Locating disability within online body positivity discourses: an analysis of #DisabledAndCute

ABSTRACT

This article situates disability within online body positivity discourses through an analysis of disabled young women’s self-representation practices via the Twitter hashtag #DisabledAndCute. Body positivity seeks to challenge conventional beauty standards by incorporating previously marginalized groups, such as disabled women, into broader “economies of visibility” that includes visibility through social media hashtags. The selfie plays a vital role and is seen as a tool through which to acquire the visibility, “empowerment” and confidence required by postfeminism. Through discursive textual analysis of 133 tweets posted by young women, this article identifies the key themes and characteristics within #DisabledAndCute such as “Love your body” (LYB) discourses and body positivity; the complex relationship between feeling cute and feeling hot; and temporality and futurity. It analyzes how #DisabledAndCute upholds postfeminist LYB discourses but also exposes the limits of LYB discourses through expressions of ambivalence that offer important insights into how gender and disability intersect within body positivity discourses. This article also explores how the tweets both conform to and subvert the temporal logics of the selfie to make the disabled self legible and produce more normative self-representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• body positivity
• Twitter
• #DisabledAndCute
• selfies

Introduction

Social media hashtags are often thought of as a “vehicle” for providing visibility—both seeing and being seen (Anthony McCosker and Ysabel Gerrard 2020, 4). The hashtag is a key feature of the microblogging site Twitter that works to organize tweets by topic and frequently plays a key role in the organization of communities and social justice movements. In recent years the Twitter hashtag has been used by disabled people to create or develop a community and bring attention to the everyday experiences of disabled people via hashtags such as #EverydayAbleism and #ActuallyAutistic. Moreover, hashtags such as #HotPersonInAWheelchair, #Disabodiposi, #DisabledAndHot and #DisabledAndCute aim to challenge stereotypes surrounding disability, particularly the assumption that disabled people are unable or unwilling to ascribe to culturally imposed beauty standards (Katie Ellis 2015). Disabled women in particular are frequently excluded from narratives of beauty due to being viewed as dependent, vulnerable and asexual (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 2002), which these hashtags endeavor to challenge.

This article explores the intersections of gender and disability through an analysis of disabled girls’ and young women’s self-representation practices via the Twitter hashtag #DisabledAndCute, which was created by Keah Brown in 2017. In doing so, this article aims to explore how gender and disability intersect within the hashtag in order to counteract common narratives of disabled girlhood where disability “often appear[s] to trump or silence other experiences,” such as gender, and disability is framed as a “problem or lack” (Deborah Steinstra 2015, 45). In its exploration of disabled girls and young women’s self-representation practices, this article situates #DisabledAndCute within the broader body positivity discourses that have emerged to highlight the need for bodily acceptance and enable those who challenge normative ideals—such as disabled people—to come forward and gain visibility. Rather than simply viewing #DisabledAndCute as a straightforward example of disabled people being incorporated into online body positivity discourses, I explore how #DisabledAndCute also exposes the limits of postfeminist “Love your body” (LYB) discourses (Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias 2014) through expressions of ambivalence that, I argue, are indicative of the psychic affects of internalized ableism. Secondly, I use Alison Kafer’s (2013) concept of “crip time” to explore how these self-representation practices work to draw attention to, and sometimes challenge, the temporal logics of the selfie to allow for a more normative self-representation.

