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The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

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.

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.

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.