This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples.

In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Some activists regarded critiques of Trump’s behavior as proof of growing disability awareness among members of the general public. Others were not so sure. Writer/activist Andrew Pulrang’s words best characterized this ambivalence.

The reaction to it, that so many people say it’s the worst thing he’s done, is indicative that we’ve turned a corner, where it’s just not socially acceptable the way it was. . . . Why is this the thing that is worse than all the other groups than he’s targeted? . . . We’re easy to feel protective towards. Part of ableism is a heavy dose of paternalism. (Carmon, 2016)

Much of the public outrage stemmed from underlying damaging attitudes regarding disability, from popular stereotypes of disabled people as inspirational figures (Hardin et al., 2001) or naïve victims (Shapiro, 1994). In this case of Trump mocking Kovaleski, an angry public took offense due to the impression that disabled people need to be protected. In other words, disabled people should be off-limits when it comes to ridicule but because they are weak and defenseless, not owing to their intrinsic humanity. These assumptions prove harmful, silencing disabled people and rendering them in/visible—invisible as “active member[s] in the public sphere” but hypervisible based on any kind of marked impairment (Kuppers, 2001, p. 25; see also Johnson & Kennedy, eds., 2020). Such “benevolence” does not counter ableism so much as perpetuate it.

In/visibility has major implications for other marginalized groups’ wellbeing, including queer folks, im/migrants, and members of gender and racial minority groups (Chávez, 2013; Licona & Maldonado, 2014; Johnson & Boylorn, 2015; Cram, 2019; Holling, 2019; Cedillo, 2020). In addition to serving as a technology of surveillance of Othered bodies, in/visibility results from interactions of disability with other marginalized identities. Histories of im/migration[1] and medical pathologization show that disability has often been used as a marker for ethnic, racial, and sexual undesirability. Ableism has long informed the immigration process, popular stereotypes, and im/migrants’ access to resources in fundamentally racist ways (Baynton, 2016; Dolmage, 2018; Molina, 2006; Ordover, 2003). Given the ubiquity of ableist attitudes in policies that directly affect Latinx people, I suggest that non-disabled Latinx activists would do well to take note of how disabled activists oppose in/visibility. Therefore, in this chapter I analyze the social media rhetorics of disabled user-activists to show how disability activists use digital media to combat in/visibility by composing powerful constitutive rhetorics that enact phenomenological foregrounding. Specifically, I examine tweets bearing the hashtag #CripTheVote, marking them as part of an ongoing social media campaign led by disabled people. Others have noted that the #CripTheVote campaign establishes novel forms of social movement (Mann, 2018), highlights disability as a fundamental facet of humanness, (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2017), identifies disabled users as a potent online constituency (Trevisan, 2019), and creates new opportunities for modifying self-concepts (Li, Bora, Salvi, & Brady, 2018). To these arguments I add that social media allow disabled people to build embodied communities that happen to converge in online spaces where they challenge habituated beliefs and attitudes.

Below, I show how algorithmic erasure inures harmful views of disability in the social imaginary by analyzing popular Google search results related to disability. Then, using #CripTheVote tweets by disabled activist-users, I explain how disabled activists compose spaces that reflect their embodied identities. In these spaces, activists contest ableist narratives to establish a form of visibility that challenges stereotypical (and stereotyping) forms of in/visibility. By engaging in online community-building and humanizing important issues, disabled social media activists bring disability to the forefront of public awareness, refusing to allow disabled identity to remain the phenomenological background of able-bodiedness. Writing as a disabled Latinx individual myself, I believe that familiarity with the online tactics of disabled activists would prove useful in the development of new tactics for promoting visibility regarding Latinx issues; such understanding would also hone attention on the needs of multiply-marginalized Latinxs, ensuring that the needs of the most vulnerable are centered in the struggle for human rights. However, since my intention here is to acquaint wider audiences with the uses of social media by disabled activists, I do not focus on campaigns by disabled Latinx user-activists or draw comparisons that might misconstrue ethnoracial status and disability as fungible markers of identity. Instead, I focus on some of the larger and better-known disability-related social media campaigns with the hope that the insights provided here will allow readers to note points of interest convergence and potentialities for solidarity across advocacy groups.

Disabled In/visibility

Disabled people make up the largest minoritized group in the United States. Currently, there are 57,000,000 people who identify or are identified as disabled, making up 19% of the population (Torres, 2018). These are figures provided by a 2012 U.S. Census Bureau report, released on the 22^nd anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). According to the census report, between 2005 (the date of the previous report) and 2010, the number of disabled people had increased by 2.2 million although the percentage remained the same. Thus, as is the case with other marginalized groups, the problem of in/visibility poses a dangerous problem for disabled persons, and yet, disability is an identity marker that is often overlooked. As a result, disabled people are routinely targeted by harmful legislation or affected by a lack of legal protections while having their needs ignored by members of other vulnerable groups, including those groups to which they also belong. Disabled people are twice as likely to be unemployed and legally may still be paid less than minimum wage (Torres, 2018). It’s no surprise, then, that many of the nation’s disabled people live in conditions of poverty.

