klb et al. 2022), to the crossover of children's show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (2012–) reimagined as a pocket dimension of the adult science fiction show Doctor Who (2005–2022) (aethel-multivoice et al. 2019). Fans are not just comfortable with such awkward misfits of tone and content, they take gleeful pleasure in contrasting the simple innocence of Daniel Tiger's fictional toddler universe with the gritty genocidal violence and canonical complication of Doctor Who. Framing a work like "[Oral Notfic] Witchers Eat Pussy" (carboncopies et al. 2021) as "Crack Treated Seriously" through tagging primes the audience for open-minded engagement with notably difficult or absurd propositions, mitigating potentially negative affective responses to the awkward. It tells audiences that they can giggle each time a performer says "pussy" and still genuinely engage the feminist and queer provocations of their storytelling. Crack-y oral notfics can help teach audiences how to navigate unexpected ideas and uncomfortable feelings with pleasure rather than trepidation. Listeners who can take seriously and even enjoy the provocation of a football coach waking up to find he's a talking hot air balloon are well situated to consider the aesthetic potential of real-world, nonnormative human bodyminds.
8. Conclusion
[8.1] Oral notfic illustrates how online communities can work to increase accessibility and develop less ableist aesthetic imaginaries. The insights of digital disability aesthetics are not limited to fandom, as any online community could potentially develop subjective instead of merely accommodationist access, value creative processes instead of merely products, and engage the unconventional aesthetics of the misfit. My case study also gestures to possible barriers, for example, in the ableist persistence of pitting access against aesthetic creativity. Access should be more important than aesthetic considerations if forced to choose between a binary, as we sometimes do in an ableist world. However, continuing to feed into the narrative of aesthetics versus access reinforces precisely the ableist perspective that critical disability activists warn us about: access built to follow normative legal rules rather than center disabled subjectivity and desire, thus merely replacing one ableist hegemony with another. Digital disability aesthetics as enlivened through the example of oral notfic offer us hope that transformative creativity can help produce radical subjective access, teach us to better value labor and community over content, and let us embrace the misfitted aesthetics of the forced and clumsy and awkward on the journey to more just political imaginaries.