Introduction
In disability discourse, grief has been positioned as either a pathology to be treated or a narrative endpoint—something to be overcome, cured, quietly endured, or ignored.1 But for many disabled people, grief is not a detour from life; it is a companion to it. Grief lives alongside joy, desire, connection, and care.2 It punctuates daily experiences not because disabled lives are tragic, but because the world has structured itself to exclude, harm, and make invisible disabled bodies and minds.3 This article begins with the premise that grief is not the end of the story: rather, it is part of a rich affective continuum. I argue that disabled content creators are not simply expressing pain on digital platforms, but are cultivating practices of joy, desire, and digital care work that resist the intersecting forces of ableism and racism. These practices are not incidental; they are deliberate, political, and world-making.
To explore this argument, I analyze the social media presence of two disabled creators: Shelby Lynch, a Black British content creator focused on fashion who uses TikTok and Instagram to confront ableism with humor and glamour, even amidst losing her beloved partner; and Alex Dacy, a white American disabled content creator whose journey into motherhood highlights conversations of desire, intimacy, vulnerability, and digital hostility. Both live with spinal muscular atrophy and use wheelchairs as mobility aids. Both advocate for body and disability positivity. However, despite these surface-level similarities, their digital reception and experiences diverge sharply—differences shaped by the intersecting structures of race, gender, and disability. As far-right ideologies continue to gain power globally—reviving eugenic logics,4 intensifying surveillance,5 and weaponizing anti-Blackness and ableism—disabled creators like Lynch and Dacy navigate a digital environment that is increasingly hostile. In this moment of authoritarian resurgence and platform precarity, their visibility is both a strategy of survival and a site of risk.
While Dacy’s online presence is often framed through sentimental narratives of personal strength and inspiration, Lynch’s is filtered through misogynoir—a term coined by Moya Bailey to describe the specific form of anti-Black misogyny directed at Black women, especially in digital spaces.6 Lynch’s content, though equally empowering and nuanced, is frequently met with hypersexualization, infantilization, or ridicule—forms of affective violence or debility that reflect how platforms reproduce social hierarchies through algorithmic visibility, audience response, and community guidelines.7 Race, in this article, is not an additive factor or background identity; rather, I position race as a structural force that shapes how grief, desire, and visibility are produced, interpreted, and policed within the digital sphere.
This reframing draws on the work of scholars across disability justice, critical race theory, feminist studies, and media scholarship. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha theorizes care work and crip time as interdependent, anti-capitalist practices grounded in mutual aid and collective survival, rather than individual productivity.8 Their work illuminates how disabled communities build infrastructures of access and relational care outside state and institutional frameworks.9 Building on this, Alyson Spurgas conceptualizes insidious trauma as the slow, cumulative psychic toll of systemic oppression—particularly the everyday marginalization that does not register as acute trauma but is nevertheless deeply embodied.10 For disabled creators, this form of trauma emerges in moments of algorithmic invisibility, audience hostility, and institutional neglect. The racialized dimensions of this experience are captured through Moya Bailey’s theorization of misogynoir, which demonstrates how algorithms and social norms co-construct environments that amplify harassment, diminish credibility, or silence resistance directed as Black women and femmes.11
The structural forces behind these inequities are further illuminated by Safiya Umoja Noble and Simone Browne, who reveal how technological infrastructures reproduce offline hierarchies through processes like digital redlining and racialized surveillance.12 Noble’s critique of algorithmic bias and Browne’s historical analysis of surveillance technologies demonstrate how Blackness—and by extension, Black disabled life—is rendered hyper-visible, vulnerable, and policed online.13 These overlapping frameworks allow us to understand disabled content creation not merely as personal expression or representation, but as a political practice of refusal and world-making.
The central intervention of this article, then, is that crip joy and desire are not incidental to disabled life—they are tactics of resistance. These creators are not simply challenging ableist misrepresentation; they are building intimate publics, generating aesthetic and political alternatives, and cultivating forms of collective care that persist in the face of systemic harm. Through close analysis of Lynch’s and Dacy’s social media presences, I examine how visibility becomes a contested site, structured by power and surveillance, but also animated by pleasure, solidarity, and imagination. Their labor online demands that we reconsider what counts as care, what counts as grief, and—crucially—what counts as resistance.