At the same time, “disabled peoples’ social invisibility has occurred in the wake of their perpetual circulation throughout print history” (Mitchell and Snyder, 2013, p. 226). Popular audiences’ knowledge of disability is often based on injurious misconceptions promoted by ableist media. Common construals of disability tend to overlook disabilities that are not so straightforwardly discernable, as is the case with some mental disabilities (Price, 2010). They make disability a matter of defect and deficit rather than acknowledging how the conditions of everyday life, constructed for the able-bodied, contribute to disability (Wilson & Lewiecki-Wilson, 2001). Instead, evident difference is used to distinguish between those who are disabled and those who are not, with impressions of value becoming socially attached to markers of difference that determine what is “normal” and what is “deviant” (Garland-Thomson, 2017). These conditions result in disabled in/visibility, wherein disabled bodies are overly “visible,” or hypervisible, while disabled people themselves become “invisible,” forced to strive for “legitimized embodied presence and a sense of belonging and participation” in everyday life (Zitzelsberger, 2005, p. 396).

Moreover, such readings of disability ignore the many ways that disability intersects with other marginalized identities in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation (Caldwell, 2010). In comparison to depictions of people from other marginalized groups, portrayals of disabled people prove more frequent, and disability as a theme proves more pervasive than ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender identity. Yet, this tendency does not entail greater representation. Indeed, it has dire consequences for multiply-marginalized and/or racialized people, further habituating stereotypes that replace real human beings in the public consciousness, bolstering and bolstered by a “taken-for-granted divide [that configures] disability as the edge of human life” (Titchkosky, 2015, p. 2). Disability stigma is used to frame people of color as defective or irrational while racial stigma renders disabled people of color as criminals (Erevelles, 2014; Dilts, 2012). Thus, establishing visibility is crucial for disabled people, especially those who are multiply-marginalized.[2]

Based on these prejudices, disabled people are denied full subjectivity and rhetoricity. Disabled voices are suppressed owing to common expectations that posit a Subject as someone independent, singular, and individualistic who speaks without intercession (Johnson, 2010), meaning politicians, advocates, and supposed allies often have more of a say than disabled individuals over disabled people’s lives.  These kinds of expectations devalue the perspectives of disabled persons, especially those who depend on others, even though most communication is mediated through relationships between people. However, by using technology to build supportive communities, many disabled activists obtain a public platform for themselves and others where they can advocate in their own best interests. Through the skillful use of social media, disabled activists create communities online where they and other individuals can contest stereotypes and other forms of rhetorical oppression. Social media is a useful tool for political organizing during times of crisis, but for disabled users for whom the time is crisis is always now, social media proves more than a tool. They are necessary rhetorical spaces where disabled user-activists organize politically and create vital communities of care and support. As an investigation of the #CripTheVote campaign demonstrates, by amplifying their own experiences, disabled user-activists embody disability in ways that counter flattening political and social discourses that foster harmful conditions for disabled people. Moreover, disabled activists strategically cultivate visibility to counteract the in/visibility imposed on disabled people, a collective rhetorical performance with vital implications.

Digital Disability

The #CripTheVote campaign started in January 2016 as part of the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), an online community established in 2014 by Alice Wong, DVP’s founder and director. The DVP’s mission is to “create, share and amplify disability media and culture” (“About”—Disability Visibility Project, n.d.). Working from an intersectional angle, the DVP publishes different kinds of texts in diverse media about disability, discrimination, and politics. In addition to suggesting that disabled individuals record their stories through StoryCorps, the DVP hosts events offline and online chats via Twitter. Their “About” page specifically mentions using social media to support disabled people and their organizations to amplify work being done within the community. These chats are organized around specific topics like engaging public officials in advocacy work and participating in political actions. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, the DVP site includes helpful links to text- and video-based how-to’s on how to join Twitter and how a Twitter chat works, ensuring that inexperience does not bar people from taking part.

