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“We Love Each Other into Meaning”: Queer Disabled Tumblr Users Constructing Identity Narratives through Love and Anger

New Narratives of Disability

ISBN: 978-1-83909-144-5, eISBN: 978-1-83909-143-8

Publication date: 25 November 2019

Abstract

Purpose/Methods/Approach

Employing virtual ethnography and narrative analysis, this chapter uses data drawn from the online social media site, Tumblr, to explore a group of Tumblr users who mostly identify with the complex intersectional identities of LGBTQ+ disabled people of color.

Findings

This chapter suggests that narratives are skillfully constructed by this group of Tumblr users in ways that counteract felt or expected experiences of exclusion, invisibility, and stigmatization within this identity-based community. The posters represented here are combating this invisibility and marginalization. They narrate themselves into existence by attaching their experiences to two well-known and recognizable social problem narratives. One is the “Pride/Community and Self-love” narrative, commonly associated with LGBTQ+ pride and LGBTQ+ communities. The other is the “Our Lives Matter/Deserving of Life” narrative, commonly associated with communities and social movements such as Black Lives Matter. Posters are artfully constructing their own community narratives by drawing from these culturally circulating and available narrative resources. When these two popular narratives are deployed in this way, they are counternarratives that are doing both resistance work and community/identity-building work. The ultimate effect is that the counternarrative they construct unites quite a diverse group of people through experiences of shared exclusion.

Implications/Value

This chapter extends the scholarly conversation on both narratives and disability by suggesting ways in which counternarratives about individuals with complex intersectional identities can be constructed in virtual communities. In so doing, the chapter brings poorly represented perspectives into discourses on disability and narratives. The study also contributes to the literature on the importance of emotion, specifically by highlighting the deployment of love and anger to counteract experiences of shame and marginalization.

Keywords

Citation

Egner, J.E. (2019), "“We Love Each Other into Meaning”: Queer Disabled Tumblr Users Constructing Identity Narratives through Love and Anger", New Narratives of Disability (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 11), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720190000011029

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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