Disabled girlhood and social media

Any contemporary study of girls’ and young women’s social media self-representations is inevitably situated within a postfeminist cultural context. Over the past two decades, a wealth of academic work has highlighted how the ideal postfeminist subject is young, white, middle-class and able-bodied, and the “postfeminist mediascape” (Jessica Ringrose 2013) constructs and addresses young women as capable, confident, assertive and future-orientated in accordance with neoliberal ideals of autonomy, capacity and attainment (Anita Harris 2004; Angela McRobbie 2009; Sarah Projansky 2014). By contrast, disabled girls are frequently considered “futureless girls”—passive, dependent and lacking capacity or an imagined future (Amanda Ptolomey 2018). More recently, the continued relevance of postfeminism has been questioned, especially in light of the resurgence of feminist activism which is particularly visible online as part of “fourth wave” feminism (Nicola Rivers 2017). However, like Rosalind Gill (2017) I argue that postfeminism has actually “tightened its hold” on contemporary life, spreading and intensifying to become form of “gendered neoliberalism” (606). The intense “spread” of postfeminism means that we can no longer assume that white, middle-class young women are its sole subjects, and more recent work has explored postfeminism’s racialized contours and how it interpellates women of colour (Jess Butler 2013) and older women, as well as its classed dynamics (Gill 2017). Despite these attempts to understand postfeminism’s increasingly broad reach, theorisations of postfeminism in relation to disability are still largely absent from this more recent work (Gill 2017, 615; Sarah Hill 2017). This article seeks to shed light on the relationship between disability and postfeminism through an analysis of how postfeminist discourses are mediated through disabled girls’ and young women’s self-representation practices as part of the Twitter hashtag #DisabledAndCute, with a particular focus on postfeminist “Love Your Body” (LYB) discourses (Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias 2014). Whereas earlier incarnations of postfeminism stressed bodily regulation as key to successful femininity, more recently there has been an increased emphasis on girls and women’s ability to cultivate a positive mindset, which, we are told, will bring forth the necessary confidence and self-esteem (Gill and Sofia Elias 2014). This focus on confidence and positivity underpins the body positivity movement, which primarily (although not exclusively) uses the affordances of social media to make those who challenge Western beauty ideals more visible through positive self-representations that speak back to dominant media representations of femininity in particular. The body positivity movement has often been seen as synonymous with fat acceptance. However, as Helena Darwin and Amara Miller (2021) demonstrate, this is not necessarily the case, and various tensions exist within the body positivity movement because it is multifaceted and complex. While this increased diversity is much needed, it is important to acknowledge that mainstream body positivity discourses still place emphasis on beauty and the body, and also privilege whiteness. Self-representations that are seen as “too challenging” are often subject to hostility, either from other social media users or the social media platform’s moderation policies, which flag such content as unacceptable (Sofia P. Caldeira and Sander De Ridder 2017; Darwin and Miller 2021).¹ As I discuss later on, this postfeminist emphasis on cultivating the “right” kind of positive disposition via body positivity is a key characteristic of #DisabledAndCute, and the subsequent analysis examines how the hashtag both conforms to and challenges these discourses.

Visibility is key to postfeminism and is synonymous with “empowerment.” As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) argues, the politics of visibility, whereby marginalized groups’ demands to be seen led to the gaining of various civil rights, has shifted towards “economies of visibility” in which “visibility becomes the end rather than a means to an end” (23). Within economies of visibility “empowerment” is often achieved through attention to the visible body (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018, 25) and marginalized bodies are brought into postfeminism’s regulatory “luminous spotlight” (McRobbie 2009) that is “literally designed for social media” (Banet-Weiser 2018, 27). As Anastasia Todd argues in her study of disabled girlhood on YouTube, social networking sites invite “disabled people to ‘perform’ their disabled identities that are not possible elsewhere” (Anastasia Todd 2018, 36) but in doing so, “disabled people are called to narrate their bodies, their experiences and their feelings in ways that render disability intelligible, palatable and sexy” (Todd 2018, 45). Disabled people are therefore called forward on the basis of “neoliberal inclusionism” (David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder 2015). Neoliberal inclusionism renders disabled people visible through the adoption of various diversity-based practices on condition that they can appropriate “historically specific expectations of normalcy” (4) based around ideals of able-bodiedness, rationality, and heteronormativity. Disabled people are expected to “fit in” by “passing as non-disabled, or at the very least not too disabled” (15). As such, self-representations of disability are expected to adhere to the logics of social media self-branding within economies of visibility where “inclusion” is about “widening an already established set of norms” (Banet-Weiser 2018, 26). As I have argued elsewhere, disabled girl bloggers engage in a heightened form of “emotional labour” (Arlie Russell Hochschild 1983) that is both gendered and related to disability, as they use their platforms to advocate and educate (non-disabled) audiences about disability within the normative aesthetics of social media self-representation which render disability less visible and therefore palatable. In doing so, disabled girl bloggers present themselves as motivated and motivational in accordance with neoliberal inclusionism and postfeminist can-do girlhood (Hill 2017). Likewise, Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø and Camilla Bruun Eriksen (2020) note how the model Madeline Stuart, who has Down Syndrome, adheres to neoliberal logics of self-branding through capitalizing on her disability as evidence of her “uniqueness” and authenticity while also presenting a flexible and entrepreneurial self that allows for Stuart to “manage and advocate for Down Syndrome and to turn her disability status into a commodity and brand” (45). The research drawn on here is concerned with disabled young women who self-brand as disabled bloggers, vloggers and—in the case of Stuart—a model, highlighting disability as a “particular capitalizable identity” (36) as part of a “new brand of disability entrepreneurialism” (Todd 2018, 39). This article’s analysis of #DisabledAndCute marks a point of departure from this, as the majority of the self-representations within the hashtag are not posted for commercial gain and users do not explicitly identify as bloggers or suchlike in their tweets. This also means that #DisabledAndCute is representative of a wider range of disabled girlhood and young womanhood that includes queer and trans identities and girls and young women of colour, whereas the most prominent disabled girl bloggers are almost always white and middle class in keeping with neoliberal postfeminist ideals.