On Twitter, the use of the #CripTheVote hashtag draws the public’s attention to legislation and other policies that targets disabled people. By featuring the word “crip” rather than “disabled,” the hashtag signifies an emphatic, radical perspective. A quick dictionary search will say that the word is considered the offensive; deployed strategically by disabled individuals, it proclaims an identity based in disabled experience (physical or mental) and a culture that results from this collective knowledge. As disability, race, and gender studies scholar Sami Schalk explains, “Crip is shorthand for the word ‘cripple’ which has been (and is) used as an insult toward people with disabilities, but which has been re-appropriated as an intra-group term of empowerment and solidarity” (2013). The term proves uncomfortable for many non-disabled people, but that tension imbues the term with significant rhetorical power.

The hashtag renders politically-engaged users more readily visible via a quick search using #CripTheVote as a key search term, reminding politicians and other public figures that disabled people are a vital voting bloc. However, the hashtag also allows disabled users to connect with others, facilitating the formation of disabled communities. That is, disabled users can decide for themselves how they wish to come together to constitute a community and with whom. Frequently, when non-disabled writers and critics mention “the disabled community,” they refer to anyone in our society who is disabled, lumping everyone together whether or not they have common interests or goals. This forced clusivity obscures real people’s autonomy and forces them into a single, catch-all box that leaves little room for complexity and diversity. Using the hashtag, members of this community bring the complexity of disability communities to the forefront of public perception, something greatly needed to displace the negative and harmful narratives that sustain entrenched ableist cultural assumptions.

The capacity for building self-defined communities is so necessary for minoritized and marginalized groups who must live in a society where the normate controls the dominant narrative of belonging and Otherness. A neologism coined by Rosemary Garland-Thomson, the normate “designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings…the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (2017, p. 8). The normate constitutes and is constituted according to what kinds of bodies are perceived as aberrant or Other and what bodies just are. The latter refers to people who are straight, cis-male, white, able-bodied, affluent, and so on. As Garland-Thomson explains, very few people actually fit this template, yet the normate retains the power to demarcate the limits of the fully human.

Algorithmic Erasure

The distinction between the conventional subject and everyone else is so deeply ingrained in our societal structures that it is often taken for granted unless the -isms it sustains happen to affect one personally. These biases are so fixed that they inform seemingly neutral discourses. One current example includes how algorithms reflect and promote bigotry. Algorithms are coded problem-solving processes that determine who shows up in your Facebook friends list, what tweets you’re more likely to come across, and the results that search engines provide. Made up of sequenced steps, most users might assume algorithms are impartial constructs. As scholars like Safiya Noble have shown, algorithms reveal the biases of the human beings behind their construction and use. Noble’s work exposes how “racialized and gendered identities are portrayed and legitimated through Google search” (2013). Users can affect the results that algorithms will show vis-à-vis their search terms; the more users search for and engage with particular terms and sites, the more likely they are to appear in popular search results. Their prevalence grants them a sense of legitimacy as representative of ideological or cultural norms, even if the searches that inspired their ranking were based on ignorance or bigotry.

In the case of algorithms and their relationship to representations of disabled people, Google search results provide a sense of how the general public might regard disability.[3] When one enters the term “disabled community” into the search bar, Google returns some troubling results (Fig. 1). Out of 1,220,000,000 results, the top ones were

• a site called options4u.org via a paid ad;
• Org, a nonprofit run by nondisabled people;
• the National Disability Authority’s “Appropriate Terms to Use” page;
• and a series of questions asking whether the word “disabled” is considered offensive or should be used at all.[4]

The thumbnail explanation shows that options4u.org “improves [the] lives of disabled people.” Further below, it says “We help people with disabilities.” Proclaiming itself a “2019 Great Cause,” the organization invites people—able-bodied people—to donate or volunteer. Plainly, the language of the brief description addresses not disabled individuals but self-identified allies looking for an opportunity to make a difference. The National Disability Authority (NDA) is an independent state organization that advises the Irish government regarding disability policy. While some disabled persons may need to access information on “appropriate terms” for people with disabilities, the page more likely provides this information for able-bodied people trying to make sure they do not use dehumanizing language. Notably, the page provides the offending term, followed by new terms: “Term no longer in use: the disabled / Term Now Used: people with disabilities or disabled people” (NDA, 2014).

Below that appears a list of questions regarding the offensiveness of the word “disabled.” This is an interesting juxtaposition, given that the NDA page tries to clarify this issue. However, in attempting to do so, the NDA provides examples of person-first language, the use of which is fervently contested by disabled people. Many able-bodied people use person-first language—“person with a disability” rather than “disabled person”—to ostensibly avoid offending disabled people. Person-first language is meant to convey the idea that disabled people are not their “disabilities,” suggesting that disability is a stigmatizing condition rather than a defining characteristic of people’s lives (Sinclair, 1999; Brown, 2011). Thus, many self-advocates prefer identity-first language—“disabled person” or “Autistic person.” Identity-first language highlights disability as a vital rhetorical framework through which disabled people engage the world. While disabled people certainly have different opinions regarding this topic, the juxtaposition provided by these search results reinforces the centrality of able-bodied attitudes in answering such questions.

