Disability Rhetoric

Artist Statement:

In this project I look at online space, the rhetoric of memes, its connection to disability, and the way that comedy relates to all of these topics. For a baseline I did a lot of research in online spaces, from blog posts on tumblr to tweets and comments from both twitter and instagram. A troubling thing about the internet and my collection of sources is that so many things are chares across platforms, and it could be almost impossible to find who was the original creator of the image or phrase. I discuss this more in-depth later in this project, but did include the usernames of the people I was able to find that did create the original image. Many of the things I discuss come from my own observations from looking at the internet and disability communities online, especially with the knowledge and skills I attained through this class. Looking at online space through the lens of disability has been a very eye opening experiance for me, and looking more into the way that knowledge and rhetoric come into being within these communities has been a really fascinating and introspective exercise for me. 

Memology and the Complexity of Online Space

Rhetoric online is very diverse, and for the untrained mind might even be indecipherable. There are many etiquettes and rules to follow, mostly safety procedures put in place to protect users anonymity. However, in recent years these unspoken rules have grown less common, with a sort of emphasis on commodifying the self taking more focus in online communities. This is in part due to the rise in online influencers who occupy the space between celebrities and everyday creative people, and in part due to consumerism and an emphasis on the self being profitable and marketable (Keeping in mind this also runs through a more individualized westernized online experience). This is one reason why we see a lot of changes in online crip space, and why it matters where these spaces are. The medium of social media changes depending on which platform you are occupying. Twitter is oriented towards short, bite-sized posts, and much like Instagram and Facebook as well, popularity, or the big numbers, are mostly status-based. And sites such as TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr and parts of Youtube, are merit-based, which is to say engaging with an audience is going to be favored. This further ties into the commodification of the self, which is further encouraged by such sites which allow for the audience to further engage with the people behind the screens. Additionally, there appears to be a sort od distortion occurring socially regarding the society’s mentality about the body and mind. But what if you aren’t looking for the big numbers? This is what a majority of social media users experience, so we see smaller communities’ creating rhetoric on these apps as well. All of this context is important to keep in mind because it does influence the rhetoric of the sites. 

For the sake of this project, I want to focus on the length and depth of rhetoric on social media, and how this fosters communities online. I went into this project thinking that the length of discussion usually mirrors its nuance, so it is unlikely to see very complex experiences captured in short-hand, brief posts. However, after reading more into the origin of memes and their connection to genes and evolution and knowledge, I have realized that they are absolute goldmines for rhetoric. 

The similarities between genes and memes are ever-present, in that they both want to survive and multiply. And while genes produce this to a biological level, memes so this on a cultural one. Memes rely on complex online contexts, some of which span decades, and it is through this collective knowledge that people online are able to create new meaning in the form of new meme formats or altering and mixing other meme formats. Thus, you get something a bit like this:

[a figure with a snake image on its head gestures to a stock image of a boot, below it instead of subtitles is the image of a man’s face, captioned “It’s free real estate”]

This is an example of a meme that uses the collective rhetoric of memes to create new meaning. The base of this image is the pigeon man meme, where the man points at a butterfly and asks, “Is this a pidgeon”, however, this format is being used to convey the phrase, “Theres a snake in my boot.”, where the snake takes on the rhetorical contextual position of the man and gestures to an image of a boot. This is given further complexity by using the “It’s free real estate” meme, which takes the place of the caption of the meme. Thus, the viewer could derive from this image that the snake is asking to the boot, “Is this free real estate?”. This meaning is only achievable through a lot of context that the viewer may or may not have. It is built on the online cultural knowledge that pre-dates the creation of this specific meme, and it is through the collective knowledge of people online that this rhetoric is able to take shape. The people who may know the meaning behind such an image are specifically people who have spent time online, to the outside viewer this is a picture of utter nonsense with no meaning. 

It is this shared knowledge that people are able to decipher and derive meaning. I am going to analyze more memes from the disabled community to show how rhetoric is created online using memes in the disabled community. 

[An animated man points to his side, followed by many repeated images of himself glitching, the caption also glitches with him, making the words, “Is this aaaaaaaaaaaa”]

This meme, captioned by “brain fog be like”, uses the base knowledge of the meme  format we saw earlier, and uses editing of the original template to communicate something similar to the experience of brain fog. The meme repeats the image of man and the caption much like a windows error page, which to some users is a perfect example of explaining what brain fog feels like. The original image was likely found online by user chronicpainlife on tumblr, where they reposted it with their own caption to recontextualize it and give it new meaning. 

