Cripping Instagram: Embodied, Critical, and Creative Cultures of Use

Abstract

How do disabled and chronically ill artists and curators navigate corporate-owned social media platforms as self-authored disabled subjects and communities? Mobilizing concepts from crip theory and accessible curation together with discourse and visual analysis, and engaging with art-ists’ and curators’ views about social media platforms and selfie culture via interviews, this paper develops a conceptual framework that prioritizes the intertwining of emergence, endurance, and exhaustion in crip artistic and curatorial online practices. The potential for a radical social media disability aesthetics takes shape as a powerful but contingent and troubled matter of digital crip emergence/emergency, a mode of contending with social media’s demands and violences through embodied automedial practices that foster presence, community, and creativity and contest the terms of social media visibility. This article activates this model by analyzing collabo-ratively authored Instagram accounts that feature residencies.