1. Introduction
[1.1] Disability is often implicit in discussions of fandom platforms, narrative representations, fan labor, and concerns of exclusivity and accessibility. However, it has been undertheorized in the field, with its intersections with race particularly lacking. Structural ableism, like structural racism, undergirds fan work and theorizations. In terms of ethnographic work, fan studies predominantly focus on the experiences of white Western fans, although recent scholarship has challenged this to a significant extent. This is also related to the increasing global popularity today of East Asian media, which has decentered the long-standing hegemony of Anglophonic media texts. The inattention to disability and race in media fan studies implies that its "concepts, definitions, and theories are partial and fragmented" (Click and Scott 2018, 241), particularly in the context of minority fans of Western texts. More intersectional studies of fan practices, representations, and experiences through a disability lens can help engage more fully with a field that is arguably founded upon the labor of neuroatypical and other fans with disabilities. Such perspectives also center fandom as a political project, albeit one of the fan's making.
[1.2] I hope to highlight the critical potential of applying a disability lens to fan studies through a decolonial framework. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars note that while disability studies is becoming increasingly globalized, disability remains largely absent from postcolonial and decolonial discourse (Chataika 2012; Dirth and Adams 2019). Given the transcultural domains of globally disseminated Western screen media, popular fandoms engaging with these form a suitable site for analysis of diverse cultural encounters with disability. Superhero fandom forms one such globally popular media fandom, with the Marvel fandom being particularly prolific in the representation of disabilities, especially mental disabilities, and its extensive use of disability-related tags. This can be used to find decolonial and disabled resistance in the (imperialist) domain of global media fandoms. However, as I argue in this article, Marvel fan works frequently incorporate disability in ways that rarely acknowledge or fulfill its decolonial potential.
[1.3] We tend to think of disability as an ontological identity that is distinct from everyday normative ways of being, separate from ongoing mainstream theorizations of fan practices. However, as disability scholars argue, disability is also an epistemic practice that disrupts taken-for-granted notions of ability (Campbell 2009). Whether it is in the context of how fans identify or understand their fannishness, participate in specific ways in consideration of their capacities and limitations or privilege certain modes of consumption over others, seek out stories with character representations aligning with their emotional and physical needs, or imagine sex as a social and intimate practice, fans rely on specific conceptualizations of ability and disability.
[1.4] Disability is ubiquitous but, like race, tends to be only brought into the room when it is clearly marked as a visible difference and announces its presence. While this is not specific to fandom and fan practices, media fandom does provide a valuable site for thinking about questions of disability given that it involves significant representation of disabilities and mental illnesses, is bound with the labor of neurodivergent fans, and several of its communal mechanisms and practices—content warnings, descriptive tags, gift fics, to name a few—are designed to account for the mental and emotional health of fans belonging to marginalized groups underrepresented in the media. Yet few studies have studied fandom from this perspective, such as the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 2019 issue titled "Disability and/in/through Fanfiction," edited by Bridget Liang and Catherine de Montrouge, and the recently released Disability and Fandom (2025) by Katherine Anderson Howell. Building upon these, I contribute to an intersectional analysis of disability in media fandom with specific attention to questions of race and coloniality.
[1.5] This article stems from my doctoral project exploring representations of disability in Marvel fandom alongside the experiences of its minority fans, particularly fans with disabilities and non-white fans. Developed as a monograph on decolonizing media fandom through a case study of Marvel superhero fandom (Garg 2026), the research began as a way to shift dominant frames of analyses in fan studies by attending to the diversity implicit in the idea of global media fandom. Since then, there have been significant developments in the media and cultural landscape that I witnessed as a non-white fan and scholar, who first became aware of the existence of the academic discipline of fan studies by discovering this free-to-access online journal on the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) site while browsing fan fiction in India more than a decade ago.