Theoretical Framework: Misogynoir, Crip Joy, and Insidious Structures
Understanding the affective labor of disabled content creators requires more than a surface-level reading of representation. The digital practices of creators like Shelby Lynch or Alex Dacy must be situated within interlocking theoretical frameworks that account for the racialized, gendered, and ableist structures shaping both visibility and harm.14 Concepts like insidious trauma, misogynoir, racialized visual regimes, and crip care work provide analytic tools necessary to understand how disabled digital storytelling becomes a form of resistance, relationality, and world-building.15
The concept of insidious trauma helps name the layered psychic harm produced by systemic marginalization. Originally theorized by Maria Root, insidious trauma describes the cumulative emotional damage caused by daily injustices—microaggressions, misrepresentation, erasure—that often go unrecognized in dominant models of trauma.16 Laura Westengard (2019) expands this to include how minoritized communities experience trauma not through spectacular violence but through the quiet relentlessness of being misread, excluded, or surveilled.17 This is particularly relevant for disabled creators, whose affective lives are shaped by a digital culture that often polices their visibility and delegitimizes their presence. Building on this lineage, Alyson Spurgas describes insidious trauma as a kind of harm that “doesn’t erupt, but seeps”—a form of somatic and relational injury produced by structures of power that normalize violence as everyday life.18 For disabled people online, these harms take the form of relentless commenting, content suppression, shadow banning,19 and the emotional exhaustion of platform performance. As Rob Nixon notes, such “slow violence” is temporally dispersed and often hidden from public view, yet no less consequential.20 And, as Lauren Berlant reminds us, living within such conditions creates structures of “crisis ordinariness”—ongoing precarity that becomes the background condition of life.21
When Shelby Lynch and Alex Dacy are harassed, reported, or suspended from platforms for showing their bodies, speaking about ableism, or simply existing online, this is not incidental. It is the manifestation of insidious trauma embedded in algorithmic systems that fail to see disabled lives as worthy of complexity or protection. For example, Dacy’s account has been flagged and removed for supposed nudity despite adhering to community guidelines—a stark example of how algorithmic enforcement mirrors ableist norms.22 The trauma here is not singular, but cumulative. It resides in the knowledge that one’s body, presence, or pleasure is constantly up for debate.
These harms are compounded when race and gender are brought into view. For Shelby Lynch, whose digital presence as a Black disabled woman disrupts whitewashed notions of disability, the experience of visibility is shaped by misogynoir, a term that describes the specific and structural form of anti-Black misogyny that targets Black women and femmes.23 In digital spaces, misogynoir functions not only through interpersonal harassment but through the very infrastructures of platforms: algorithmic suppression,24 moderation biases, and a lack of content protection.25
Bailey and Trudy describe misogynoir as an “affective economy” wherein Black women’s emotions and embodiments are devalued or demonized.26 Lynch’s content, which often includes beauty tutorials, fashion content, and educational posts about ableism, is frequently misinterpreted or flagged—not because it violates guidelines, but because it violates dominant norms about who is allowed to be joyful, visible, or desirable. The digital disciplining of her body follows long-standing visual tropes that render Black disabled femininity excessive, threatening, or unintelligible.
Angela Smith shows in her work on race, disability, and horror cinema that disabled characters of color are often portrayed as grotesque, tragic, or monstrous.27 These representational logics bleed into social media, where creators like Lynch must perform against a cultural archive that associates disability with helplessness and Blackness with danger. In this context, Lynch’s expression of beauty, autonomy, or even frustration becomes politically charged—not because of the content itself, but because of who is producing it and how they are perceived through intersecting systems of race and ableism.28
Despite these violent structures, disabled content creators enact resistance not only through critique but through joy, care, and desire. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha theorizes care work as the often invisible, improvisational labor that disabled people—particularly femmes of color—perform to sustain themselves and one another.29 This kind of care is not institutional or clinical; it is political, relational, and rooted in survival.30 In digital environments, care might take the form of reposting a friend's GoFundMe, commenting supportive affirmations, checking in via DM (direct message), or simply allowing space for silence and rest.