Method

This article explores the intersections of gender and disability inherent within the self-representation practices of the girls and young women who contribute to #DisabledAndCute on the social media site Twitter. In exploring the gendered intersections of disability in media produced and consumed by disabled girls and young women, this article responds to Elizabeth Ellcessor, Mack Hagood, and Bill Kirkpatrick’s (2017) call for disability studies and media studies to join together and move beyond textual analyses of representations of disability and instead take into account how disabled people produce and consume media as well as other ideologies and identities related to gender, class and ethnicity (Diana Garrisi and Jacob Johanssen 2020, 9). Hashtags are an effective form of social media analysis due to their visibility—more so than other forms of engagement such as “liking” or commenting—and for their ability to connect users who may not have a pre-existing relationship (Ysabel Gerrard 2018, 4494). The research presented here is based on analysis of 133 “latest” tweets that utilize the hashtag over the period of a month from 11th February-15th March 2019. While the number of posts may seem low, this is indicative of the fact that the hashtag has been active since February 2017 and the initial flurry of activity has abated slightly. One of the challenges of conducting qualitative social media research using Twitter is that the capacity to view every historic tweet under a particular hashtag is limited and it is easier and more effective to capture tweets in real time. While there may have been some potential limitations due to the relatively small sample size, there were attempts to mitigate this through the use of qualitative methods that produce rich data. I conducted textual analysis of the tweets that used the hashtag—which included visual images and text—in order to identify recurrent themes, which included femininity, ambivalence, temporality and futurity, and mediations of “cuteness and “hotness.” This subsequently enabled me to identify the key characteristics of the hashtag and how discourses of disabled girlhood are produced and mediated through #DisabledAndCute. This analysis does not include individual users’ Twitter profiles or replies to tweets that are tagged #DisabledAndCute, although this would be a fruitful point of future inquiry, as it would provide insight into how these self-representations are received. For ethical purposes I have endeavoured to anonymize the data as far as possible by not including usernames or other identifying characteristics, and not quoting tweets in their entirety even though the tweets are publicly available. This is in recognition of the fact that disability can be a sensitive and personal topic, and the tweets were not intended for academic analysis (Wasim Ahmed, Peter Bath and Gianluca Demartini 2017; McCosker and Gerrard 2020). In addition, I am unable to include anonymized screenshots of the tweets collected for this article as Twitter’s Developer Terms state that tweets must be displayed in their unmodified form, which challenges the accepted practice of anonymization in qualitative research (Ysabel Gerrard 2020, 4).

The majority of contributors to #DisabledAndCute are girls and young women,² and this article examines #DisabledAndCute through the lens of girlhood. In doing so it views girlhood as a social construct that is fluid rather than strictly aged based, as postfeminist discourses frequently include the “girling” of older women. Furthermore, this article takes a de-essentializing approach to gender that is not naturalized or strictly tied to biological sex but fluid. This is particularly true of online environments, which “continuously unsettle our ability to view, classify, and measure identity categories as naturally tied to sexed, raced or otherwise identifiable bodies” (Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller 2019, 4). Disability is approached as a similarly fluid and self-defined identity, in particular because one of the key functions and pleasures of #DisabledAndCute is its ability to challenge perceptions of what it means to be a disabled girl or young woman by enabling those with “hidden” disabilities to assert their disabled selves and make them legible. The remainder of this article will identify the key characteristics of #DisabledAndCute and its mediation of disabled girlhood and young womanhood through key themes, such as postfeminist “Love your body” (LYB) discourses and body positivity; the complex relationship between feeling/ being cute and feeling/ being hot; and temporality and futurity.

#DisabledAndCute

#DisabledAndCute was established in February 2017 by then twenty-six-year-old journalist Keah Brown, who is a Black disabled woman. As #DisabledAndCute went viral, publications such as Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue and Buzzfeed positioned #DisabledAndCute within body positivity discourses by celebrating the hashtag’s “empowering” potential (Rose Troup Buchanan 2017; Brittney McNamara 2017; Elizabeth Narins 2017). Writing for Essence.com, a US lifestyle publication aimed at Black women, Brown explained that she started the hashtag to “challenge the standard of beauty” via an “act of self-love in the disability community,” subsequently positioning the hashtag within broader “love your body” discourses that are discussed later on:

I hope that we keep telling our stories and giving ourselves the room to feel joy, especially under the [Trump] presidential administration and in the face of so much inspiration porn. The hashtag is hopefully a conversation starter between the disabled community and mainstream media (Keah Brown 2017).