[1.6] I begin by framing disability within a decolonial framework drawing from scholarship in disability studies and fan studies. I briefly outline the significance of disability representation and identify transformative media fandom as an important yet understudied cultural space for studying disability. Drawing from my immersion in and understanding of fan practices and narratives on the OTW fan fiction archive, Archive of Our Own (AO3), I discuss popular fan fiction tropes and argue that these use disability as a form of narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2013). This illustrates how fans are engaging with disability even in narratives not explicitly marked as such and not only through the way they participate in media fandom. I go on to examine disability representation in Marvel superhero characters and the stories—canon and fan made—involving them, tracing their eugenic connections. Marvel fandom is one of the largest media fandoms, with over 700,000 fan works on AO3, and one that is rife with stories of disability, health, and recovery. Through an analysis of key characterizations in the Captain America fandom, I demonstrate how fans subscribe to and reinforce an imperialist ideology where disability accommodation is reliant upon American nationalism, and which erases the disability and experience of non-white others. In referencing particular fan fics, I do not intend to single these out as failing to uphold markers of desirable representation but rather to point to the patterns of fan representation that form part of the broader cultural landscape, which continues to disable some fans more than others. In naming these works without their author names, I hope to engage with these as relevant sites of cultural analysis while being conscious of the gift economy ethos in which they were shared.
2. Studying disability in the media through a decolonial framework
[2.1] In recent years, fan studies scholars have pointed out that fandom has a racism problem and have called for a decolonization of fan studies (Pande 2018; Stanfill 2018). Some ways of enacting such decolonization include paying attention to the historical whiteness of fan studies and its genealogies, with greater attention towards the work of non-white scholars and perspectives of non-white fans. I suggest one way of decolonizing fandom includes a decolonization of analytical tools and frameworks. While a decolonial impetus can and must include de-Westernizing research epistemologies, it also requires engaging with colonial legacies and the consequences of colonization (both historical and ongoing) on people's lived experiences. In fan studies, this can include paying attention to the colonial legacy and power relations of analytical concepts such as affect and disability/health (Garg 2022).
[2.2] In the context of disability and health, a decolonial framework necessitates engagement with how categories such as able-bodiedness and able-mindedness have historically privileged white Western bodies and how coloniality shapes the bodyminds of populations that were colonized or experience ongoing imperialist violence. In the case of media cultures, colonial histories also impact the availability of resources involved in the development and distribution of media technology, lending greater material power to colonial nations. This contributes to the media imperialism thesis, which puts greater emphasis on the ownership of media infrastructures affecting media flows, determining which media texts have greater global reach. Given the higher production value and capital of American media industries, US-produced media have greater sway in terms of how they portray (American) heroes who save the world. While there is greater cross-cultural flow today, especially with the rise of Korean pop culture, American media continue to enjoy significant worldwide influence.
[2.3] These tensions are heightened in the realm of media reception and engagement. As transformative fandom (referring to creative fan work such as fan fiction, fan art, and fan videos) provides a powerful tool for challenging and revising such US-produced narratives from the perspective of diverse fans, it becomes an important site for critiquing the problems within dominant representations. A decolonial framework urges us to look at how racial and national hierarchies are perpetuated even in transformative fandom, and how they can be transcended. This can involve close attention to (neo)colonial dynamics in stories involving American superheroes and an interrogation of real-world politics affecting representational choices. As I will demonstrate through the case of Marvel characters, it also reveals how curing disability in producing a superhero, by fixing the non-superpowered individual in both canon and fan narratives, reproduces eugenicist ideas that emerged through colonial practices justifying scientific racism. This is particularly relevant in the case of the superhero genre, which was conceived at the height of the eugenics movement in the US in the 1930s (Gavaler 2014).
[2.4] Emerging from disability activism in the UK, disability studies as a discipline is strongly rooted in a social model that points to the social nature of disability in contrast with the medical model, which locates disability in the body of the individual (Siebers 2008). While early disability scholarship tended to ignore questions of culture, representation, and meaning, the representation of disability remains of deep relevance to people's experience of disability. Media scholar Niall Richardson (2010) argues that ableism is not only about the body's functionality; in fact, people are often equally or more concerned about hegemonic standards of beauty and sexual desirability. When it comes to disabled bodies, which often defy markers of conventional attractiveness and challenge models of sexual performance in contemporary understandings, it becomes important to evaluate these concerns along the spectrum of disability rights. This is a key site in the field of critical disability studies, which addresses some of the limitations of the earlier social model that distinguished between impairment (bodily or mental difference) and disability (produced through a lack of social and institutional accommodation of impairment).