Further illustrating this tendency are the rest of the initial search results (Fig, 2). “Please Quit Using the Disabled Community in Your Political Campaign!” is written by the mother of a disabled child, not a disabled person. The next result links to The Arc’s site. The Arc is an organization founded in the 1950s by “a small group of concerned and passionate parents and community members who would be catalyst for changing the public perception of children with disabilities (The Arc, 2018). The site’s language centers parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, providing testimonies from some of the group’s founders but no word about the involvement of the disabled people represented. DisabledCommunity.Org appears again, stating their mission to empower disabled people. The final result provides “Communities and Websites that Disabled People Should be Following” because the disabled community provides “great content” and “inspiring stories,” perpetuating the cliché of disabled people as motivating figures for the able-bodied. Only two of the listed organizations—the American Association of People with Disabilities and the National Eating Disorders Association—appear to center disabled people themselves based on their reasons for convening (“a cross disability community,” “our community members”) and a clear preference for identity-first language (“disability community,” “this piece uses identity-first language”).

Creating a Disabled Community across Time and Space

In response to the centering of able-bodiedness in our society and algorithms, disabled users use social media spaces to engage in activism that emphasizes disabled people having their own needs and perspectives. Here, it is important to mention that not all disabled people use social media.[5] Many social media sites prove inaccessible to disabled users because “they are often text-based and present the potential for misinterpretation of communication and unwanted self-disclosure” (Miller, 2017, p. 511). Nevertheless, research shows that social media provides an important element of choice. For example, unlike the case of DisabledCommunity.Org (Fig. 2), where the term “disabled community” joins all disabled people under a rubric of homogeneity, disabled users of social media feel they gain entry to spaces inhabited by others with similar struggles and that they have options regarding self-disclosure of their disabilities; some choose to remain anonymous (Miller, 2017). Disabled people can identify or dissociate from one another based on other facets of their identities as well, forging friendships and engaging in political activism with others. When users come together on social media based on relatable bodily experiences, people rather than material geographies determine how communal lines are drawn.

Activists can offer each other support across spaces that might prove untraversable especially for disabled people. For example, Figure 3 shows a tweet by Black disabled activist Imani Barbarin asking for communal input: “Giving a presentation on the effectiveness of hashtag campaigns started by disabled people today (i.e., #CripTheVote and #ADAPTandRESIST. Should I record it?” Barbarin, who goes by the username @Crutches&Spice, is the originator of popular hashtags like #AbledsAreWeird and #ThingsDisabledPeopleKnow, hashtags that center disability and counter the normate’s power to claim sole authoritative knowledge. Below, Alice Wong (@SFdirewolf), the creator of #CripTheVote and founder of the DVP, replies with “Please do!!” Barbarin is from Pennsylvania, Wong from San Francisco. On Twitter, these two well-known disabled activists “meet” and those of us who know who they are get to be a part of it, too. Amid a sea of Twitter users, those who are part of this particular online community connect through specific kind of knowledge that suffuses the online and offline world and yet remains mainly visible to those who share a common interest.

Within these communal spaces, disabled identification is not only experiential but rhetorical owing to impressions of kairos that they enable. Kairos as a dual concept ties an appropriate time and space to an appropriately measured action (Kinneavy, 2002). Certain messages pertain to certain spaces at certain moments and their communication must occur within the bounds of certain norms. Social media allow the creation of community at crucial political, social, and/or cultural moments and do so by stressing a few basic rules (Vie, 2014). Groups request that members stick to certain topics, and users must follow the rules of netiquette. However, where the ephemerality of kairos and online discussions meet ever-present ableism, social media actually helps to keep vital communities and conversations going. For instance, Wong started #CripTheVote during an election cycle, but the hashtag remains a vital tool for challenging ableist views that frame disabled people as an apolitical, easily ignored group.

Moreover, social media accommodates multiple instantiations of kairos at the same time as communication happens in asynchronous time. In an online space, people can come and go, participate or not, without meaning being lost. Fig. 4 shows a Twitter chat led by Wong and Pulrang where it appears that different users answer questions seemingly out of sync. Rebecca Cokley, director of the Disability Justice Initiative, says, “A2. That’s what they want-us tired. They want us 2 choose what matters #Medicaid #CHIP or ADA b/c THEY know it will divide us. #CripThe Vote.” Wong writes, “Q3 What bipartisan efforts do you anticipate in Congress on the #ACA? Are you optimistic, or feeling something else? #CripTheVote.” Below that, Dr. Rachel McDonald, Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Care Support Services at The College of William & Mary, tweets, “A1. Big love for disability advocates/community tonight/ Concerned about the potential dismantling of #ADA and #Medicaid laws #CriptTheVote.” If this conversation transpired in a material space, the results would be confusing. And yet, this “ordered disorder” reflects the constant back-and-forth demanded of activists who combat structural inequities whose effects transcend election cycles and quick fixes. Thus, social media disability activism invites writers to interrogate standard notions of kairos, teaching users to compose for audiences affected by society’s -isms, people for whom the rhetorical moment is always now just as it is always the time to discuss and organize around these issues.

