Representation matters. That’s an actual fact. In a study from the National Research Group in 2020, shared by Variety, they found that 74 per cent of the people polled reported that inclusive content is important to them when choosing things to watch. In the survey, 91 per cent of the respondents (Americans aged 18-54 “who are heavily engaged with pop culture”) believed that media has the power and ability to influence society and 77 per cent of them also believed that Black Americans specifically were impacted by how they were portrayed in media. We also know that increased visibility of queer people and characters in children’s shows like The Owl House and Kipo and the Age of Wonder Beasts as well as reality shows like Queer Eye and dramatic series like Pose have lead to increased visibility and the understanding that queer people are… just people too.
Representation
We know that representation of marginalised groups in media leads to that group being better received by the general population who otherwise may not be seeing these people outside of hateful stereotypes. So what does that have to do with fandom? Fandom, for many people, is one of the first times that people see themselves fully and get the positive representation that they’ve been denied in mainstream media.
At what point do you remember seeing yourself in fandom for the very first time? Was it a drabble about a queer pairing? Absolutely affirming art of a character re-imagined as a trans person? How about a long-form story about dealing with trauma?
Fandom has always been a loud and safe space for queer people to find, see, and represent themselves. From the earliest documented moments of “transformative” fandom — where people seek to change or confront the source material through creating and consuming fanworks — queer people have been front and centre creating works that centre characters who lived the lives that they wanted to live.
The very first, very queer Kirk/Spock stories to show up in close-knit fannish communities and then in fanzines (like Diane Marchant’s “A Fragment out of Time” in a 1974 issue of Grup) helped pave the way for fandom as we know it. Queer fans and the queer stories they write are a force powering transformative fandom to this day, with the 2019 Fansplaining survey on shipping showing that the majority of the thousands of people who responded to it identified as queer and female.
One issue, of course, is that the majority of survey respondents also self-reported themselves as “white.” So where does that leave fans of colour and their representation in fandom? For many of us, we make our own via racebending.
Racebending
For many people of colour that first moment of seeing themselves fully in fandom came as a result of racebending. Racebending, a term coined by Racebending.com back when the disastrous Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action film came out, originally was a negative term, as the site mentions racebending as “a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of colour.” (This was because historically, studios would cast a white actor in Black/red/yellow face and call it a day rather than creating meaningful roles for performers of color.)
Currently, “racebending” refers to characters being “recast” as people of colour in order to add positive diversity to a media property that otherwise lacked significant characters and performers of color. We’ve seen examples of positive (if, relatively one dimensional) racebending in media for several decades — Smallville’s Pete Ross, Zoe Saldana’s Nyota Uhura in Star Trek, and many different characters in The CW and Warner Brothers’ DC superhero universes, for example. However, “racebending” has existed in fandom as a positive norm for decades before the casting executives responsible for DC Comics adaptations ever decided to cast Black women as the red-haired love interests of iconic heroes (see Candice Patton’s Iris West and Anna Diop’s Starfire).
Fandom was there, and racebending, from a very long time ago.
Fans dreamt of a Black Hermione Granger long before Rowling got onto the idea that surface-level diversity would make her very homogenous series look better. They racebent Harry Potter himself, reimagining him as a biracial Indian teenager torn between both whiteness and wizardry. During my time in the DC and Marvel fandoms, I was pleasantly surprised by how many fan artists and writers racebent characters like Tim Drake and Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, and Selina Kyle. (Yes, DC did it first by casting Eartha Kitt as the character in the final season of the 60s’ show and there was that bad Catwoman film, but fandom really did do it best!) And of course, fans then asked for and rallied around racebent characters once they were made canon — a necessary move in the case of the Iris West Defense Squad due to the way that The Flash fandom continues to attack Candice Patton and the character she plays on the show.
Overall, racebending is incredibly meaningful to fans of colour and provides them with a way to see themselves in fandom. However, online interpretations of an unsatisfying canon aren’t the only ways that fandom offers marginalized fans ways to see themselves in fandom.
At what point do you remember seeing yourself in fandom for the very first time? Was it a drabble about a queer pairing? Absolutely affirming art of a character reimagined as a trans person? How about a long-form story about dealing with trauma?
Community
Fandom is all about community. We come to fandom because of things we love and connect with other people who love the things that we love for the same reasons we do. There’s a post going viral on Tumblr that says “a fandom can just be you and the ten people you haven’t blocked yet”, and while that’s definitely true and I’m a huge fan of curating your online spaces, fandom also brings together people from around the world who thought they were alone in their uniqueness. Fandom brings people together based on what made them stand out in their offline and online lives.
Take ClexaCon. The convention was created to do two things: create a safe space for queer female fandoming and celebrate femslash following a period of time when queer female characters in media were dying awful deaths. While ClexaCon has its own fair share of problems — conversations about racism at the convention circulated in the summer of 2020 and femslash fandom has the same issues with racism as any other part of fandom when it comes to racial representation — at the end of the day, it’s still a space that is oriented around furthering communities for queer women. Other conventions — virtual and, prior to 2020, in-person — provide spaces for other marginalised people in different fandoms to come together and be represented in spaces, industries, and communities that they’re historically left out of or not represented well in. K-Cons around the world provide ways for international idol fans to engage with idol fandoms, and that increase in visibility and community means that fans within the Korean diaspora are more able to connect with each other and talk critically about the industry, artists, and fandoms.
Sure, fandom as a whole still has a ways to go in terms of being fully accessible to all marginalised and vulnerable fans in terms of fanworks and headcanons as well as the spaces on and off line where we do fandom. But one of the things fandom does well is allow many fans to see themselves for the first time and connect to other people who are also seeing themselves in fandom.