[2.5] Unlike race or sexuality, many people think about disability as an identity through encountering it in the media, when it is not shared explicitly by family or friends (Richardson 2010). Hence, media texts become a primary source for disability representation shaping people's perceptions of disability and people with disability. Given the absence of cultural texts that show disabled people engaging in meaningful romantic and sexual relationships, mainstream representations reinforce compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer 2006), which constructs able-bodiedness as the norm. Media thus perform crucial cultural and relational work when it comes to disability, making it beneficial to read cultural representations explicitly along a disability framework.
[2.6] Digital media provide key sites for diverse representations of disability (Ellis and Kent 2011), including people with disability making their own media for self-representation and contributing to disability discourse through dialogic platforms. Yet despite the exciting possibilities for representation and engagement with disability in digital spaces, few studies focus on fan-generated content. Moreover, intersectional perspectives that consider how diverse impairments and people with disabilities are perceived differently in different cultures and geographical locations are lacking.
3. Disability, fan fiction, and narrative prosthesis
[3.1] In approaching the question of disability in fandom, I first want to expand the ambit of how and where we perceive and study disability and its transgressive potential. In transformative fan work, one of the most popular thematic categories is angst, which focuses on themes of suffering. Angst-heavy works frequently rely on emotional recompense achieved through romantic fulfillment and intimacy. A specific genre facilitating this is hurt/comfort (h/c), where one character is hurt, and the other character comforts them. Depending on writers' intentions, the content ratio of hurt to comfort ranges, with narratives that focus solely on the hurt often encapsulated by the term "whump," where a character is made to repeatedly suffer. The hurt or suffering essential to such narratives is frequently achieved through injury, illness, or disability. Suffering occupies an important space in the field of disability studies: for example, in locating illness on the disability spectrum (Wendell 2016) and in noting the limitations of the social model.
[3.2] The preoccupation with the suffering bodymind lies at the heart of many popular fan tropes (e.g., injury and sick fics), displaying how disability structures fan fiction. In these works, disability often becomes a ritualistic device to facilitate an intimate encounter or engender a romantic relationship. For instance, in soulmate AUs (alternate universes), soulmates are frequently identified through the absence of a disabling element after two soulmates meet or unite (e.g., a person starts seeing the world in color once they meet their soulmate). Similarly, sex pollen (also known as the fuck-or-die trope) involves a situation where characters are in pain that can only be relieved by sexual activity with another person. The element of needing to have sex to relieve physical pain can cause mental and emotional suffering (these are also usually tagged "dub con," standing for dubious consent, signifying the dubious nature of consent provided in such a sexual encounter). On the other hand, the self-explanatory sick fic involves some kind of illness to facilitate care of one person by another. Bodily injury and temporary sensory disabilities operate the same way, serving as the premise for weakening a character to allow the other character to take care of them. Whump focuses on injury and disablement, with the text devoted significantly to descriptions of physical and/or emotional trauma. Amnesia fics are another popular trope in fan fiction and soap operas.
[3.3] In the abovementioned tropes, disablement is largely momentary and followed by romantic relief, utilizing disability as a plot device, or narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2013), where literary narratives use disability as a metaphorical opportunity. Such a narrative can divorce disability from its social milieu in focusing on the individual as the site of disability oppression rather than a means to explore the cultural identity of disabled people as a disenfranchised group. The substantial incidence of these tropes, however, also reveals the creative force of a disability identity and the potential to disrupt the able/disabled binary. This creative potential of disability tropes in fan works can be a meaningful way to introduce concerns and experiences of disability to nondisabled people, emphasize the role of society in exacerbating or mitigating disabling experiences, and pave the way for more complex representations.
[3.4] Fandom functions as a creative zone where narratives of temporary disablement provide an epistemic bridge between the experiences of disabled and nondisabled people, uniting the lived human experience. As disability scholars reiterate, disability is the only universal experience that all human beings undergo at some point in their lives, suggesting that we are all temporarily abled (McRuer 2006). Narratives where disablement occurs in the form of interludes of hurt express a desire for an acknowledgement of suffering and its restitution in the form of love and affection as a practice of care. While such a position poses a danger of decontextualizing disability experiences, it also holds the potential to reveal the ubiquity and ordinariness of disability.