Much of the images we see online are posted and reposted on nearly every other social media site out there. There are countless tumblr images on twitter, twitter images on reddit, and reddit comments posted to instagram, this is a side effect of the wild nature of social media. Much like graffiti art, online memes are usually open source, in that anyone could come along and change it and adapt it to their own liking. It is also common to see people steal images, repost images, and for people to communicate that the original post is not theirs. It is less common to see people online claim to own something that is not theirs, often because it is hard online to get away with such things, but also because it has become normalized for rhetoric online to be dumped into the shared pool of the online space. Which may seem to contradict what I said earlier about commodifying the self online, but in online space there is a nuanced and fluid movement to the expectations of when a person should show themselves to the world, and when someone is expected to only show their art and not the person behind it. This is likely a result of so many different types of people being a part of a community. This topic however also brings me to my next meme: 

[A scene from the movie Up, the old man gives the scout a badge, the old man is labeled “me”, the child is “character I like” and the caption is “I would like to award you the highest honor I can bestow”, the badge is labeled “autism headcanons”]

This meme uses the format from the movie Up, where the rhetor draws emphasis on their pride for their identity by giving it as a badge to the “character I like”. I find this format to be particularly bittersweet because it touches on the pride of a character being disabled, but also draws attention to the lack of good representation in the media for disabled people. Headcanons are personal, there is no expectation for people to see it as the truth, or canon, of a piece of media. However there are often times where a headcanon becomes so popular that they become more widely accepted among a community.  The rhetoric of a piece of media changes via the audience, which before the internet it would have been very difficult to have reached the scale it could reach now. Oftentimes these sorts of headcanons arise because people don’t see themselves represented in the media they consume, or they see the writer’s subtext and decide to bring it to the forefront. Perhaps a character demonstrates characteristics of an autistic person, but it is never outright said that they’re autistic, or perhaps it is heavily implied but the word is never used. This leaves a gap for the actual community to fill, that people on the outside might not fully recognize and see. While it seems fairly agreed on that there needs to be actual disabled people in media for everyone to see, it is unfortunately a rarity to actually find, so I have seen several posts in these online disabled communities talk about the joy they feel from seeing themselves in a character, while also feeling the loss of being cheated out of representation. 

[two spidermen point at eachother, captioned “when you spend hours researching adhd because you’re adhd made you hyperfocus on adhd”]

While we touch on the theme of disability pride in memes, we also should look at the theme of relatability. Often online memes are used for comedic purposes, and this comedy comes in many forms. We have seen examples already of comedy that comes from unique formatting and relatability and also that comes from pride, and the pursuit of representation even at the price of altering the very piece of media that you love.  This meme is an example of comedy found through relatability, which in the online disabled community is most often aimed at the audience of other disabled people. This meme uses the spiderman pointing meme template., where rhatroically the audience could either be shown two things that seem different but are infact similar, or they could derive rhetorically that the two topics represented by the spidermen pointing are perpetuating one another’s being. It delves into the cyctlical loop that alternate realities and clones themtaically touch on. This latter rhetoric is used in this meme, which becomes more clear through the caption. The “when u” is used often online and is a indicator that this meme is effective more through its relatability, instead of lets say shock value, inside humor or cringe comedy (there are far more types of comedy but there are the more common types seen in memes). 

[a cartoon person reaches out to a ball labeled, “motivational memes”, behind them in the second panel a blob creature wraps its arms around them, it is labeled “ableism”]

It is difficult to look at disability memes and not talk about the theme of ablism, and dealing with ablism. The theme makes a lot of sense, making fun of people who harm you or perpetuate harm onto you or your community is both a way to reclaim power back from ablists, and to communicate what is and isn’t ablist in the first place. Often times memes could be a basis for complex discussion. Through my research is because very clear to me when joining a new online community what are the common things or phrases that people have to deal with, and what they would prefer instead. Often times it becomes laughably ridiculous to see how many people have been told the exact same things by different people, then I began to realize that this was probably a result of the previous cultural basis that people built their predjudices upon. This meme is one example of this taking effect.  It uses a two frame online comic format to show the hope a person feel in receiving or pursuing a seemingly positive thing, then the dread that comes in realizing that a negative things is either attached or disguised by said positive thing. This image‘s referance to “motivational memes” could be several things. From what I’ve found in online communities, it could either be referring to motivational posts that promote societal views on productivity that align with constantly being available to exceed in your work, or it is  eferring to  motivational videos that show disabled people exceling in something that “makes up” for their disability. Both of these are harmful for the disability community and being able to joke around the negative feeling’s such concepts invoke provide a sort of comfort in the relatability of disagreeing with such concepts. 