Highlighting Disabled People’s Humanity

As noted above, in social media spaces, disabled user-activists get to define community on their own terms, contesting impressions that render disabled people as one indistinguishable mass. In so doing, they also counter the dehumanizing mechanisms that erase individuality and complexity. This point is crucial because this makes it much easier for legislators and voters to go against disabled people’s interests if they are recognized as statistics rather than real people. Government entities regard disabled people as an imagined community that remains abstract even though the impression is predicated on the assumption of shared bodily conditions. These supposedly shared conditions find their grounding in financial discourse. In contrast, disability activists frame their own bio-socio-political interests very differently than do governmental bodies or members of the general public. When disabled activists tweet about their physical and material realities, they encourage but do not presume consubstantiality with others.

Once again, a Google search reveals how disabled people are perceived legally and financially, hence, socially (Fig. 5). The first result, a paid ad, offers a free consultation to help people find out if they qualify for Social Security benefits. The second and third results, both to the Social Security Administration website, specifically lead to links about disability benefits. Between them, a series of questions ask how one qualifies for disability, how much disability pays, what conditions prove automatic qualifications, and how one gets started on disability [benefits]. If a random person who was not necessarily seeking information on disability benefits plugged in the term “disability,” the results might be construed to support the common story that many individuals who claim to be disabled are lazy or “faking it.” That is, that these results arise from people researching ways to cheat the system. That impression has racist implications. A history of casting people of color as helpless or shiftless and the government as benevolent has long associated disability with “immorality, dishonesty, and laziness” (Samuels, 2014, pp. 58, 170). Over several centuries, eugenicist medical and pseudo-scientific texts asserted that non-whites were essentially inferior, a blight needing to be contained or else a feebleminded population in need of paternalistic care. Such images live on in stereotypes like Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, a figure whose specter continues to haunt discussions about public assistance programs. Such stereotypes influence how even search results are received—and they encourage people to vote for those who would root out supposed benefits fraud or cut benefits, leaving disabled people to deal with the dire consequences.

Another Google search, this time using the search term “disabled people,” provides more dreadful results (Fig. 6). The first is a Wikipedia entry that provides a subdirectory to “Disability benefits” and “Disability insurance” yet again. A series of questions asks who is a disabled, whether they can be considered healthy, what being a person with a disability means, and what you call a disabled person (that last question reading like the start of a bad ableist joke). Below that is a link to a CDC page on “Disability and Health.” Most people know the CDC, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the agency that steps in whenever a pandemic strikes. Thus, the link perpetuates the commonplace idea that disability is a hopefully preventable condition. This idea proves very dangerous, inspiring eugenicist groups who wish to eradicate disabilities and, consequently, disabled people.

Perhaps the most striking result is a link to a Wikipedia article and a snippet that defines disability as “an impairment that may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these…” (The actual link redirects to the “Disability” Wikipedia entry.) Besides pictures of people in wheelchairs, there are three pictures of Donald Trump, one of them bearing the words “More images.” This may be the result of two things. In 2017, activists engaged in an all-out fight to prevent the Trump administration’s gutting of the ADA, which already provides a bare minimum of protections for disabled people, and its proposed dismantling of Obamacare and cuts to Medicaid, threatening the coverage of millions of disabled people. (Some of those tweets are featured in Figs. 3 and 4.) There is also the propensity of journalists and pundits to refer to Trump as “crazy,” “deranged,” or “mentally ill” to explain his lack of experience, tact, and compassion. This political use of ableist terms encourages people to use them as insults, reaffirming prejudice against those with mental and intellectual disabilities. Studies show that those who would not ordinarily use discriminatory language are more likely to actually engage in discrimination, feeling “morally credentialed” that they were not, in fact, biased (Gomez & Kaiser, 2019). In other words, the popular use of these terms to diagnose or ridicule Trump leads to increased ableism that can still be denied. The same sense of moral decency that had people denounce Trump’s mocking of Kovaleski accommodates the mocking of mental illness because the supposed target is loathed. Except Trump is not the ultimate target of such ableism—disabled people are.