Brown’s comment raises a number of key points. Firstly, the hashtag is positioned in opposition with traditional media, which has typically excluded disabled women in terms of representation and as media producers or represented disabled people as “inspiration porn.” Inspiration porn, a term coined by the disability activist Stella Young (2012), refers to the depiction of disabled people (often doing ordinary things) being used to produce positive affects, such as inspiration or motivation, in non-disabled people. It is akin to the dominant representation of the disabled person as “super crip,” in which disabled people are either attributed with super human abilities or “praised excessively for relatively ordinary achievements” (Colin Barnes 1992, np). Second, in aiming to “challenge the standard of beauty,” Brown acknowledges the “cultural disablement” that occurs when disabled women are excluded from normative beauty discourses and the aforementioned assumption that disabled women are unwilling or unable to ascribe to cultural standards of beauty (Ellis 2015). Lastly, the emphasis on joy points to the affective nature of the hashtag. As Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2015) note, disability is necessarily affective in that it has the potential to affect and be affected. Typical affects and emotions associated with disability include fear, pity and disgust, which act as “mediating emotion[s] in the relations between disabled and nondisabled people,” leading to ambivalent feelings by non-disabled people toward disabled people (Bill Hughes 2009, 408). More recently, Todd (2018) has argued that disabled girls in particular function as what Sara Ahmed refers to as “happiness objects” (Sara Ahmed 2010) who cause happiness and help to move non-disabled people in the correct way through educating them and helping them to become more tolerant and understanding (41). Anastasia Todd (2016), along with Kelly Fritsch (2013), notes that “positive affects now structure the contemporary production of disability” that includes the imperative to overcome feelings of shame and instead embody pride, as well as the imperative to “overcome suffering” (through medical intervention) and express hopefulness (144). This move towards positive affects in the production of disability is evident in Brown’s statement of intent and is also in keeping with neoliberal postfeminist logics that demand the cultivation of the “right” kind of positive attitude, which, as disabled young women, the contributors to #DisabledAndCute are doubly required to perform.

As well as hope and pride, the more specific positive affect of “cuteness” is evoked via the hashtag, as Keah Brown (2018) describes the hashtag as “more about feeling than it is about a way that somebody actually looks.” Positioning cuteness as an affective feeling rather than an aesthetic or visual quality enabled Brown to rebuke criticisms of the hashtag, which centred around the idea that the use of the word cute—which is typically gendered as feminine and associated with children—reinforced the infanitlization and desexualisation that disabled young women in particular often experience (Garland-Thomson 1997). Although cuteness here is positioned in terms of affect and feeling, aesthetic cuteness is evident throughout the hashtag via the recurrent use of filters that adorn the girls and young women with cute features such as wide eyes, bunny ears and hearts. As Joshua Paul Dale et al argue (2017), “cuteness increasingly constitutes a performative aesthetic and form of communication for those who seek to enact, represent, or reference cuteness (whether positively or negatively) through and within self-presentation” (2). This mediated cuteness also works to demonstrate how disabled girls’ and young women’s self-representation practices are dictated by and confined within the “generic limits” (Sami Schalk 2016, 82) of social media that encourages a normative mode of self-presentation based around certain characteristics, such the use of filters to modify one’s appearance (Hill 2017). In addition, the majority of posts conform to selfie conventions of a close-up image of the face, usually taken by the subject herself.

#DisabledAndCute and the mediation of “love your body” (LYB) discourses

The vast majority of the images posted to #DisabledAndCute are selfies, which is in keeping with the hashtag’s aim of challenging conventional beauty standards through making disabled girls’ and young women’s bodies visible within broader “economies of visibility” (Banet-Weiser 2018). In the abundance of academic work that has emerged recently, the selfie is considered both as a genre of media with recurrent aesthetic patterns and characteristics (Sabine Wirth 2018, 220) and as a practice or mediated gesture (Edgar Gómez Cruz and Helen Thornham 2015; Paul Frosh 2015; Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg 2021). Selfies (and the act of sharing them on social media) play a key role in the mediation of “love your body” discourses (LYB) as a tool for building body confidence, which Gill and Elias refer to as “selfie esteem” (2014, 182). Whereas earlier postfeminist discourses of bodily regulation focused on the body and its “flaws,” LYB discourses reflect a move towards more pernicious psychic forms of regulation, at the heart of which is positive affect that dictates that a “beautiful body must be accompanied by a beautiful mind” (Gill and Sofia Elias 2014, 185). LYB discourses often present a “relationship to the self that has gone bad or been broken,” which can be fixed by gaining confidence through the act of taking and sharing selfies that render the body visible to be celebrated (Gill and Sofia Elias 2014, 180).