[3.5] Superhero fandom is a fertile ground for studying such narratives of disability as it offers scope for reimagining registers of ability and embodied identity, not least through characters changing their (dis)ability status as they come into their superpowers. However, temporary disablement and its overcoming is also predicated upon a variety of sociopolitical institutions and historical relations that carry a colonial legacy. In the next section, I examine the representation of disability in fan works involving the storyline of overcoming or curing disability, especially through science and technology, prevalent in science fiction and superhero genres, that carry eugenicist connotations and often function as a type of feel-good disability porn. Such narratives serve to emotionally move the nondisabled audience rather than address the ableism entrenched in people and societal structures. Deploying a decolonial framework to study disability in specific fan works of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I briefly discuss works centering the ship Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes (Stucky) that involve an overwhelming focus on issues of mental disability and trauma. In so doing, I argue that these stories amplify the disability and suffering of white American characters at the cost of concealing the disability, trauma, and loss of life of non-white people and populations, especially in fan narratives referencing contemporary wars and conflicts.
4. Eugenics, tagging, and disability tropes in Marvel canon and fandom
[4.1] Stucky arguably remains the most popular ship in Marvel fandom based on the number of fan works and its inclusion in AO3's list of top ships several years in a row. Steve Rogers takes the superhero role of Captain America from his emergence in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) until he passes on the Captain America shield to his aide Sam Wilson (also known as the Falcon), played by African American actor Anthony Mackie, in Avengers: Endgame (2019). James "Bucky" Barnes, played by Romanian American actor Sebastian Stan, is Rogers's best friend–turned–brainwashed–assassin, codenamed the Winter Soldier. Although Stucky follows the popular fan trope of two white boys, which posits that two white men in a media franchise are more likely than not to be shipped (especially in comparison with an interracial ship), it also involves two characters who are explicitly disabled at various points in their canon storylines. Looking at the intersections of race, coloniality, and disability, I first discuss how the production of Steve Rogers as Captain America participates in a colonial process aligned with notions of compulsory able-bodiedness by erasing both disability as well as the racialized history of the eugenics project. Second, I trace the neocolonial implications of the Winter Soldier canon arc and fan narratives featuring Rogers and Barnes as active members of the US military.
[4.2] The production of Captain America involves the enhancement of Steve Rogers into a superpowered being through the administration of a serum that increased his physical abilities and musculature and cured his physical ailments and disabilities including colorblindness, asthma, and scoliosis. This canon narrative personifies the goals of the eugenics movement, defined as "the science of racial purification and the elimination of human 'defects'" (Mitchell and Snyder 2003, 844). The MCU majorly features a post-serum Steve Rogers who has a buff super-body, and this is overwhelmingly replicated in the fandom. In canon, the pre-serum Rogers, formed through CGI technology de-buffing American actor Chris Evans, is primarily present in only one MCU film, with far less screen time than his post-serum counterpart. This disproportionate representation is repeated in transformative media fandom. While there are several fan works involving pre-serum Steve Rogers, these are significantly fewer in number than those with post-serum Steve. At the time of writing, there were 9,305 entries tagged "pre-serum Steve Rogers" and 5,398 tagged "post-serum Steve Rogers." While on the surface this seems to imply a greater number of pre-serum or explicitly disabled Steve, this does not account for the fact that there are far more fan works involving Steve's post-serum hyper-able body that are not tagged with the post-serum content tag as it is assumed (or arguably constructed) as the norm. This is partly because the existence of ability is not pointed out as much as the presence of a disability, evidenced by the fact that not many fan works announce their representation of post-serum Steve Rogers unless they feature both versions of Rogers, indicating that the latter is the (desirable) default category.