These images of Trump framed by the diagnosis of mental illness are accompanied by other injurious images. One titled the “Physical disable” [sic] does not even feature a real person but the wheelchair-using character Artie Abrams from the series Glee, played by Kevin McHale who is not actually disabled. The character is generally good-natured and succeeds at singing despite his disability, though he imagines himself dancing in at least one episode. In other words, disabled people serve a social function in exchange for attention, compassion, and resources.

Given such impressions of disabled people, disabled activists must often use social media to promote awareness regarding visual representations of disabled people. It is the popular use of disability as a device that they must refute, whether the depiction is used to show disdain (in the case of Trump) or to inspire (in the case of Artie). In either instance, disabled people are denied depth and used to bolster the normativity of everyday life. Hence, some users will use the #CripTheVote hashtag to promote visibility beyond election cycles since these harmful stereotypes will inevitably influence people’s vote. For example, retweeting the Pacific Standard’s tweet, @Katie_Speak (Katie Klabusich) calls on others to challenge detrimental depictions of disability (Fig. 7). The Pacific Standard tweet reads, “Netflix’s ‘Afflicted’ could have been an empathetic glimpse into the lives of chronically ill patients. Instead, as @mayadusenbery explains, the show insinuates that patients are imagining or exaggerating their diseases, and further stigmatizing patients.” @Katie_Speak says, “I added my name to the petition. If you haven’t yet, please read Maya’s piece and then add your name. #DisabilityJustice #ChronicIllness #CriptheVote #DisabilityVisibility #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs.”[6]

This tweet does not refer to an election or public policy but still uses the recognition and authority of the #CripTheVote campaign to amplify the petition in service to achieving visibility for disabled people. When shows like Glee and Afflicted feature stereotypical characters, those characters threaten to overshadow real people. Glee’s Artie feeds expectations that disabled people should be cheerful and work to inspire others. In the case of Afflicted, the fear that disabled people are faking is stoked once again.

Another tweet that strategically use the #CripTheVote hashtag explains why this matters so much (Fig. 8). @geekygimp (Erin Hawley) tweets, “Disability justice 101: don’t refer to disabled people as ‘the disabled’. By removing the word ‘people,’ you further separate us from the rest of humanity. #DisabilityJustice #Disability101 #ThankYouForComingToMyTedTalk #DisabilityVisibility #CripTheVote.”[7] This tweet makes use of the original hashtag’s rhetorical power and popularity to establish the campaign’s ultimate goals: justice and visibility, including physical and material security. These tweets call attention to disabled people’s basic humanity. Refusing to be erased by obfuscating terms and media clichés, these activist-users ensure others know that disabled people are more than a fiscal bottom line. There are real human beings behind the tweets.

Slacktivism or Disabled Visibility?

Visibility for disabled people entails having room to participate in society in ways that suit their embodied needs and abilities. It also means that members of the normate dominant culture must own how they have contributed to disabled people’s having to struggle for basic rights. Part of that acknowledgement requires rethinking common (mis-)understandings regarding community membership and how that might manifest, especially in relation to social media. As stated earlier, some disabled people cannot engage in activism that requires them to leave their homes, navigate inaccessible environments, or participate in long marches in loud spaces. Social media allows them to spread awareness or signal boost messages. They can share times, dates, and locations of protests; they may circulate petitions to legislators. The nondisabled normate must recognize these actions as valid forms of participation. Too often, these kinds of online activities are discounted as slacktivism, or “slacker activism,” a demeaning designation. A slacktivist is an armchair activist—a “clicktivist” who simply signs online petitions or shares political memes. Slacktivism has been called “feel-good back patting . . . without mobilization and/or demonstrable effect in solving a social issue” (Glenn, 2015, p. 82), the idea being that people can virtually signal and thereby cultivate a concerned ethos without sacrificing time or energy. However, these judgements are ableist and do not take different forms of community building into account.

Some activists can participate in marches or die-ins. Others like disabled people with limited mobility, may be restricted to online involvement. This, too, is an effective form of activism and, quite possibly, one better suited to fostering long-term involvement and dedication. Members of a group personally affected by structural injustice are more likely to dedicate consistent attention to an issue that directly shapes their experiences (Gomez & Kaiser, 2019). Due to that consistency, community members can delegate tasks according to people’s abilities, creating highly influential movements capable of effecting significant change. For example, while at times mobilization happens on the ground, much of the Disability Visibility Project’s work happens online in the form of podcasts, blogs, videos, and through the use of social media (Fig. 9). Activists and community members can add to the DVP’s archives as they are able using multimodal tools and media. Everyone’s experience proves indispensable. In sharing their story with StoryCorps (the narrative archive component of the DVP), disabled individuals become agents of social transformation for years to come. The DVP’s ongoing success draws attention to the power of online activism in building community and creating change over time through education and outreach, vital actions that sometimes get overshadowed by the spectacle of in-person protest even though these will always be needed, long after the current political cycle draws to a close.

