1. Introduction
[1.1] The discipline of fan studies has yet to systematically examine disability as a marginalized identity and critical scholarly approach beyond a handful of articles, such as Ellcessor's 2018 discussion of platform accessibility and the special issue of Canadian Journal of Disability Studies on disability and fan fiction (Liang and Duchastel de Montrouge 2019), and one book, Katherine Anderson Howell's 2025 monograph. This special issue on Disability and Fandom seeks to lay this necessary foundation for disciplinary transformation, allowing future knowledge-makers greater legibility for their work while highlighting the most pressing questions of this growing subfield.
[1.2] The process of proposing, editing, and reviewing this issue has been an empowering exercise in community building. It also revealed many practical barriers to doing interdisciplinary scholarship. For instance, all contributors faced the challenge of having to demonstrate expert facility with not one but two bodies of scholarly literature, while reviewers were typically only versed in one and unfamiliar with the other. Scholars in this special issue addressed such barriers by articulating how their situated knowledges as disabled people and fans produced uniquely valuable perspectives with a lifetime of ethnographic, artistic, and practical expertise on their subject.
[1.3] Autoethnographic approaches are uniquely suited—even necessary—to the beginning of an interdisciplinary endeavor, which definitionally lacks established methods and theories. The disabled fan scholar must use primary evidence to build new tools for examining the unstudied experiences we know exist because we have lived them. The works in this issue establish a baseline of presence for multiply marginalized experiences of, for instance, neuro-queer fan practices, upon which future scholars can now build rather than be forced to spend half their word count merely proving they exist.
[1.4] This issue features a variety of new disabled methodologies developed through engagement with fan texts, platforms, and communities. Interestingly, very few articles brought fan studies methods or theories to bear on disabled subjects, practices, and communities. The editors propose that this may indicate respective strengths and weaknesses between these fields: While disability studies has produced transportable methods, fan studies is better suited to provide engaging case studies rather than critical approaches applicable outside the scope of fandom. There are all kinds of disability in fandom, but fan studies has not prepared itself to recognize or grapple with disability even within its own accepted borders, suggesting the field could begin redressing its internalized ableism by examining the current limitations on its methods and theories.
[1.5] The scholars in this special issue prove the applicability of disability approaches to fan studies, especially demonstrating how online fan activities are neither disembodied nor secondary to disability interests. The apparent immateriality of digital fan practices can actually work to widen disability studies' focus and better grasp the invisible operations of the ideology of ableism and the resistant strategies of disabled fans. Several authors suggest that fandom is structurally resonant with disabled experiences and/or disability accessibility, especially converging on understudied experiences of neurodiversity and other so-called invisible disabilities (Price 2015), showing how fandom can act as a space to build community with other Autistic, ADHD, and mentally ill folks and use fandom's transformative tools to make these marginalized disability experiences legible. Also in this issue, Garg utilizes a decolonial perspective to critique the limitations of fandom's disability imaginations. These articles only capture a small fragment of contemporary digital fandom, largely focusing on the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own and straight white male Anglophone texts. With the validity of disability fan studies as a subfield established and urgent topics of interest identified, we hope future scholarship is now better prepared to engage deeper critiques and intersectional approaches.
[1.6] We recognize that many disabled authors were forced to work under able-bodied frameworks for this issue, including traditional publishing deadlines in conflict with crip time, copyediting structures that defy neurodivergent creativity, and the emotional, physical, and cognitive labors of writing that stretch us thin in already chronically ill and pained bodies. We acknowledge the work of many authors who did not make this final issue due to such structural constraints, and we thank them for their time, effort, and scholarship. We also acknowledge the labor of the contributors and the TWC journal staff for their tremendous work in producing this issue, seeking to bridge fields through beautifully imperfect and incomplete academic-art-advocacy. This issue witnesses the ableist limits in current systems of academic publishing because criticism allows for growth, identifying ways in which we can honor our collective responsibility to make these processes more accessible for future disabled scholars.