To further understand the rhythms of disabled content creation, we must attend to crip time—a temporal framework that resists normative, ableist assumptions about how bodies should function, how emotions should unfold, and how lives should progress.31 Originally articulated by Alison Kafer, crip time refers not only to the fact that disabled bodies and minds may operate at different speeds, but also to the political necessity of refusing conventional timelines of success, healing, or development.32 It is a reconfiguration of temporality that makes space for delay, non-linearity, adaptation, and rest.33
Crip time functions as a direct challenge to the lifespan development model often embedded in Western psychology, which maps out a “normal” progression of life milestones—graduating, working, marrying, parenting—based on the presumed capabilities of white, able-bodied, cisheteronormative subjects.34 Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, care work under these conditions is an act of refusal.35 It rejects those dominant timelines and insists on mutual aid, access intimacy, and flexible interdependence.36 Crip care is not about achieving independence or productivity, but about sustaining one another across uneven capacities and shifting needs.37
This kind of care is inseparable from the concept of crip joy.38 As Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us, joy is not apolitical—“our joy is a form of justice.”39 It is a refusal of erasure, of pity, of being flattened into a diagnosis or a tragedy.40 When disabled people express joy, pleasure, or connection in the face of systems designed to marginalize and medicalize them, they are not merely “coping”—they are resisting.41 Crip joy is an act of survival and defiance, an insistence that disabled life is not reducible to grief or struggle, even as it must navigate those conditions.42
These disruptions of normative time and emotion take on new dimensions in digital spaces. While social media platforms are structured by algorithmic pressures—favoring frequency, immediacy, and constant engagement—crip creators often resist these demands by posting intermittently, naming burnout, or refusing to perform polished positivity.43 The cadence of their digital presence reflects a rejection of platform capitalism’s demand for consistency and spectacle.44 And yet, these same platforms also allow for what Samira Rajabi calls a “negotiative mediation”—a kind of third space where identity, grief, and embodiment can be worked through across nonlinear time.45
The flexibility and elasticity of crip time and care work find powerful expression within digital communities, where platform rhythms can be reoriented around disabled users’ needs and collective desires. As Rajabi argues, the digital realm functions as a kind of “third space”—one that encourages “negotiative mediation that transcends time and is ever changeable, never fixed.”46 This fluidity allows disabled people not only to share their stories but to continually renegotiate identity in relationship to trauma, embodiment, and community. The nonlinear temporality of online interaction aligns with crip time’s refusal of linear healing or milestone-driven development. Instead of being measured by recovery or resolution, the value of time in crip digital communities is determined by connection, presence, and care.
This is especially evident in the collective meaning-making and care work Rajabi experienced following her own medical crisis.47 She writes of searching Google and Twitter after being diagnosed with a brain tumor:
When I saw the results of my search, I saw that I wasn’t alone. It is in the stories that were told along-side mine that my story became a collective one. It both belonged to me and belonged to the #btsm (Brain Tumor Social Media) community. Moreover, my story became situated in a broader discourse, one in which I railed against the diagnosis of a brain tumour and one in which I watched others make similar political gestures to be seen in their disabled, suffering bodies.48
Rajabi’s story exemplifies how digital representation and shared narratives can act as counter-discourses to the isolation and internalized ableism that so often accompany illness and disability. The moment she recognized herself in others' experiences—grieving, resisting, surviving—her individual trauma was transformed into collective agency. This is one of the most powerful affordances of crip time in digital spaces: it does not require a fixed pace, a complete recovery, or a triumphant narrative. It offers instead a coalitional ethic of presence, where being seen, heard, and believed becomes a form of healing in itself.
The platforms built by disabled creators like Shelby Lynch and Alex Dacy embody this ethic. Their social media pages do not just disseminate content—they function as crip community hubs, where followers offer encouragement, share their own stories, and co-create a space for being together through the fluctuations of grief, joy, anger, and embodiment. These digital communities model anti-ableist care that refuses the urgency of mainstream social timelines, and instead practices slowness, attentiveness, and reciprocal witnessing.49
In what follows, I explore how each creator crafts these spaces of crip temporality and care, and how their platforms function as archives of resistance, identity renegotiation, and collective survival.
Shelby Lynch: Joy, Desire, and the Racial Politics of Being Seen
Shelby Lynch (@shelbykinsxo), a UK-based Black disabled model and influencer with spinal muscular atrophy, uses her TikTok platform to educate, advocate, and dazzle. With vibrant fashion content, candid reflections, and a biting sense of humor, Lynch’s work resists and reframes the structures of ableism and racism that shape public perceptions of disability. Her platform centers joy and desire not in spite of grief or trauma, but through it—turning her lived experiences into archives of resistance and relational care.50 Lynch’s refusal to perform tragedy or hide her body and voice is not simply self-expression; it is a political strategy that reclaims visibility as a space of empowerment and collective recognition.
While grief and insidious trauma are part of Lynch’s narrative terrain, they are not endpoints. Rather, they become catalysts for crip joy, digital solidarity, and identity renegotiation. Her storytelling disrupts the sanitized or sentimental framings of disability often promoted through media infrastructures. In a pinned video, she reflects:
In high school boys used to pick on me quite a bit. One time a boy asked me really loudly in a lesson, “how do you get a bath?” Which was super embarrassing. Another boy in school referred to me as the “R” slur. That damaged my confidence. I wish I was more prepared for how ignorant people can be towards disability. Just so I could prepare myself more for the backlash I receive…when I was younger, I was aware I was disabled, but I never felt different to anyone else. Then I got older and realized that the rest of the world wasn’t as accepting of me. Because they are not used to seeing disabled people.
