Rhetoric of Online Disability Activism: #CripTheVote and Civic Participation

Contemporary social movement scholarship has increasingly concerned itself with forms of digital activism from outlets such as Twitter toward communication and social change. However, the implications of this new activism for defining “social movement,” including the term’s historical emphasis on embodiment, deserve further inquiry. In response, this article focuses on the Twitter campaign, #CripTheVote. The campaign is an exemplar of activism that expands upon what constitutes social movement to include new forms of digital expression in ways that uniquely address the concerns of disabled populations and challenge the compulsory able-bodiedness of “movement” necessitating embodiment. Major themes of accommodation information, candidate awareness, and voter pride demonstrate that members of the campaign simultaneously encourage participation in normative systems of democratic engagement (i.e., voting) along with efforts at broader ideological change (i.e., placing greater awareness on disability issues in society) within the #CripTheVote hashtag campaign, therefore constituting new forms of social movement.