2. Articles
[2.1] Divya Garg uses a decolonial perspective to examine Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fics, revealing that fans are complicit in hegemonic operationalizations of disability, which reinstate ideas of American nationalism and imperialism and marginalize non-Western and nonwhite experiences. Many of the fan works set in the military universe tend to privilege the disability and trauma of white men while signaling the colonial legacy of the superhero genre and the MCU franchise. Garg prescribes a deeper analysis and line of questioning into the larger politics of media fandom: Whose stories do the media and fans tell, and who do they relegate to a footnote?
[2.2] Marialaura Grandolfo and Nicola Simonetti's "Tagging Care: 'Disability' in Good Omens and Stranger Things 'Hurt/Comfort' Fan Fiction" explores how fans can critically mobilize tags on AO3 to signal the importance of disability in their works and counter ableist tropes. Specifically, Grandolfo compares two fandom case studies to demonstrate how the popular trope of hurt/comfort can do more than treat disability as a narrative prosthetic and source of pity; by naming disability as a central theme through tagging, authors can deploy disability as a critical framework and encourage readers to take up a nuanced receptive position.
[2.3] Georgia Thomas-Parr's "Contemplating the Neuroaffirmative Potential of Fandom Studies" surfaces neglected neurodivergent potential in fan studies literature, exploring the structural resonances of fandom and neurodiversity especially in terms of shared stigma and an investment in working at angles to hegemonic culture. As illustrated through the case study of the "special interest," Thomas-Parr explores fandom as a space particularly suited to supporting neurodivergent folks' creativity and so especially useful for scholars seeking to find case studies and communities with whom to conduct neuroaffirmative research beyond the normate majority.
[2.4] Kitty Geoghan offers an autoethnographic account as an autistic fan and their engagement with fan fiction in order to illustrate the potential of neuroqueering fan studies. Neuroqueer exists at the theoretical intersections of queer history, which has a long tradition in fan studies spaces, and neurodiversity, which is just beginning to be examined. By framing experiences through this framework, Geoghan is able to expand the work already done in fan studies on gender and sexuality to incorporate neurological differences.
[2.5] Teddy Hogerhuis's "Embracing the Robotic: Products of Neuroqueer Reclamation on AO3" explores how fans navigate the complicated historical discourse around neurodivergent people in regard to the often pathologizing, dehumanizing effects of being labeled "robotic." Hogerhuis's close reading of fan fiction within a critical queer-disabled theoretical framework uncovers how fans refuse hegemonic negative perceptions of the robot figure and instead "hack" the concept to forward radical neuroqueer modes of identity and connection, arguing that AO3's community-focused infrastructure makes it particularly suited to supporting this nonnormative creative work.
[2.6] D. L. Brand's "Constructed Representation: Finding Autism in Star Trek" introduces the practice of constructed representation, where autistic fans locate characters not explicitly intended as neurodivergent representation within their normative text and build evidence to support reading the character as autistic. Brand argues that the agentic act of constructed representation is often more meaningful and less stigmatized to autistic fans than intentional representation, which often relies on harmful stereotypes and provides only a limited, neurotypical imaginary of autistic experience.
[2.7] Olivia Johnston Riley's "Digital Disability Aesthetics: Queer-Disabled Practices in Oral Notfic" develops the concept of digital disability aesthetics, operationalizing how some online creators and audiences use disability to critically inform their everyday production of and engagement with creative works. Exploring the case study of oral notfic, fan audio works recorded without preexisting textual content, Riley argues that these podficcers expand our imaginaries of disability access, creativity, and aesthetic value to make room for disabled artists, practices, and perspectives.