Splicing these memories together with stylish, empowered images of herself in adulthood, Lynch narrates her transformation—not as a triumph over disability, but as a refusal to internalize others’ discomfort. This narrative arc reflects what Alyson Spurgas calls feminized trauma: harm that accrues slowly and pervasively, often dismissed, leading to a necessary fracturing.51 Rather than confining her trauma to a static origin story, Lynch shows how grief can coexist with glam, sass, and laughter. Her visibility is not a performance of healing but an enactment of survival.
However, Lynch’s presence online is not interpreted through neutral eyes. As Moya Bailey theorizes through misogynoir, Black disabled women are subject to a specific set of visual and algorithmic disciplining practices that alternately hypersexualize, desexualize, or mock them.52 Lynch regularly receives comments comparing her to animals, questioning her right to motherhood, or framing her beauty as anomalous—“Piggy,” “You shouldn’t have children,” “Shark Teeth,” “Why are you still hot,” and “Voldemort.”53 These comments are not just individual offenses but evidence of how race, gender, ability, and desirability intersect to structure online reception. Further, the name calling is multifaceted trauma because it refers to multiple intersecting aspects of her identity. While the “you shouldn’t have children” desexualizes her, the animal references draw on histories of negative stereotypical images of Black people that emphasize criminality or immorality, and the “why are you still hot” comment hones into the hypersexualization of her body.54
Yet even within this hostile digital terrain, Lynch refuses to be defined by the vitriol; instead, she skillfully navigates and subverts these narratives—claiming visibility on her own terms and turning institutional recognition into opportunities for critique, humor, and joy. While TikTok has made efforts to feature disabled creators like Lynch, the platform often falls into another form of ableism: repackaging her content as inspiration porn.55 In a “Creator Spotlight” featuring Lynch (@shelbykinsxo), TikTok praises her for “shifting conversations around fashion and beauty,” but does so through a framing that positions her work as motivational content for nondisabled viewers.56 The language used in the opening blurb exemplifies this dynamic, describing Lynch as someone who “doesn’t shy away from tricky questions” and is “inspiring us all in the process.”57 In the beginning blurb, TikTok writes:
Shelby posts engaging and educational videos on what it is like to live with a disability. She doesn't shy away from tricky questions, and regularly offers advice about what her followers can do to support the disabled community and tackle ableism - inspiring us all in the process! From providing advice on how you can support Disability Pride Month to how to raise awareness about Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Shelby's aim is to educate the TikTok community and break down misconceptions around disability. She's recently taken her activism one step further and launched a petition to advocate for children to be educated on disability in schools and has been keeping her followers regularly updated on how she has been getting on. What a woman and what an inspiration! [emphasis added]58
The framing, though intended as praise, exemplifies what disability activists call inspiration porn—the reduction of disabled people to motivational objects for nondisabled audiences.59 Lynch immediately responded with a video captioned: “No I’m not inspirational for existing 😂 #disabilitytiktok #mylife #ableism.”60 Rather than rejecting the spotlight entirely, Lynch uses the moment to create a meta-commentary on how her presence is co-opted. Her reaction videos often employ TikTok features like the “stitch”—a tool that allows users to incorporate a clip from another video into their own as a form of response. Lynch has used this feature to add captions such as “Omg I know the shock #ableism” and “Story of our lives,” combining humor and critique to challenge misconceptions, build solidarity, and educate her audience.61 This use of humor and aesthetic play aligns with Piepzna-Samarasinha’s definition of crip care work: these are practices that cultivate interdependence by recruiting co-witnesses through stitches/duets and turning comments into mutual aid for language and norms; it sustains cultural survival by circulating crip humor and access literacies that keep disabled knowledge legible within ableist attention economy; and it performs refusal by rejecting the ‘inspirational’ frame, withholding compulsory gratitude, and redirecting the gaze toward structural ableism rather than individual fortitude.62 For Lynch, joy is not apolitical—it is a public act of reclamation.
