Crip Categories in Online Fanfic: Contested Representations of Disability through Tagging

• In Event: Creative Misfits - II: Creating Categories: Disability, Agency, and Identity

Abstract

What if Harry Potter became blind through an incurable curse? Can Castiel help Sam Winchester adapt to becoming paraplegic? How would River Tam become self-sufficient after Serenity? Fanfictions are stories written by fans about any kind of mass media fandom (TV shows, movies, books, play, comics and anime, etc.) in order to expand and extend their narratives. These are kept in (mostly) public online repositories, often created and maintained by fans. Disability themes and tropes are as present in fanfiction narratives as they are in the originals they are based on.
In this presentation I explore how some of the archival practices in one online repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), shapes possible discourses about disability, and non-normative bodyminds. Disability-related search terms, or "tags", and how they are hierarchized and otherwise organized to enable search capabilities, impact the practices of fans that interact with the site. Fans on AO3 can also create their own tags (freeform tagging), allowing for disruptions of mainstream views about disability, illness, and other non-normative embodied experiences. How do these tensions, these "misfittings" (Garland Thomson, 2011) created between fans' playful impulses to insert new ways of classifying disability in AO3, and volunteers' attempts to design a searchable taxonomy using medical categories, enables disability as both a contested cultural practice and identity (Kafer, 2013)? How do these technosocial affordances enable the classification system in AO3 itself to become visible as an artifact that structures a particular narrative order (Bowker & Star, 2000) about disability?

Author

• Catherine Duchastel, STS Program, York University