[4.3] In such a context, representing and claiming a pre-serum Rogers identity that focuses on living with a disability resists norms of compulsory able-bodiedness, potentially claiming a type of disability pride. The tag "pre-serum Steve Rogers" works to embody a crip identity (Schalk 2013) in providing an in-depth account of life as a person with disability especially when choosing that representation over a post-serum Steve Rogers. This is prevalent in several canon-universe Stucky fan works focusing on Steve and Bucky's life before Rogers became Captain America with certain aspects fanonized, including their poverty, Steve's various illnesses, and his progressiveness (note 1). However, these also reify whiteness, with disability (and class) contributing to elevating Steve Rogers's character as good. This is evident in an anonymous post on Plots You're Tired Of in Fanfic, quoted in Rukmini Pande's monograph on fandom and race (2018, 126):
[4.4] Steve and Bucky share an apartment. They are poor, so poor. The temperature is mentioned at least once (either too hot or too cold). The fact that they live in Queer Brooklyn and know queerness exists is mentioned. Some extra with an Irish or Italian name or veeeery occasionally a Jewish name is mentioned in passing. No other groups lived in New York in this time. It is a fact. If the person has an accent and just came over and only Steve in all of New York is ever kind to them, even better. If Steve gets beat up trying to defend them from Racists, even better than that. Steve gets beat up in an alley defending at least one marginalized person…Bucky works by the docks. Underpaid. But always by the docks. Forever the docks. Brooklyn is 99% docks. Bucky works for Steve. Steve was and/or is sick…Steve perhaps pines for Bucky but mostly Steve is Good. Bucky thinks about how he is going to afford the rent with all this Depression and also Steve's sickness. Porn. (fail-fandomanon 2014)
[4.5] This hilariously accurate description of a significant section of Stucky fan fiction draws our attention to the racial dynamics of this trope, locating its popularity not in disability (at least, not on its own), but in a specific intersection of whiteness, disability, and (romanticized) poverty. Disability is prolific in Marvel fandom, but only in specific (benign) ways, and always in conjunction with whiteness.
[4.6] The eugenicist connotations of the Captain America narrative and its problematic racial dynamics are pronounced when considering the racialized histories of such medical experimentation in the United States, the majority of which was done on black bodies (Washington 2006). In the Captain America comics, this is acknowledged in the storyline of Elijah Bradley, the first black Captain America who survived the super-serum injection. The Disney+ television miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) incorporated this storyline, adding to the critical commentary on the racist legacy of the Captain America title and position. Although many fan works display an awareness of this history and its canonization in the MCU, few works engage with the idea of a Black Captain America even with the canon role of Sam Wilson as the new Captain America. This is suggested by the far fewer number of fan works with representations of Wilson as Captain America in comparison. For instance, at the time of my writing this, there were only 1,208 works tagged "Captain America Sam Wilson." In fact, searching by the filter tag "Captain America—character" on AO3 redirects to the category of "Steve Rogers," which has 195,976 entries. Works not tagged "Captain America Sam Wilson" predominantly feature Steve Rogers as Captain America, reinforcing the idea of Rogers as the default Captain America. In contrast, several canon-universe Stucky narratives focusing on the successful rehabilitation of Bucky Barnes from the aftermath of his long trauma involve Sam Wilson in the supporting role of the unpaid therapist in a continuation of the racist mammy stereotype (Coker and Pande 2018). Such trends show how disability is represented vis-à-vis white and non-white characters in ways that privilege the experiences of white men and cast non-white characters to their periphery.
[4.7] The eugenic trope of curing disability is also reproduced in Bucky Barnes's production as a super-soldier (becoming the Winter Soldier) but to more complex effects. Barnes was part of Rogers's special military unit, the Howling Commandos, in the first film set during WWII in which he falls to his presumed death during combat. The events of the second film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2012), reveal that he survived the fall but lost his arm, and was captured by Hydra, the fictionalized scientific wing of the Nazi party. Barnes was administered a version of the super-soldier serum and was affixed with an enhanced prosthetic arm and transferred to the Soviets, who kept him in a cryogenic chamber, letting him out for assassinations. His impairment is physically visible in the form of his bionic arm, which simultaneously marks him as hyper-able, thus erasing signs of his disability and making him a superpowered cyborg figure. The nonconsensual attachment of the enhanced limb that creates the visually appealing cyborg superhero/villain also serves as a reminder of the mental trauma that has gone into making Barnes into the Winter Soldier. Rogers encounters Barnes as the cyborg assassin the Winter Soldier in a reemergence of Hydra, that ends with Rogers eventually giving up on fighting his erstwhile best friend and falling into a river from which Barnes saves him, presumably breaking from his brainwashing.