Desire, too, is central to Lynch’s digital project. In one video, she uses Lizzo’s “Rumors” to respond to desexualizing assumptions, captioning it, “Rumor has it disabled people have sex.”63 She smiles, nods, and lets the beat drop, her face full of pleasure and play. In another video, responding to the comment, “You’re hot for a disabled person,” she rolls her eyes and simply states what should be obvious: disabled people are and can be hot.64 These acts of self-representation, while light in tone, counter centuries of eugenic, colonial, and ableist ideologies that have rendered Black disabled women either hypersexual threats or desexualized burdens.65 Jules Gill-Peterson notes how infantilization and hypersexualization often operate in tandem—especially for racialized and trans bodies—casting them as simultaneously vulnerable and threatening, innocent and deviant.66 These contradictory affective framings serve to constrain personhood, reducing individuals to sites of fear or pity. Lynch’s self-representational work on TikTok reveals how such structures linger in digital perception, and how joy, play, and refusal become methods of their undoing.67
Her fashion-forward content also works to interrupt industry norms that exclude disabled bodies. Lynch’s reasoning is simple and incisive: disabled people exist, shop, and desire stylish clothes—so why not hire more disabled models? But embedded in this statement is a more complex argument about access, representation, and the economics of visibility.68 Her call to the fashion industry is both a demand for inclusion and a challenge to the aesthetic and financial boundaries of capitalist markets. As a lingerie ambassador for Savage X Fenty, Lynch does not simply promote body positivity; she reclaims erotic representation as a disabled Black woman—and gets paid to do so.69 Her ambassadorship is therefore more than symbolic. It positions her at the intersection of commodified empowerment and digital labor,70 where advocacy becomes entangled with brand alignment, influencer culture,71 and monetized aesthetics.72
This kind of work complicates traditional narratives of activism. Lynch’s platform is not a nonprofit campaign or grassroots coalition—it is a hybrid space where education, embodiment, and branding converge. In modeling lingerie, she confronts ableist notions that disabled bodies are inherently nonsexual or inappropriate for public desire.73 But she also does so within a consumer framework, where representation becomes a marketable asset and the politics of inclusion are often shaped by visibility metrics, algorithms, and sales conversions.74 Monetizing advocacy, in this sense, is both empowering and fraught: it can create new avenues for disabled creators to support themselves and reach wider audiences, but it also risks reducing complex identities to branded commodities.75
Still, Lynch’s fashion-forward content refuses to be flattened by this dynamic. In a pinned video captioned “Dear @mollymaehague this my application to be a model for @prettylittlething,” she states: “There’s such a lack of representation of disabled models because we are literally everywhere… I feel like it’s so important for little girls and boys that are disabled who want to get into the industry to have someone to look up to and I would love to be that person.”76 Here, she positions herself not just as a model, but as a possibility model—a term used in queer and disability justice circles to describe figures who signal alternative ways of being in the world.77 Her argument is grounded not in abstract inclusion but in consumer power.78 “We are the biggest minority, and we also like to spend money on clothes.”79 This is a strategic appeal, yes—but it also reframes disabled people not as burdens or outliers, but as participants in, and critics of, consumer culture.80
Through this lens, Lynch’s presence online becomes a form of critical world-building81—not because she rejects capitalism outright, but because she uses its platforms to push against their constraints. She creates content that is both aspirational and disruptive, modeling a world where disabled people are visible not as symbols of inspiration or tragedy, but as agents of style, pleasure, and economic influence. Her advocacy thus operates on multiple registers: it speaks to justice, recognition, and equity, even as it moves within systems of monetization and commodified identity.
In doing so, Lynch imagines a future where disabled people are not only represented, but paid, styled, desired, and centered—not because they conform to dominant standards, but because they expand them. She builds a public that is capacious enough to hold joy and grief, sexuality and trauma, humor and critique. And in that public, her presence is not a token—it is a refusal of erasure, a demand for access, and a declaration of worth.
Lynch’s presence online shows how race shapes the terms of disability visibility, structuring what kinds of bodies are celebrated, censored, or commodified. Her content navigates a delicate and often violent terrain: hyper-visible as a Black disabled woman, yet still vulnerable to algorithmic suppression, misogynoir, and the aesthetic demands of platform capitalism. Her use of humor, fashion, and storytelling transforms the insidious trauma she has endured into a site of digital solidarity and community care. In this way, Lynch exemplifies how disabled creators navigate the tensions between hypervisibility, surveillance, and self-representation with extraordinary intentionality. While grief, microaggressions, and embodied trauma remain embedded in their narratives, they do not define the limits of their expression. Instead, such experiences become catalysts for joy, relationality, and crip futurity. By centering crip time, care work, and aesthetics of refusal, this article theorizes disabled digital storytelling not as passive documentation, but as a form of grassroots activism and political imagination—one that insists on complex, joyful, and racially conscious forms of being. With this framework in place, the next section turns to Alex Dacy, a white disabled content creator whose reception and representation differ in revealing ways.
