OTW Guest Post: Bridget Liang & Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | OTW Guest Post: Bridget Liang & Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge |
| Interviewer: | Claudia Rebaza |
| Interviewee: | Bridget Liang & Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge |
| Date(s): | October 24, 2019 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | OTW Guest Post: Bridget Liang & Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
OTW Guest Post: Bridget Liang & Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge is a 2019 interview done as part of a series. See OTW Guest Post.
Bridget Liang is a mixed race, queer, transfeminine, neurodiverse, disabled, fat fangirl. They’re a PhD candidate in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies Program at York University, a community researcher, workshop and group facilitator, performance artist, and fiction writer. Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge is a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies at York University in Ontario, and a research assistant in the PiET (Practices in Enabling Technologies) lab in the Lassonde School of Engineering and Computer Science. Cath is interested in how technosocial practices influence disability discourses in fanfiction spaces. Today, Bridget & Cath talk about their work on disability and fanfiction research in the issue they edited of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.
Some Excerpts
What made you want to examine how disability manifests in fannish spaces?
Bridget: I’m a disabled person and have rarely ever seen anyone with my disabilities in stories I’ve read. Once, I found this author on a gay erotica website who wrote his protagonist with a disability that was different from mine, but the character “moved like me” (Mullis, 2019). I was so overcome with emotion that I sent a very long email to this author detailing all my feelings. As a sometimes writer, one of my biggest focuses is representation. As I’ve mentioned basically everywhere, I’m queer, trans, mixed race, disabled, autistic, and fat. I’ve never seen someone who has every single one of my identity categories. I feel like a monster, undesirable due to social norms.
And so, I love my monsters and I try to represent people who share traits with me having nice things happen to them. I know, I’m not writing anything profound or award winning, but representation matters to me. What does it say when I’m only reading about two white, conventionally attractive cis boys in love with each other, who get married, move into a nice place, and adopt/have kids? I’m none of those things but I still yearn for and desire love. I still want to make enough money to have more than a “bare life” (Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. California: Stanford University Press). This special issue was Cath’s pet project. She just invited me along for the ride.
Cath: The short answer is that I’m a disabled fan who’s into fanfic. The long one is that because fanfic was a solace to me as a queer person, a place where all the stories I read were femslash or slash, a place where queer representations were abundant and varied, I also started wanting to see disability represented similarly. And mostly I didn’t see it represented in ways that I found to be empowering, or even accurate.
I mean, there is so much disability representation in fanfic! Hurt/Comfort is basically based on using disability as a plot device and a way to develop characters, and a lot of angst also uses disability very liberally, but what’s said about what disability means (pitiable, pure, an insurmountable loss unless cured, a sign of evil, all those usual disability stereotypes) just seemed to reproduce how disability was used in mass media already. Which is weird, because fanfiction does the opposite when it comes to queer representation: it challenges accepted heteronormative narratives, and queers them in any number of playful and irreverent ways.
However, once in a while I would come across a really good fic with disability, and I would think: this author gets it; either they’re disabled or they love someone who is. And that lets you know other disabled people are there too, even if you don’t see them, or feel invisible as a disabled fan. I started reading a lot of Rayne (River Tam/Jayne from Firefly) fanfics and, a big part of the attraction for me was all the different ways that River was written in relation to her disability; either it was cured, or disappeared in the background, or was controlled (via meds and/or Jayne’s love/heterosexual sex); or it was front and centre, and there was an explicit recognition of the importance of disability in who River was.
That got me thinking a lot about how central to Firefly River and her disability is to the very existence of the show: without River, there is no story to tell, she is the core of the narrative. This was even before I read “Narrative Prosthesis” by Mitchell and Snyder (2000), who develop this argument via literary criticism. This reflection about River led me to questioning the role of disability in fanfiction; it’s a creative practice by ordinary fans who are engaging with the dominant, mainstream cultural narratives, that can tell us a lot about how disability is imagined culturally and socially, how it circulates, and is constructed.