Furthermore, discussions about slacktivism overlook rhetorical and symbolic action as critical aspects of activism. Activism is not solely defined by “actively engaging in politics, protest, or civil disobedience, or spending or raising money,” as Malcolm Gladwell and others assert (Vie, 2014). As the results of a search using the term “disability visibility” show, it is possible to influence algorithmic patterns by popularizing specific terms or hashtags that center certain perspectives or actions. As a result, users unfamiliar with an issue or its impact on a particular group might be made aware, allowing them to make a choice whether to show support or not. On social media, the algorithm can influence users’ behaviors. When people do share certain texts or change their profile pictures to demonstrate visible support for a cause, the algorithm makes friend suggestions or page recommendations. Isolated members of a group might feel less alone as they identify potential allies or supporters (Ibid.). For some disabled individuals, this virtual contact might offer an opportunity to disclose if they so choose. They may perceive themselves as members of diffuse communities and feel their lives are recognized by a tweet or a shared video. Identification does not have to be stable or permanent for it to have meaning. Those “small moments” of support might make all the difference to one person and that still matters because the political is always personal, especially for marginalized people. But even when activism does involve matters of money, online actions can have significant material repercussions. Nowadays, social media users can express their feelings on an issue on any public official’s Facebook page or on an organization’s Twitter feed. A co-opted feed can severely hurt any party, from a corporation to a politician, by creating negative associations with their image that might be hard to expunge. This “identity threat” can have major economic consequences (Veil, Reno, Freihaut, & Oldham, 2015): customers stop buying or donors stop making contributions. During elections, disabled people represent a substantial part of the population, and the viral denunciation of a candidate can be quite effective.

Ultimately, definitions of slacktivism that hinge on specific kinds of action while diminishing the activist potential of online activities perpetuate prejudicial biases. Even today, the enduring influence of traditional gender roles means that women tend to be the primary caretakers in familial and organizational contexts or that they have little time and energy to spare. Hence, women may be less likely than men to participate in political movements or assume positions of authority (Craddock, 2019). Online activism, however, permits people to engage in organizing which they might not have been able to do otherwise. A good deal of disability activism happens through social media due to issues of access and mobility. Many locations where activism is concentrated were not created with disabled access as a primary concern.

Some Takeaways

A certain ambivalence characterizes attitudes towards social media. On the one hand, critics can readily point to its vital utility in organizing. Much has been written about social media use in relation to the Occupy movement and the events that made up the Arab Spring (Smith, 2017). On the other hand, social media platforms are still widely regarded as tools or vehicles for communication rather than powerful rhetorical locales in their own right. Critical focus remains fixed on the different ways social media can “reshape organizational structure, communication flows, and the diffusion of frames and repertoires of action” across time and space (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015, p.867). While these are important points to consider, this focus frames social media as mere “channels” for communicating information already extant in particular circles rather than dynamic spaces where information and vital relationships also come into being. Yet this latter understanding matters when we consider the rhetorical activities of disabled activists. If we view social media as solely conduits for circulating information from within fixed spaces out into the rest of the world, we overlook the material impact social media activism itself can have. This oversight discounts the lived experiences of disabled persons who may have limited mobility and may rely on social media spaces for organizing and for creating community. An analysis of the #CripTheVote campaign suggests that social media spaces are locales where the terms of everyday life can be reconfigured, dynamic meeting places where crucial rhetorical action occurs and originates. The activities of disabled activists on Twitter show that community-building can occur online through identification and mutual support. This insight might productively inform the activism of other marginalized groups by allowing said groups to plan actions characterized by online activity alongside on-the-ground action rather than simply using digital tools as a means to spread the word. In this manner, potential multi-marginalized activists may be more likely to feel welcome or participate, given a choice of how they may do so.

Social media platforms are spaces where emergent forms of rhetoric take shape as people who may not otherwise interact communicate and establish relationships, whether positive or negative. Although a common refrain states that the online world diverges from the “real” world, the two are not as discrete as some might believe. What transpires in social media spaces has repercussions offline, as people organize or assert certain views to influence others around them. Likewise, at any given time, one may go online and find myriad discussions about local or global current events. This results in the formation of communities that may or may not be as easily identifiable to outsiders as those composed of people who share cultural or other characteristics, but they are communities, nonetheless. For disabled users, these communities provide spaces where disabled experiences are centered rather than those of non-disabled allies or caregivers. The presence of these communities also offsets the dominant savior narrative perpetuated when able-bodied parties take up space and determine for them what they need. #CripTheVote centers crips with no apologies. Likewise, other marginalized groups can use strategic hashtags to educate and cultivate awareness without needing to expend vital energy by needing to explain the big issues to already privileged audiences. This tactic proves quite effective; for example, see the use of hashtags by Black activists on Black Twitter (Graham & Smith, 2016; Brock, 2012; Sharma, 2013). Deliberately cultivating hashtags that can be amended or appropriated for future actions can help establish communities where newer members learn as they go as they search for variations of the hashtag and when they are/have been deployed.