Within these celebratory discourses, the selfie is viewed as an “empowering” tool that enables the subject to change their relationship to their body and see themselves in new ways (Caldeira and De Ridder 2017; Hynnä-Granberg 2021). This is particularly important in regards to disabled girls and young women who are the object of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2000) refers to as “the stare,” which registers difference between the viewer and the object and “constitutes disability in the social realm;” staring is the “ritual social enactment of exclusion from the imagined community of the fully human” (335). Selfies, then, enable disabled young women to reclaim the agency that is typically lost within the dynamics of the stare. Disability studies scholars have noted how, for disabled (performance) artists, engaging in the self-presentation of their disabled selves is “liberatory” because it forces the (non-disabled) viewer to view the disabled body as something other than “lack” (Garland-Thomson 2000). Moreover, Tobin Siebers (2001) similarly argues that the disabled body “changes the process of representation itself,” as traditional modes of representation centre upon the body, one that is adaptable and built for pleasure, and, therefore, normative, which renders the disabled body as “defective” or “Other” (738). This line of thinking calls for a move away from attempts to represent a “bodily truth” towards a privileging of sensory and emotional experiences, such as pain (Alexandra Sastre 2014, 933). In his call for a “new realism of the body,” Siebers draws on work by disabled artists who adhere to this principle, as they “do not hesitate to represent the ragged edges and blunt angles of the disabled body in a matter of fact way … ” which “includes gritty accounts of their pain and daily humiliations” (Siebers 2001, 747). #DisabledAndCute tweets often draw attention to the realities of being disabled or living with impairments and chronic illness in a matter of fact way through references to pain, medication and everyday experiences of ableism, but the in a manner that is much less confrontational than the work of disabled (performance) artists examined by Garland-Thomson and Siebers. The “ragged edges and blunt angles” of the disabled body typically found in disability artwork (Siebers 2001, 747) are softened through social media selfie conventions, such as the use of filters, in accordance with the selfie as a genre, as well as the way in which body positivity hashtags focus on smiling selfies, which limits the hashtag’s ability to offer a more radical approach to body positivity in relation to disability. There is often a tension within the hashtag whereby references to pain and flare ups of illness that draw attention to the lived experience of disability or chronic illness are undercut by smiles or caveats about more positive aspects of their lives or that they are nevertheless “still cute.” Such expressions construct what Emma Sheppard (2020) refers to as a “happy disabled identity” by appearing outwardly content in order to reassure others that their experience of disability is not terrible (45) in a way that is in keeping with neoliberal postfeminist imperatives to present a consistently positive and happy self.

Many of the tweets convey the kind of positive attitude that is indicative of LYB discourses through the unequivocal assertion of the hashtag #DisabledAndCute, whether that be as part of a positively worded tweet or as an accompaniment to a single selfie. This is to be expected as a keenness to contribute to a body positivity hashtag suggests that the poster already has a certain degree of confidence and body positivity (Caldeira and De Ridder 2017, 326). Perhaps more surprisingly, however, is that #DisabledAndCute is marked by a degree of ambivalence that undermines this postfeminist imperative to “love your body.” One of the ways in which this ambivalence is subtly conveyed is through how the images are cropped and positioned. For example, in a post that contains four different images, the central image is a selfie where the markers of disability are not visible. In these posts, markers of disability, such as wheelchairs and walking aids, are relegated to the side of the frame. Other young women draw attention to the fact that when choosing which selection of selfies to post they realized that they have comparatively very few photos of themselves with their wheelchair, if any.