Alex Dacy: Whiteness, Desexualization, and Desire
Where Shelby Lynch must navigate the racialized contours of misogynoir—marked by hypervisibility, hypersexualization, and aesthetic surveillance—Alex Dacy (@wheelchair_rapunzel), a white disabled content creator with spinal muscular atrophy, contends with a different disciplining set of constraints. Her digital presence is shaped by desexualization and infantilization, racialized affordances historically granted to white women that associate them with moral innocence, domestic virtue, and physical fragility.82 These norms are not inherently protective. As Dorothy Roberts reminds us, whiteness is often positioned as the benchmark of “ideal” womanhood and maternal legitimacy—until disability disrupts that alignment, revealing how conditional that inclusion truly is.83
Dacy’s early content actively resists the angelic-innocent stereotype that dominates portrayals of white disabled femininity.84 In one now-archived Instagram caption, she quips: “Disability misconception: people with disabilities are angelic & innocent. I mean, I can pretend like I’ve never gotten blacked out & made out with more than one guy in a night 😜.”85 This kind of narrative re-authoring reframes disabled embodiment as desiring and agentic rather than tragic or saintly. Her lingerie modeling, frank discussions of pleasure, and poetry about body image and care all function as public declarations that disabled bodies are sites of intimacy, eroticism, and self-love.86 These acts of visibility are also acts of refusal—refusal to let disability be flattened into either pity or purity. In a June 2021 post, she shares an image of herself in white lingerie, revealing a long scar tracing her spine, and writes: “It hasn’t always been easy to find beauty in my disabled body… To know my body is worthy of intimacy, pleasure and touch… Lingerie is a huge part of my body image journey. It’s helped me find confidence in my imperfections. In my disabledness.”87 Yet while Dacy’s reclamation of sexuality has garnered support, it has also been met with institutional suppression: her TikTok account has been banned multiple times under ambiguous violations of “minor safety” or “nudity,” despite being of legal age and a lingerie ambassador for inclusive fashion brands.88 This contradiction—public admiration paired with platform discipline—illustrates how disabled desirability is still treated as transgressive when not contained within palatable boundaries, even for white creators.
Dacy’s transition into motherhood marked a new and fraught chapter in her digital visibility. When she publicly announced her pregnancy in 2022, she was met with swift and vitriolic backlash. Commenters questioned her fitness to parent, speculated about the health of her unborn child, and told her to terminate the pregnancy. These reactions escalated into multiple anonymous reports to Child Protective Services—some of which occurred while her daughter, Ari, was still in the NICU.89 The assumption was clear: a disabled woman could not possibly parent safely or independently.90
This is the logic of maternal ableism, a structural and affective system that casts disabled mothers as inherently unfit, dangerous, or deviant.91 Maternal ableism operates through both cultural myth and institutional surveillance, often leading to the policing of disabled people’s reproductive autonomy.92 As Roberts and Mauldin note, this system has deep eugenic roots—where disability was grounds for sterilization, family separation, and state intervention.93 The reports filed against Dacy reflect how disability continues to be read through a lens of deficiency, especially when layered with assumptions about parental competence.
What distinguishes Dacy’s experience, however, is not the trauma alone, but the legitimacy her pain was afforded. Media outlets covered the harassment sympathetically.94 Her followers expressed outrage, reposted her story, and reaffirmed her right to parent. Her digital grief—expressed through candid Instagram stories, exhausted captions, and poetic reflections—was rendered legible and “grievable.”95 In contrast, Lynch’s joy and pain are often dismissed, distorted, or disciplined. As Bailey argues, digital spaces grant differential recognition: white maternal grief is validated, while Black disabled expressions of pleasure or parenthood are often treated as anomalies or threats.96
Still, the vitriolic attacks against Dacy should not be ignored, nor should her work against ableist attacks on disabled mothers be reduced. Her content actively expands what disabled motherhood can look like. She shares adapted caregiving routines, candid reflections on postpartum anxiety, and tender videos of herself and Ari in matching outfits. She is clear that joy is not performance—it is survival. Her commitment to centering her daughter is not a bid for validation, but a claim to ordinary love. She states, “that’s part of life, you go through different seasons of life…I’m happy to be in this new chapter of my mom era.”97 This assertion defies cultural narratives that equate competence with physical independence. Instead, Dacy enacts what Piepzna-Samarasinha calls crip care: a relational ethic grounded in interdependence, flexibility, and access.98 From co-parenting structures to taking her daughter on wheelchair rides, Dacy makes visible the adaptive strategies disabled parents use—not as exceptions, but as normal variations of care.
Her poetry, too, maps the emotional texture of caregiving and dependence. In a story from December 2021, she writes:
Attractive young women scrub me /
I feel the water trickling down the scar engraved down my spine… /
In my mind to be anywhere but here…
To feel the water and the warmth /
Of the room hug me like a cozy blanket /
Without anybody else touching me.99
This piece captures the ambivalence of care: the desire for solitude, the intimacy of reliance, and the negotiations between needing help and wanting autonomy. These moments are not just confessional—they are political. As Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, “What does it mean when I can’t support you in the ways you’re supporting me?”100 Dacy’s writing does not resolve that question. It lives in it. And in doing so, it contributes to a broader archive of disabled aesthetics and feminist care work.
