Decolonizing Media Fandom

"Description: In popular media and scholarship, the default fan is often assumed to be white, Anglo-American, and able-bodied. Research about racially and culturally diverse fans is usually undertaken in specifically transnational and transcultural fandoms such as Korean pop music fandom. This book instead focuses on the globally diverse fan base of a massively popular Western text, Marvel (superhero comics and films), and focuses on ideas of disability and race. The superhero genre provides an especially meaningful opportunity to examine discourses of ability and disability as it frequently involves narratives of transforming a physical disability to produce a superpowered being or introducing a mental disability as a result of traumatizing experiences. Drawing on key Marvel fanworks shared on the fanfiction archive, Archive of Our Own (AO3), a survey and interviews with Marvel fans who identify as non-white and/or having a disability, this book examines the strengths and limitations of media fandom from the perspective of those who are often relegated to the margins even within fan cultures. This is done on two levels: firstly, in terms of representation within fanworks to understand how disability is understood and experienced across different cultures, and secondly, through fan practices and participatory experiences. The book argues that fans are affectively empowered and disempowered, and included and excluded in fandom, in ways that are reliant on their positions of race and ability. In so doing, this book complicates prevailing fan and scholarly perceptions about media fandom's positive and negative role and contributes to the decolonization of fan and disability scholarship, which have focused on global north perspectives. Contextualizing fandom's emancipatory potential against experiences of toxicity, the book posits that a mutual decolonization of fandom and mental healthcare can enhance fandom's potential for care and expand Western approaches to mental health and therapies. In addition, expressing an affirmative impulse towards re-visioning fandom, it also proposes some potential interventions into fan spaces to make them more accessible and inclusive"-- Provided by publisher.