Disabled Content Creators’ Collective Care: Navigating Grief and Insidious Trauma

Abstract

This article explores how disabled content creators enact crip joy, desire, and collective care as resistant practices in the face of ableist and racialized digital infrastructures. Focusing on the TikTok and Instagram presences of Shelby Lynch, a Black disabled content creator, and Alex Dacy, a white disabled content creator, I analyze how these creators navigate the tensions between hypervisibility, surveillance, and self-representation. While grief and insidious trauma remain part of their narrative terrains, this article reframes such affective experiences not as endpoints but as catalysts for joy, relationality, and digital solidarity. Drawing on the work of Moya Bailey, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Alyson Spurgas, I argue that visibility itself is not neutral; it is structured through intersecting regimes of race, gender, ability, and desirability. By centering crip time, care work, and aesthetics of refusal, this article theorizes disabled digital storytelling as a form of grassroots activism and political imagination—one that insists on complex, joyful, and racially conscious forms of being.

Keywords: crip joy, misogynoir, digital care work, crip time, surveillance, visibility, racialized representation

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