[4.8] The cyborg is a classic science fiction and popular culture figure, celebrated for its transgressive possibilities. In her famous essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), Donna Haraway conceptualizes the cyborg as a powerful symbol of disruption and anti-essentialism that challenges traditional boundaries of human and nonhuman, and nature and culture. However, disability scholars have pointed out significant limitations of this purported utopia through the very material limitations of assistive technologies and the capitalist and colonialist structures underpinning them. As disability scholar Donna Reeve argues, the cyborg fusion of human and machine raises several issues that are obfuscated in a celebratory rhetoric, including the uneven distribution of technology, the physical pain and difficulties of using assistive technologies, and the "vulnerability to surveillance, control and dependency" (2012, 107–8) that such technology brings. These questions are often forgotten in the techno-capitalist utopias of triumphing over disability through scientific and technological advancement.
[4.9] The cyborg narrative in Marvel fan works, much like mainstream representations, tends to focus on the positive effects of using technology. This includes fan works that deliberately involve the bionic arm being repurposed or remanufactured by Avengers superheroes such as Tony Stark/Iron Man, a genius with machines. This is done to explicitly reframe the negative associations of the body trauma associated with Barnes's production as the Winter Soldier into more positive embodiments with the arm being used to bring pleasure rather than pain. This is sometimes illustrated in the metal arm kink fic, which depicts Barnes using the arm for sexual pleasure (whether for himself or a partner), presenting an affirmative disability narrative that provides an enabling transformation of a prominent source of discomfort and pain. However, few fan works go into the physical pain of using prosthetics—a major reality for many people with disabilities using assistive technologies. While some fan works make important allusions to how, in its initial implantation by Hydra, the metal arm forms part of the process through which Barnes's bodily autonomy was wrested, they rarely do so outside that context once it has changed to more benign manufacturers (be it Stark or others). The fan fiction discourse of prosthetics in this sense resembles mainstream media's romanticized view of their technological proficiency and coolness rather than the practical difficulties they bear for several users.
[4.10] The techno-utopic representations of the cyborg negate any real-life limitations that come with prosthetics, their affordability, access, and usage. Britt Young (2021) talks about how popular videos of unboxing prosthetics, including the famous 2015 moment when Robert Downey Jr. presented a 3D-printed Iron Man–styled prosthetic arm to a seven-year-old boy, form a type of disability porn. Such stories put the onus of disability accommodation on the disabled person rather than nondisabled people and society at large. Young writes that the majority of users of upper-limb prostheses, including her, actually report very negative experiences with these, and several people discontinue their use entirely. Indeed, often such prosthetics are only used in the presence of able-bodied outsiders who get uncomfortable in close contact with visibly disabled people, making us question whose comfort these devices aim for. Crawford, for instance, found that amputees were regularly seen as "inciting fear in the able-bodied" (2015, 222) and would attempt to hide "'offensive' features of the dismembered body through prosthetization" (227) to pass as able-bodied. Such practices show how hegemonic norms are persistent even in media fandom where disabled characters who occupy, or pass, as dominant identities (white/abled) find greater representation and accommodation.
[4.11] Fan works that focus on cyborg characters or those using technological implants who pass can thus exhibit ableism, signaling significant limitations of disability representation in media fandom. This does not even account for the fact that such prosthetics and assistive technology remain financially inaccessible for a large portion of the disabled population, particularly those from the global south, where more than 80 percent of those who qualify as disabled reside (Dirth and Adams 2019). The reality of the production of physical disability linked with warfare is particularly stark in the context of real-world politics where the overwhelming population of amputees lies in the global south, with Gaza now home to the highest number of child amputees in the world (United Nations 2025).
5. Disability and decolonization in Captain America military fan fiction
[5.1] An important dimension in considering the use of disability cures and technological implants is their use in international warfare, which produces disability as a form of population debilitation. This is particularly true for military arcs in the Captain America universe, as both Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes (as well as many other American superheroes) are part of the larger military-industrial complex predicated on American nationalism and imperialism. In these fan fics, there are frequent allusions to both physical and mental disability, often as a direct result of undergoing or undertaking torture, but only through the perspectives of the (white) American characters. Though there may be allusions to the injuries or trauma inflicted upon civilians in these regions, any significant discussion and character development is restricted to how those contribute to the distress, disablement, and disillusionment of the American heroes.