3. Symposium
[3.1] Dean Leetal critiques how J. K. Rowling has mobilized certain disability rights language to provide political cover for her transphobia. Specifically, Rowling claims that trans women are "triggering" to cis women survivors of sexual violence and so excludes trans women from the survivor support center she founded. However, Rowling neglects to provide any meaningful disability accessibility at the center—the building is physically inaccessible, and the website has no trigger warnings—even as she appropriates access rhetoric to obfuscate and excuse her perpetuation of transphobia.
[3.2] Vincent Paquin explores the Hazbin Hotel adult animated series, where the character Angel Dust goes through a journey of recovery in the context of addiction and trauma. Using Neely Myers's framework on recovery, Paquin highlights the role of intimacy and moral agency in Angel's transformation, which allows the character to become more accountable for the needs of his community and to live a more fulfilling and hopeful life. Paquin argues that to better understand the implications of recovery narratives in fan culture, future work should consider the reception, transformation, and production of such narratives within fandoms.
[3.3] Rowan Crewe uses personal narrative, affect theory, and the ideas of care labor and access intimacy to explore the unique disability accessibility potential of fan fiction. Crewe explains how fan fiction's focus on bodies and emotions in the context of community and comfortingly familiar characters lends itself structurally to supporting disabled bodyminds better than other forms of literature tend to do, closing with the specific example of the hurt/comfort trope as received by a chronically pained reader.
[3.4] Lauren Rouse shares the results of a 2022 demographic survey done on AO3 users, specifically examining responses of disability identity. Rouse discusses which disabilities are prevalent in fandom communities as well as the intersections of disabilities and other identities like race. Rouse contends that by examining these results, fan scholars can begin to form a foundational idea of fans' disability identities and their needs, wants, or desires about disability in fandom and its related media.
[3.5] Chelsea Fay Baumgartner investigates fandom headcanons—personal interpretations in conversation with the source text and its popular readings—of the character Shen Yuan as chronically ill. Exploring the disability headcanons of this case study reveals how fans negotiate textual authority, grounding their favored readings variously in textual evidence and resonance with personal disability experiences. Baumgartner further suggests that fandom can be a productive location for diverse audiences to engage the ideas of disability studies in creative community.
[3.6] Bo Blanksma explores how fans articulate readings of fictional characters as neurodivergent through video editing. Using the case study of What We Do in the Shadows fan edits, Blanksma demonstrates how video editors and the fan communities receiving these works develop reading strategies to identify autistic behaviors like stimming and echolalia within the source text and develop this evidence discursively into legible neurodivergent character interpretations with which audiences can identify and feel represented.
4. Book review
[4.1] Vee Kennedy reviews Katherine Anderson Howell's landmark monograph Disability and Fandom, the first book-length exploration of these fields' intersection. Kennedy outlines Howell's comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of cripping fan studies, exploring in detail some especially impactful case studies such as the intersectional analysis of the celebrity Ye, and highlighting the valuable crip vulnerability Howell models for future disabled scholars working in this field.
5. Acknowledgments
[5.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 48 in an editorial capacity: Poe Johnson and Mel Stanfill (editors); Taylore Nicole Woodhouse and Tanya Zuk (assistant editors); Jennifer Duggan and Khaliah Reed (Symposium); and Brienne Adams (Review).
[5.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 48 in a production capacity: Jillian Kovach (production editor); Lys Benson, Beth Friedman, Jillian Kovach, M. Lisa, Christine Mains, and A. Smith (copyeditors); Claire P. Baker, Natalia G, Jillian Kovach, M. Lisa, Christine Mains, Rhine, Rebecca Sentance, Latina Vidolova, and Yumi (layout); and Jillian Kovach, Christine Mains, Ember Phoenix, Aileen Sheedy, and Latina Vidolova (proofreaders).
[5.3] TWC thanks the board of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW provides financial support to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
[5.4] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 48: David Adelman, Krystal Cleary, Kara Cremonese, Kitty Geoghan, Rachel Loewen, Marion Quirici, Jess Rauchberg, and Megan Rose.