[A man looks at a burger and smiles, the man is labeled, “able bodies people in desperate need of motivation”, the burger is labeled, “disabled people”]

This meme is a specific example of the latter motivational meme that I explained previously. The captioning of this image is very specific in the ablism that it is poking fun of. This format is more ambiguous however. The man looking at the burger could be assumed to be overjoyed at a very messy food, or it could invoking the image of hunger and commodity that “able bodied people” point towards disabled people in their need to feel motivated. The image is more open to interpretation, but it also uses a similar rhetorical format to many other templates. 

[two women cry, point and appear to be yelling at a smug and angry cat, the women are labeled “put your hearing aids on!” and the cat is labeled “you’re not worth the batteries”]

This final meme deals with themes of ablism, but also unlike the last two images we’ve observed bites back directly to the ablists. Here the rhetor uses the salad cat meme format, which depicts two women yelling angrily at a cat sneering back. The cat could seem prideful, unremorsful, and unwavered in the face of being yelled back. The image itself depicts a rather ridiculous situation, and the captions are used to show the argument between the ablist and the disabled person. I am confident in saying that this meme depicts with both ablism and pride. The two women are almost always demonstrating panic, anger and foolishness, but the cat often is used to represent a variety of attitudes. Sometimes the cat is used to communicate facts, sometimes its anger or exhaustion. The cat’s emotions are usually interpreted through the context of the caption. And in this example, it protests against the idea that people with hearing aids always need to have them on, for the sake of making nondisabled people’s lives easier, something that people with hearing aids do not owe to anyone. This meme also in a way separates the prosthetic, or the accommodation, from the person. Where the first panel implies that hearing aids are something the person cannot part with, that it is necessary for their existence, the second makes the distinction that it is simply an electronic divide. Rather than explaining that the person does not want to engage with you, the second panel draws attention to the batteries instead of the ability to hear more.

We’ve looked at lot at the rhetoric of disability memes, but what impact do these have within the disability community online? When it comes to the disabled community online, there is an expansive amount of information to be found. Within my research I have found two spheres of communities in these spaces. There are a lot of posts that are informational, that are more oriented towards non-disabled people, or people who are new to the online community. They could be helpful to newly-disabled people or people who need information on how to support their disabled friends. The second sphere is more focused towards people in the community. It is founded on the basis that the information found in the first sphere is already known fairly in depth. This foundation is used to have more nuanced discussions, share more specific experiences, and where a lot of the memes are found. For instance, the migraine memes use words like, “brain fog” and autism memes discuss “masking” without feeling the need to explain these words because it is expected of the audience to already be familiar with these terms — usually the audience is people within these communities. There is a generalized knowledge based on common experiences that is used to create relatability and quickly convey a lot of rhetoric. It is the context of this rhetoric that allows it to take shape. 

There is a distinction to be made between yourself in the physical world, the “irl-self”, and the online-self. The anonymity that comes with being online, coupled with its more accessible nature, makes online crip space something very fascinating to consider. Social media is accessible from anywhere with the internet, so long as you have a phone or computer, which makes it especially quick and easy to access. It also is a unique space in how it is usually optional to interact with. While not always, jobs and school might require you to be plugged into a device, social media sites and entertainment are something people are able to walk away from, which unlike inaccessible physical spaces, or kyrotic spaces, is an advantage that online spaces provide. However, some downsides are notable. Lighting of screens could be especially harsh and things like eyestrain and flashing lights are still things people have to look out for. It is not a perfect, all accommodating space, and often the experience of being online is influenced by what people and sites you interact with. Disabled people will still see ablism online, but also will be able to connect with a wide community of people with similar experiences to them. Additionally the rhetoric found online is extremely unique, and heavily relies on the shared knowledge of people that already exist online, so it could be difficult for outsiders to get a grasp of what information is being communicated and why. I think that the shared cultural knowledge however allows for very fun ways to connect with people, and while the speed and complexity of being online could become overwhelming, there is a comfort to being able to turn off your device and step out of that space should you need to.