[5.2] This is particularly evident in military universe fan works referencing contemporary wars and conflicts, including US incursions in the Middle East. For instance, set during the Iraq War, the long fic Baghdad Waltz gives considerable depth to issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, minority stress, depression, alcoholism, psychological abuse, psychological recovery, and traumatic brain injury (which are all also tagged by the author), displaying significant and nuanced understanding and experience of military and medical institutions as well as strong critiques of them. At 680,727 words, with 3,469 comments, 2,175 kudos, and 103,389 hits (or views), it is an extremely well-researched and well-written account of how war contributes to disability/disablement and how recovery is a slow nonlinear journey. Such fan works exhibit an understanding of how a lack of structural support for war veterans further disables them, reflecting the political relational model of disability (Kafer 2013) that focuses on how both disability and impairment are shaped by sociopolitical contexts. However, while it is important to critique the effects of war and violence on the psychology of (US) soldiers, the absence of any non-US and/or non-white subjects from such in-depth consideration and character development reveals a critical gap in the creative space of transformative media fandom, a gap that may be inescapable for minority fans who are subject to US aggression and imperial violence.
[5.3] In many fan works set in the Middle East, the region becomes an easy backdrop against which romance and trauma play out with little to no research about the people who live in these diverse nations. For example, the much shorter How I Wish That You Were Mine, at 37,383 words, discusses disability and mental health solely in the context of Rogers and Barnes as US soldiers and references the conflict in the Middle East in a significantly underdeveloped manner in comparison with Baghdad Waltz. It is less focused on discussing disability and trauma but offers a valuable example of political fan fics that draw from real world conflicts in ways that center and reify American nationalism but offer little in terms of meaningful representation of others.
[5.4] One way that trauma is aestheticized in these works is through the use of torture as a plot device to humanize and romanticize the white protagonists, particularly prevalent in whump, a narrative category that focuses on the physical and/or emotional suffering experienced by a character. Torture is a primary motif in works featuring Bucky Barnes (as the Winter Soldier) who experienced significant physical and mental suffering as a prisoner of war for over a period of seventy years. Even nonmilitary universe fan works frequently focus on descriptions of torture and its long-term effects on Barnes, who is a popular whump target in the fandom (alongside other white men like Tony Stark).
[5.5] The narrative focus on the romantic fulfillment of white men leaves little scope for interrogating their complicity in the larger systems of warfare and disablement that disproportionately affect those in the global south. Indeed, in such geopolitical conflicts, as Jasbir Puar argues, disability is often used as a way to derive benefit from a debilitated population. In The Right to Maim (2017), Puar writes that racialized bodies are targeted with the purpose of producing disability as a way to extract value from them while appearing to be the more humanitarian strategy than outright killing. In many of these cases, disability then takes significant physical, emotional, and financial cost, with disabled bodies both marked for slow death (Berlant 2007) and considered more discardable.
[5.6] It is Barnes's racialized whiteness that allows his torture and resulting trauma to be a worthy subject of aestheticization and exploration. When it comes to torture, "transnational and transhistorical linkages…surge together to create the Muslim body as a particular typological object of torture" (Puar 2007, 85–86). However, the Muslim body or any non-white populations are conspicuously absent in these fan works. Even in fan works referencing Muslim characters, these characters are rarely as developed as white characters, whether those originally in the canon or introduced by fans. While this is, at times, attributed to the lack of such characters in the Marvel canon, it is telling that even fan works with any original characters (OCs) introduced by fans rarely include Muslim or non-white minorities, whether those with disabilities or nondisabled.
[5.7] In addition, the title the Winter Soldier itself reveals a racial and colonial bias both in canon as well as in fandom. The title (originally from a Thomas Jefferson speech) is referenced in a real investigation into the war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam and (later) in Iraq, known as the Winter Soldier Investigation. The public hearings were screened as a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize the atrocities committed by the US Armed Forces and their allies in the Vietnam War. However, these connotations are lost in the superhero universe that makes no allusions to the colonial enterprise of the United States in these countries and instead posits American superheroes as global saviors.
[5.8] In the case of the MCU, this is evident from the way man-made or supernatural threats are framed as global issues: the alien enemy that the Avengers fight in their first ensemble film, The Avengers (2012), targeting New York is shown to be an imminent threat to the rest of the world. Similarly, the events of its successful sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), involved a rogue, evil artificial intelligence that endangered the world with a decisive battle fought in a fictionalized Eastern European country. More significantly, ex-weapons manufacturer and genius billionaire Tony Stark invented the Iron Man suit as a captive in Afghanistan and is then represented as a hero who saves Afghan people from terrorists identified with the help of his advanced technology and weaponized suit of armor. Such narratives critically frame American superheroes as saviors of oppressed people globally without sufficient implications of their role in contributing to disability and trauma in places where the US military is involved (note 2) .
