Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric Jun 2021 Open Access

#CripTheVote: Disability Activism, Social Media, and the Campaign for Communal Visibility

Christina V. Cedillo

Abstract

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2021-06-30
DOI
10.59236/rjv20i3pp32-55
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
social media race and writing gender and writing disability studies
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