Importantly, Dacy also uses digital space to now explore the emotional labor of disabled motherhood. Her poetry often lingers on the tension between autonomy and dependency, the vulnerability of needing help while offering care. These expressions not only document her lived experience but expand the archive of disabled aesthetics. As Kafer argues, disability futures are shaped by how we narrate disability in the present101—and Dacy’s presence insists on a future in which disabled people are not just allowed to parent but are celebrated as parents.
Notably, Dacy’s platform is not only a site of self-representation and celebration of disabled motherhood, but also of income generation. Like many content creators, she relies on brand partnerships, affiliate links, and platform monetization to support herself and her daughter. Her collaborations with body-positive and inclusive fashion brands are part of a broader strategy to reclaim economic agency—advocating for disability visibility while resisting traditional labor structures that often exclude disabled people. Yet this monetization work is fragile. Each algorithmic ban risks disrupting her livelihood. Being flagged as "inappropriate" or "unsafe" is not just about visibility—it becomes a barrier to economic survival. This is particularly unjust given that similar content by nondisabled creators is often promoted rather than penalized, as we’re coming to know as “algorithmic ableism.”102 As disability justice advocates have long emphasized, access to financial autonomy and public platforms is a critical part of liberation.103
In this context, Dacy’s work must be read not only as narrative or aesthetic resistance but as economic advocacy—a refusal to be excluded from visibility and viability. She is not simply fighting for representation; she is demanding that disabled people be allowed to thrive, earn, and sustain themselves through their creative labor.
By analyzing Dacy’s content alongside Lynch’s, we see how hypervisibility, surveillance, and digital storytelling are structured through intersecting systems of race, gender, ability, and desirability. Both women engage in affective labor, resist erasure, and build digital communities rooted in care and kinship. Yet the cultural scripts that shape audience reception and institutional response diverge dramatically. Lynch must contend with misogynoir, algorithmic discipline, and a refusal of her right to pleasure and profitability. Her content is often co-opted as inspiration porn or ignored entirely by monetization structures. Dacy, while also surveilled, is met with a certain affective legitimacy: her grief is legible, her motherhood is culturally digestible, and her attempts to monetize are more often perceived as empowering than threatening. This disparity reveals how platform economies and content moderation policies are not neutral, but actively shape which disabled creators are allowed to succeed, and under what terms.
And yet, both creators engage in what Kafer describes as crip futurity—a narrative and aesthetic practice that imagines joyful, liberated futures in the face of oppressive structures.104 Dacy’s storytelling is not merely confessional or inspirational; it is political world-building and economic intervention.105 Her refusal to retreat in the face of scrutiny, her insistence on being visible as a sexual, desiring, caregiving mother, and her commitment to joy mark her digital labor as a form of crip resistance. She joins Lynch in rejecting the frame of tragedy, instead making space for relational joy, digital solidarity, and economic imagination. Together, their stories model what it means to claim visibility on one’s own terms—not simply to be seen, but to be known, sustained, and supported.
Crip Joy as Intersectional Collective Care
Across the stories of Shelby Lynch and Alex Dacy, a central theme emerges joy is not a naïve escape from the violence of ableism, racism, or misogyny—it is a resistant practice of surviving and thriving through those violences. Their content affirms that crip joy is not antithetical to grief or insidious trauma, but deeply entangled with them. Joy, in this context, is not a sanitized emotion; it is an embodied refusal to be erased.
Lauren Berlant writes that affective life is shaped by “cruel optimism”—the condition of holding onto attachments that may actually harm us, just to remain tethered to the promise of a livable life.106 But in the case of these creators, joy does not read as cruel or delusional. Instead, following Piepzna-Samarasinha, it becomes a form of strategic refusal—a choice to seek pleasure, connection, and representation in a world structured against them.107 Joy is not a denial of violence; it is a way of insisting that disabled life is worth living, even under systems that seek to regulate, infantilize, or disappear it.
For Lynch, this joy surfaces through aesthetic play—bright colors, bold outfits, biting humor, and TikToks that flirt, educate, and celebrate Black disabled beauty. For Dacy, it appears in the soft rituals of care: matching outfits with her daughter, tender poems, raw captions, and moments of public intimacy with her caregivers. Both creators engage joy as a practice of crip time—a slowness, a divergence, a willingness to move outside capitalist metrics of productivity and “progress.” Their joy is slow, messy, sometimes weary, but also electrifying in its insistence on visibility.