Furthermore, this ambivalence and uncertainty is often made explicit through the text that accompanies the image. For these girls and young women, while they seem able to assert their intersectional disabled identities, their identification with cuteness is more complex, littered with hesitancies and uncertainty as they are “trying” to be cute, “sorta” (sic) cute and “maybe” cute, which challenges the postfeminist imperative to express the “right” kind of positive, confident attitude that is inherent within LYB discourses. This seeming inability to perform their fully confident selves in accordance with postfeminist discourses can be read as a psychic consequence of internalized ableism. Ableism is a “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human” (Fiona Kumari Campbell 2009, 4). As Deborah Marks (1999) argues, we need to take into account not just the consequences of impairment (as in the medical model) or the disabling societal barriers (as in the social model) but “how impairment and disability are emotionally experienced” as “internalized oppression” as a result of living in a disabling society (25) where societal norms of normalcy, capacity and the procession of a “perfect” body are internalized, often leading to feelings of ambivalence and shame, and possibly “negative self image and low expectations” (Micheline Mason 1992, 27). This “internalized oppression,” or internalized ableism, is indicated in various ways in the hashtag; through the hesitancy described above, and also through the way that participation in the hashtag has prompted the contributor to acknowledge that they do not have many photos of themselves using mobility aids or sitting in their wheelchair in a manner that hints at a (former) reluctance to draw attention to signifiers of disability and present themselves as disabled. One contributor explicitly acknowledges the tension between body positivity discourses inherent within #DisabledAndCute and the psychic impact of ableism. Although they assert themselves as being #DisabledAndCute, they also highlight how it is difficult to feel cute and love oneself “in a system where you are treated as ugly and worthless.” This sense of systemic exclusion is heightened for the young women who experience the intersection of ableism and racism, such as the young Black woman who posts selfies and asserts that she is #DisabledAndCute while acknowledging that Western features are afforded more praise in discussions of beauty. Likewise, in her book, The Pretty One (Keah Brown 2019), Brown refers to the “double rejection” she experiences “living as and in a Black disabled woman’s body” (135). Such comments about feeling excluded and “worthless” expose the limits of LYB discourses, particularly the common theme of a “relationship to the self that has gone bad or been broken” (Gill and Sofia Elias 2014, 181), because this discourse implies that something (usually unspecified) has happened to the individual—for equally unspecified reasons—and it is the individual’s responsibility to repair this broken relationship. This does not take into account the systemic issues that could cause one’s relationship to oneself to become “broken,” such as repeated experiences of ableism that are subsequently internalized. Young disabled people, who may have experienced ableism and oppression throughout their lives, may not have had a previously positive relationship to the self that has gone bad over time, a sense of before and after, as LYB discourses suggest, making it difficult to repair a “broken” relationship to the self. Drawing attention to how ableism impacts upon their ability to love themselves is an example of how some young women offer a critique of LYB discourses and the postfeminist imperative to think positively and love oneself, while simultaneously taking part in the hashtag. Another such example critiques what Gill (2017) refers to as the “feminized” “inspiration industry” that includes posters, memes and signage encouraging the postfeminist subject to demonstrate self-responsibility and create her own happiness through positive thinking and good choices (620). This example takes the well-known “inspirational” meme, “she believed she could so she did,” and re-works it as a commentary on living with chronic illness, particularly the fatigue that often accompanies a chronic illness: “She believed she could but she was tired (so she rested and you know what? The world went on and it was ok).” The meme adopts the conventions of the feminized inspirational meme while also critiquing it by encouraging others to resist the neoliberal postfeminist imperative for self-determination and productivity. This is reinforced by the contributor’s use of #spoonie, an identifier used by those living with chronic illness, and they way in which their tweet encourages others to learn to accept the need to rest.³

Hot or cute?

In March 2019 a new hashtag, created by Disability Awareness Consultant Andrew Gurza, emerged alongside #DisabledAndCute: #DisabledpeopleAreHot. In creating the hashtag, Gurza aimed to challenge the common perception of disabled people as desexualized by highlighting the intersection between queerness, disability and sexuality (Jamie Feldman 2019). Gurza’s own contributions to #DisabledPeopleAreHot are more overtly sexual, presenting a kink related aesthetic in photos depicting him as seemingly nude and covered in chains, although the majority of the contributions to #DisabledPeopleAreHot were not as explicit. The contrast between the two hashtags reinforces the gendered youthfulness of #DisabledAndCute, which is predominantly populated by young women, unlike #DisabledPeopleAreHot, which is more varied in terms of the gender and age of the contributors. Due to the recentness of its creation, many contributors to #DisabledAndCute also used the hashtag #DisabledPeopleAreHot. “Hotness,” like “sexiness,” is considered a key aspect of a woman’s identity under the logics of postfeminism, but the frequent desexualization of disabled women means that they are often exempt from the postfeminist imperative to be “hot,” as it is considered to be unachievable. The emergence of #DisabledPeopleAreHot prompted some contributors to reflect on and address this long-held exclusion, and to re-affirm that disabled people are hot. These young women were able to confidently able to assert their “hot” disabled selves in line with both the aims of the hashtag and the broader logics of postfeminist culture. Others, however, used #DisabledPeopleAreHot as part of a dialogue with #DisabledAndCute, which furthers the sense of ambivalence within the hashtag. While they appreciated the idea and sentiment of #DisabledPeopleAreHot, they expressed a sense of unease or an inability to view themselves as “hot.” #DisabledAndCute’s creator, Keah Brown, expressed a similar sentiment when addressing the aforementioned criticism she received for using the word cute, saying: “I know that I don’t feel sexy or fine, I feel cute, and I think that is perfectly okay to say” (Brown 2017). This inability to view themselves as “hot” subverts postfeminist logics and is, perhaps, also indicative of the psychic affects of ableist attitudes that desexualize disabled women and continues to view their bodies through a medicalized lens (Susan Wendell 1996). These young women expressed unease with the #DisabledPeopleAreHot hashtag, not because they felt that the hashtag was inappropriate, but rather that they could not imagine themselves as such—at least not yet.

