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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This presentation explores disability cultures on TikTok. To do so, I bridge feminist disability studies, affect studies, and feminist media studies to discuss the digital and affective labor that disabled girls on TikTok perform to cultivate disability visibility in this new digital economy of attention. I focus the presentation on the service dog subculture on TikTok as a case study. Through a discussion of the short-video app’s logic of virality and a visual and discursive analysis of several disabled girl TikTokers (Service Angel Percie, Ashton Gurnari, Pawsitive Strides), I argue that within the service dog subculture on TikTok, disabled girl service dog handlers crip girlhood by proclaiming their desire for and delight in interdependent interspecies kinships. They upend the presupposition that desiring independence and autonomy is a “natural” part of growing up.
I contextualize these self-representations within the media panics and national anxieties around “fake service dogs,” and I show how discourses of race, disability, “girlness,” and animality operate within this economy of disability visibility. I argue that these disabled girls and their dogs affectively circulate online as spectacular bodies in place, as opposed to the suspicious bodies “out of place” that drive the anxiety around “fake” service animals, effectively reifying the ability/disability binary and limiting the mobility of crip bodies and dogs that are marked excessive or dangerous.
Cripping Girlhood on TikTok
This presentation explores disability cultures on TikTok. To do so, I bridge feminist disability studies, affect studies, and feminist media studies to discuss the digital and affective labor that disabled girls on TikTok perform to cultivate disability visibility in this new digital economy of attention. I focus the presentation on the service dog subculture on TikTok as a case study. Through a discussion of the short-video app’s logic of virality and a visual and discursive analysis of several disabled girl TikTokers (Service Angel Percie, Ashton Gurnari, Pawsitive Strides), I argue that within the service dog subculture on TikTok, disabled girl service dog handlers crip girlhood by proclaiming their desire for and delight in interdependent interspecies kinships. They upend the presupposition that desiring independence and autonomy is a “natural” part of growing up.
I contextualize these self-representations within the media panics and national anxieties around “fake service dogs,” and I show how discourses of race, disability, “girlness,” and animality operate within this economy of disability visibility. I argue that these disabled girls and their dogs affectively circulate online as spectacular bodies in place, as opposed to the suspicious bodies “out of place” that drive the anxiety around “fake” service animals, effectively reifying the ability/disability binary and limiting the mobility of crip bodies and dogs that are marked excessive or dangerous.
Bio
Anastasia Todd is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research is at the intersection of feminist disability studies and girlhood studies. She is currently working on her first book, titled Cripping Girlhood. Cripping Girlhood uncovers how contemporary media representations of disabled girlhood are integral to the U.S. project of ablenationalism.