[5.9] A key factor in this is the involvement of the US Department of Defense as a funding partner on many of these films. As Tricia Jenkins and Tom Secker (2022) observe, the Pentagon has regularly partnered on Marvel projects including the first two Iron Man films (2008, 2010), the first two Captain America films, and Captain Marvel (2019). By providing the use of military equipment and heavy machinery, as well as allowing filming in restricted areas, the Pentagon leverages its support to ensure that the US military is portrayed as heroes, disallowing any criticism of military personnel. Hollywood films involving the military have historically worked as recruitment propaganda and many MCU stars have also been involved in USO activities. Chartered by the US Congress, the United Service Organizations (USO) is a nonprofit organization that supports American military members and their families through various services including entertainment.
[5.10] This brief diversion into the industry politics of the MCU is to show how fans, whether intentionally or otherwise, reinscribe some aspects of the canon while resisting others, and consider to what extent fans reproduce the canon's imperialist agenda. Fan works like the massively popular and influential Not Easily Conquered series reference the real-life origins of the term the Winter Soldier and provide critical moments where non-white characters are contextualized through their history but continue to use it to construct American superheroes in a positive light. In the fan fic, Steve Rogers/Captain America lives out the years following WWII in contrast to the canon where he goes down in a plane during the final fight of the first film. The fan work provides a fascinating retelling of American politics where Rogers does not serve in the Vietnam War and spends several years admirably dismantling landmines in Southern Vietnam that continue to injure and kill people in villages. While it does provide valuable acknowledgement of the others affected by the US and its imperialist aggressions, these are only limitedly addressed as the lens remains on Captain America taking responsibility for harm done during the war. In contrast, several other historical AUs set during wartime focus even more insularly on the experiences of Steve and Bucky as American soldiers or war veterans with little to no attention to questions of American culpability and its cost to others.
[5.11] These patterns of representation serve to construct the default fan as the white American who likely identifies with the American character(s) and centers American history and politics, rather than the non-white who encounters their history in a sidenote or passing comment used to develop the white characters or progress the story. This is not to say that it is the sole responsibility of these fan authors to represent the long-term effects of war on people of the global south, but to question the larger politics of media fandom, whose stories it tells, and who is relegated to a footnote. As fan fiction is geared towards addressing aspects that are not or cannot be represented in mainstream media, it perhaps carries an ethical responsibility to be more cognizant of the contexts in which it represents war and disability, and whose reality it reflects and privileges. Examining race and coloniality in analyses of media fandom, often framed as inherently progressive, allows for a more nuanced view of fandom politics and sees the role of fan fiction in not just subverting but also reinforcing the interrelations of whiteness, ableism, and imperialism.
6. Conclusion
[6.1] Disability is generally absent from mainstream theorizations of media fandom and typically imagined as an ontological category. However, it is also an identity and a practice that disrupts assumed notions of ability and hegemonic systems of knowledge. Digital spaces of media fandom rely upon an intersectional web of identities implicit in the figure of the anonymous fan and need to consider the diversity of internet-mediated fandom without assuming a default white/abled participant. Transformative fan works frequently involve a disability axis, forming an important cultural site of disability representation.
[6.2] Using a decolonial framework to examine disability in superhero narratives, including political fan works referencing real-world wars and conflicts, demonstrates how the eugenic and colonial legacies of the genre are frequently replicated in fandom. While superhero fan narratives provide ample scope for exploring ideas of embodiment and agency in relation to conceptualizations and marginal experiences of disability, these center Eurocentric perspectives and frequently involve curing disability in ways that devalue a disability identity. Marvel fan works also tend to replicate the racial and colonial biases of the MCU, privileging narratives of American nationalism and imperialism. Moreover, fan works where Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes reprise their roles as US soldiers overwhelmingly locate disability and distress in white American superheroes with little reference to the suffering of people of color and their historical contexts. Such representations serve to reify the default fan as white and American and relegate non-white fans to the margin both in Marvel canon and fandom.