Finally, social media use by disabled activists invites us to re-think our notions of rhetorical space: “the geography of a communicative event [that] may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of space” (Mountford, 2001, p. 42). Rhetorical space is interpreted through a cultural lens, which informs how we understand the material geography of a space. Typically, the rhetorical spaces of the everyday world and the rhetorical spaces afforded by social media are perceived as separate, distinct locations of communication. Yet social media spaces do have the power to enact change in the offline world, challenging the notion that what happens online stays online. While rhetorical scholars have contested the idea that online and offline spaces are two different spheres, said belief nonetheless influences how many people interpret online action. The most blatant example is the notion of slacktivism. By now the concept itself is familiar to many online denizens. Nonetheless, the terms by which we identify it prove a bit more complicated than the term might suggest. The purpose behind this term is to distinguish between semblances of activism and the real deal. While the slacktivist cannot be bothered to do anything truly meaningful, true activists place their bodies on the line and dedicate a significant amount of time to a cause. At least, that tends to be a prevailing interpretation, but that does not account for several key considerations including people’s physical condition and forms of kairos that are ongoing because the problems faced by marginalized groups are ongoing. This point highlights how often dis/ability is disregarded as a dimension of everyday life, but it also reveals how deeply different forms of privilege undergird even popular notions of political action. These are serious considerations for all activist groups, who should ensure that those with limited mobility (whether due to disability, undocumented status, or work and familial responsibilities) are accommodated or, better yet, centered.

Conclusion

A failure to understand that rhetorical spaces are not confined to distinct geographies, that they have online and offline dimensions, ignores to what degree online rhetorics influence people’s everyday choices and lives. It precludes our appreciation for social media as “platforms in which new identities are forged and channeled. . . [a] key site where protest identities are created, channeled, and contested” (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015, p. 866). More importantly, it allows the perpetuation of harmful biases. Expectations that activism must manifest in certain ways can hinge on sexism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice. Impractical standards can lead to feelings of guilt when those they exclude cannot meet them, intensifying the experience of exclusion. Consequently, not only are the vital activist contributions of marginalized groups discounted, but that disregard affirms the centrality of privileged identity in defining activism, rhetorical action, and worth, backgrounding the very communities that activists aim to assist.

What disabled activists do in social media spaces is make room for themselves to express their concerns and demands of their communities on their own terms. This includes drawing attention to specific issues and influencing other users’ opinions regarding public policy. Beyond the persuasive success of such campaigns, these kinds of rhetorical performances are themselves powerful acts of phenomenological remaking. In the struggle for civil rights and equity, change happens slowly. Yet far-reaching social transformation depends on altering the public’s convictions. The activists featured here show up prevalent notions of disability as constructs that seek to standardize lived experience and categorize human beings. In so doing, they make disability—and disabled people—visible in highly public ways that challenge the authority of in/visibility schemes. Activists from other marginalized groups would do well to learn from their example as they seek to make their organizations more inclusive and ready for the politically long-haul.

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Footnotes

[1] Here, I use “im/migration” and “im/migrant” to connote the complex forces that constrain human movement across borders versus “immigration” and “immigrant,” which indicate a rigid legal view of belonging and citizenship. Many so-called “immigrants” are Indigenous people forced by colonial capitalist structures to seek safety beyond their traditional lands.

[2] Since 1 in 6 Latinxs are disabled (Courtney-Long et al., 2017), these issues have major repercussions for the Latinx community: 1 in 6 Latinx are less likely to have access to vital medical care even as all Latinxs (including the non-disabled) are shaded by in-group and out-group stigmas associated with disability.

[3] I deliberately entered these searches into public computers with cleared histories to avoid influencing the results and so get a sense of what links a random user might find.

[4] I have not linked to these sites here in order to not influence the flow of traffic.

[5] A 2003 survey showed that compared to 58% of non-disabled people in the U.S., only 38% of disabled people go online with 62% of disabled non-users stating that they could not access the Internet due to their disability (Pew).

[6] I have added capital letters to the hashtags so they may be recognized by screen readers.

[7] Capital letters also added here. See note 6.