Temporality and futurity

In this section I evoke Kafer’s (2013) concept of “crip time” to examine how #DisabledAndCute mediates the temporality of the selfie. “Crip time” refers to, among other things, disabled people’s inability to move through time at the required pace, the need for “extra” time, failure or refusal to progress through time in a linear fashion from past, to present, to future, and in the right ways, and failure to have a future (Sheppard 2020). Earlier, I discussed how disabled girls are often seen as “futureless” due to ableist assumptions about their lack of capacity and independence. As Kafer (2013) argues in her theorisation of crip time, “the future” has been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness … in these imaginings, disability too often serves as the agreed-upon limit of our projected futures” (27). In no way do I want to argue that the contributors to #DisabledAndCute view their own futures as limited by disability; rather their self-representation practices address their own futurity through the expression of an imagined and hoped for future. Specifically, this coalesced around the image of Hollywood actor Selma Blair. On February 24th 2019 Blair attended the Vanity Fair Oscars After Party and was photographed posing on the red carpet while using a cane as a mobility aid following the revelation that she has Multiple Sclerosis. The young women expressed their gratitude to Blair for rendering her disability visible in such a public manner, and noted the positive affects that the images provoked, such as happiness and pride in their disabled selves. Blair is referred to as “fierce,” “queen” and “bad-ass” in the tweets, which use the #DisabledAndCute hashtag to position Blair within the community. The enthusiastic response to Blair’s appearance reinforces how important it is for young disabled people to see themselves represented in mainstream media and popular culture, and just how rarely this happens. The tweets included the official photographs of Blair taken on the red carpet, and although they are not selfies of the contributors (or even of Blair herself), I argue that they are acts of self-representation because they provide a means through which the young women can express their own gendered and disabled identities. The images of Blair, who at 46 years old is older than the contributors to the hashtag, are also used to orientate an imagined future self in a way that (continues to) embrace disability alongside feminine beauty and strength. As one poster commented, seeing the photos of Blair made them feel they too could be the “bad-ass cane lady in a beautiful gown.”

Temporality is apparent in numerous ways within the hashtag. The temporal structure of the selfie is a “mode of presencing, a first-person testimony of the here and now;” it suggests liveness as both a mediated present and presence (Wirth 2018, 227). Within #DisabledAndCute the temporal logics of the selfie remain largely in tact, as contributors use their selfies to capture a mediation of their present moment with the aim of drawing attention to their lived experience of disability and chronic illness. This is particularly the case for those young women with “hidden” disabilities, who use their selfies to highlight their experience of impairment and disability. The captions that accompany the normative aesthetics of the selfie often draw attention to medical procedures, reliance on medication, and experiences of extreme fatigue that the poster is currently experiencing which are not always apparent. For many of the contributors to the hashtag, disability is not a fixed state, and some days they feel more disabled than others. Feelings of cuteness are also fluctuating, and a minority of posters subvert the temporal logics of the selfie by explicitly acknowledging that they are not feeling cute in the present moment, so they are posting a selfie from a time in the past when they did. This temporal subversion could be seen as an evocation of crip time in that these self-representations of the disabled self are non-linear; speaking to the past, present and future but not necessarily in that order. “Cripping” the temporal logics of the selfie, however, allows for a more normative form of self-representation, as here feeling cute is associated with stereotypical markers of femininity, such as smiling brightly and wearing make up, as some disabled young women choose to emphasize their hetero-femininity in order to counteract the aforementioned stereotypical view of disabled girls and women as desexualized, infantilised and vulnerable (Jen Slater, Embla Ágústsdóttir, and Freyja Haraldsdóttir 2018). As Sheppard (2020) demonstrates, the contestatory nature of crip time allows for “more normative ways of being/ moving” (40), which is what this subversion of the temporal logics of the selfie allows for here. Sheppard further argues that crip time “includes—must include—time to be unsure, ambivalent about disability … ” (45) and we can see this subversion of the temporal logics of the selfie—by evoking past feelings of cuteness that do not exist in the present—as further indications of the kind of ambivalence and hesitancy that was discussed earlier. Moreover, through the lens of crip time, we can see how these posts trouble the idea of body positivity as an implicitly linear “journey” from dissatisfaction to self-love, as cuteness is presented as something that something that was acquired and then temporarily lost, hopefully to be found again.