Importantly, their joy is not solitary—it is collective. Lynch’s use of hashtags like #ableism and her stitching of reaction videos create a feedback loop of public witnessing.108 Dacy’s Instagram posts generate threads of mutual recognition, where disabled followers share their own scars, griefs, and joys. As Bailey argues, digital platforms are not just archives of visibility; they are economies of recognition.109 Who gets to be seen, grieved, or celebrated is never neutral. But in their coalitional care webs—built through reposts, comments, shared aesthetics, and improvisational solidarity—these creators offer something more: a model for access-centered digital kinship.110
This digital intimacy, referring to the affective connections and relational practices that emerge through online platforms, is often experienced through likes, comments, DMs, or shared content—and fosters feelings of closeness, empathy, or mutual recognition despite physical distance. These intimacies are mediated by technology, shaped by platform affordances, and deeply entwined with how identity, embodiment, and emotion circulate in digital spaces. I argue that digital intimacy is expanded through what Mia Mingus calls “access intimacy,” which names the specific, often rare, feeling of mutual understanding that arises when one’s access needs are anticipated or met with care—without shame, burden, or excessive explanation. In other words, access intimacy includes but exceeds emotional connection: it centers access as a precondition for genuine intimacy, reframing care as both an affective and infrastructural practice.111 It defies both the medical model of disability that pathologizes dependence and the neoliberal celebration of “overcoming” that isolates disabled achievement from community.112 Instead, Lynch and Dacy’s platforms demonstrate how crip care is rooted in relation: in DMs, duets,113 shared survival strategies, and communal joy. They show how care might circulate not as institutional service, but as everyday presence. As Spurgas notes, healing from insidious trauma often emerges not through clinical intervention, but through embodied recognition, solidarity, and “falling apart.”114
And yet, these care webs are not free from surveillance. Lynch must constantly navigate the threat of being misread—her joy mistaken for arrogance, her sexuality for inappropriateness, her grief for dysfunction. Dacy faces infantilization that undermines her maternal competence, even as she receives more public empathy. Their visibility is never neutral—it is algorithmically ranked, racially filtered, and often economically precarious. But through aesthetic refusal and narrative control, they reshape what care looks like: not as charity or resilience porn, but as coalition, critique, and creative survival.
In this way, crip joy becomes a political methodology. It is not about pretending pain doesn’t exist—it is about insisting that pleasure, desire, and connection also do. It is about building digital worlds where disabled people can be fully human: grieving and desiring, flawed and fabulous, caretakers and cared for. As Lynch and Dacy show, joy can be a practice of collective resistance—not because it erases harm, but because it builds something alongside it: a web of witness, a kinship structure, a glimpse of a future that sees disabled life as central, not marginal.115 Their stories remind us that visibility, when shaped by community and grounded in care, can be both a survival strategy and a dreamwork.116 Against the erasures of platform capitalism, the violence of misogynoir, and the isolation of ableist culture, they offer us something rare: a glimpse of crip futurity where joy is a language we speak to one another—not in spite of trauma, but through it.
Conclusion: Toward a Racialized Crip Politics of Feeling
This article has argued that disabled content creators like Shelby Lynch and Alex Dacy are not simply representing their identities online—they are building emotionally and politically complex digital infrastructures that center care, desire, grief, and joy as collective practices. Their narratives reveal that visibility is never neutral; it is always mediated by racialized regimes of surveillance, desirability, and affective legibility. By analyzing their content through the lens of crip time, maternal ableism, misogynoir, and economic precarity, this piece offers a framework for understanding how disabled creators navigate—and resist—the digital architectures that seek to commodify, discipline, or erase them.
This work becomes all the more urgent in the face of rising fascist and ableist logics—those that target disabled people through reproductive control, algorithmic policing, the rollback of care infrastructure, and the disciplining of public affect. These threats are not hypothetical. They are material, and they disproportionately impact disabled people who are women, trans, queer, BIPOC, poor, and/or immigrants. In this context, joy, visibility, and representation are not soft politics; they are tactics of survival and resistance. As fascist ideologies increasingly mobilize nostalgia for a "pure," able-bodied national future, the visibility of disabled creators—especially those pushing back through desire, kinship, and unapologetic digital presence—becomes a direct challenge to that vision.
This article also insists that race must not be treated as an afterthought in disability studies. Too often, analyses of representation isolate race as a modifier to a presumed white disabled subjectivity. What Lynch and Dacy reveal instead is that race, gender, disability, and affect are co-constitutive—shaping who is allowed to be visible, to grieve, to parent, to desire, and to earn. Future scholarship in digital disability studies must take this intersectional terrain seriously. This includes cross-platform research on how algorithmic moderation disproportionately affects racialized disabled creators; abolitionist frameworks that imagine care outside carceral systems; and coalitional projects that elevate the political expertise of multiply marginalized disabled people.
Lynch and Dacy’s digital labor are not simply about representation: it is about survival, intimacy, and the right to imagine otherwise.117 As they build networks of crip care, visibility, and solidarity, they model what a racialized crip politics of feeling can look like: one that does not flinch from grief, that insists on pleasure, and that holds space for radically reimagined futures.