Conclusion

This article has offered an analysis of disabled girls’ and young women’s self-representation practices via the Twitter hashtag #DisabledAndCute in an attempt to incorporate disability into existing understandings of social media body positivity discourses, as it has hitherto been missing. It has done so through identifying the key themes and characteristics inherent within the Twitter hashtag #DisabledAndCute, paying particular attention to how postfeminist “love your body” (LYB) discourses are mediated, thus furthering our understanding of postfeminism through the inclusion of disability. Many of the #DisabledAndCute tweets further LYB discourses by producing normative self-representations that adhere to the generic conventions of the selfie, and adhere to the postfeminist imperative to express self-confidence and positivity. At the same time, there are instances of ambivalence that are expressed in a variety of ways. This includes the placement of images in such a way to minimize the visibility of markers of disability or impairment; expressions of ambivalent feelings and hesitations that highlight the difficulty in perceiving oneself as “cute;” and subverting the temporal logics of the selfie to depict a moment from the past when the subject felt “cute” in a way that they do not now. This ambivalence is indicative of the psychic impact of systemic ableism, and the difficulties of “living” LYB discourses and body positivity within a mediascape that has routinely excluded disabled women and rendered them invisible, and deemed them unable to ascribe to normative ideas of femininity. Indeed, the reaction to the images of Selma Blair within the hashtag serve as an important reminder of the importance of representation for disabled girls and young women as they are required to make themselves visible.

To be clear, in drawing attention to this ambivalence and internalized ableism I am in no way criticizing the aims of #DisabledAndCute or suggesting that the experience of disability is inherently negative (it isn’t). For some of the contributors to the hashtag, posting selfies and declaring themselves #DisabledAndCute has increased their confidence and enabled them to make their disabled selves visible, while also drawing attention to what it is like to experience disability or impairment. As Gill and Sofia Elias (2014) argue, LYB discourses are highly ambivalent texts that are “difficult to critique and perhaps impossible … to live” (180), and this article has teased out some of the specific ambivalences and complexities in relation to the intersections of gender and disability. Body positivity discourses function to bring previously marginalized groups into regulatory neoliberal “economies of visibility” (Banet-Weiser 2018) and #DisabledAndCute does so in a way that is largely in keeping with normative ideals of femininity. However, it has also shown that there must also be space within body positivity discourses to express ambivalence and to trouble—or crip—the idea of body positivity as linear or fixed, as well as go beyond visual representation of the body and draw attention to its affective nature in order to gain a cohesive sense of the complicated ways in which gender and disability intersect through the process of self-representation.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided helpful feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Hill

Sarah Hill is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. Her current research explores disabled girls’ and young women’s online self-representation practices. She is the author of Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film (2020), published by Bloomsbury. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. Likewise, while I acknowledge that social media offers opportunities for disabled girls and young women to become visible when they are so under-represented in traditional media, it is crucial to acknowledge that their online self-representations exist within the same ableist social structures as offline. This includes ableist technological design that makes social media platforms difficult or impossible for some disabled people to use, and also the fact that disabled people often experience hate speech both on- and offline.

2. Six out of 133 posts are by two people who identify as non-binary.

3. Chronic illness is “understood to be illnesses that do not go away by themselves within six months, that cannot reliably be cured, and that will not kill the patient any time soon” (Wendell 1996, 20). Disability studies researchers have highlighted the problematic relationship between illness and disability, as the association of illness with disability further “contributes to the medicalization of disability in which disability is regarded as individual misfortune” (Susan Wendell 2016, 160). However, #DisabledAndCute often conflates chronic illness and disability when some young women use the hashtag to draw attention to their experiences of chronic illness, particularly when it is not necessarily visible and they are able to “pass” as non-disabled, as discussed earlier.