Crip Creatives: Their Corner of Internet Culture

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Creating Crip Culture

In her post, Crip Community (2013) Eliza Chandler remarks upon a common theme found in the corner of internet Jessica has decided to call her own. Chandler ascribes disability and crip community as “[space] where disabled and mad folks and our allies […] build and sustain activists movements, theorize new meanings of disability and madness, create art that represents the vitality of disability and mad-identity, and learn from and enjoy one another”(Chandler, 2013). Part of what endeared me to Jessica’s channel was the visibility piece; in her videos and her comments disabled people were enganging openly. Titled Coming out… again (2023), my third cultural artifact notes the systems and tools disabled communities used to uplift one another and themselves. 

At the beginning of her tell-all style video, Jessica remarks “Congratulations to many of you who guessed this video was coming, because you diagnosed me in the comments” (0:47, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard 2017). The virtual diagnosis Jessica refers to is the most prominent demonstration of critical disability studies as a precursor to the (re)production of disability as culture.  Subscribers and viewers of the channel have previously been correct in their disability-related hypothesis (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard 2017), as many also felt the medical model of disability does not account for “root causes of disadvantages experienced” (3, Crow: 1992).  The comment section of this particular video serves as a community forum of disability, a form of celebration that Chandler deems “a powerful counter-narrative to the tired, normative rhetoric that our lives are not worth living” (Chandler, 2013).

It is important to note the virtual and accessible role of the platform being used here, as it can illuminate more possibility for disabled congregation. Youtube is currently an online platform that allows user to consume Jessica’s content at no cost, which allows the possibility for more crip-connections. While Jessica is largely transparent in her identify online (with the exclusion of her young son’s face), the platform also has built-in anonymity, should the user choose to enact it. There are multiple ways of engaging with the discourse Jessica is introducing, which is why the sense of solidarity within disabled experiences is so strong among her subscribers. Additionally, her channel was created in 2011. This means that there is longevity in her content and evolution as disabled, queer creator. Similarly to Chandler, Jessica has “found a home […and continues to] meet new, creative, smart, radical, and dedicated [members of] crip communities” (Chandler, 2013). 

Chandler, Eliza. 2013. “Crip Community.” Vision, Passion, Action. Nov 26.

Crow, Liz. (1996). Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability.

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Finger-Free Makeup? It's More Likely Than You'd Think.

Jessica’s content is an example of crip culture because of the ways it challenges societal ideals of disability. My first cultural artifact examining this is one of Jessica’s vintage makeup tutorials, Full Face of 1950’s Make Up Using No Fingers Challenge! [CC] (2017). As Jessica states in the beginning of the video, the tutorial was not originally intended to have a “Because…Disabled!” (0:002, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard 2017) tag line.

However, palsies are a regular part of her life. By filming her  experience with paralyzed hand(s), Jessica challenged hegemonic standards of disability and non-disability at the same time. This is done through the emphasis of impairment within her video; an aspect of the social model and crip culture Liz Crow argues is understated at best and misrepresented at worst. In their article Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability (1996), Crow writes that “interpreting impairment as personal tragedy creates fear of impairment and an emphasis on medical intervention. Such an interpretation is a key part of the attitudes and actions that disable us” (6, Crow: 1996). Jessica’s video acknowledges the “pain, fatigue, depression and chronic illness, including the way [it prevents] us from realizing our potential” (4, Crow: 1996). For her, that looks like sarcastic narration about how impossible it is to hold makeup tools when recovering from a year-long loss of arm use; 

“Thank goodness for the powdered pencil! […] Oh, and the top has rolled away. Never mind, I’m sure lots more will end up on the floor. Pause for pain..." (3:40).

These comments illustrate a tangible picture of Jessica’s disability, whilst avoiding the disabled acceptance Crow is so weary of. They demand social model-structured spaces recognize impairment, “Instead of tackling the contradictions and complexities of our experiences head on, we […] present impairment as irrelevant, neutral and, sometimes, positive, but never, ever as the quandary it really is. “ (3, Crow: 1996). Once again, Jessica subverts society’s expectation of ‘functioning’ with a disability by voicing her reality because “the suppression of […] impairment does not mean they cease to exist or suddenly become more bearable” (5, Crow: 1996). In doing so, Jessica is not objectifying, nor minimizing her own experience; because of the independent nature of her channel, we are able to interact with Jessica’s disability in a manner that she feels comfortable with.  The autonomous representation of disability is so so incredibly crucial in establishing culture for disabled people, as they begin to have art or space or community that is their own.

Crow, Liz. (1996). Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability.

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Establishing Context:

Jessica’s channels is one of the first in-community pieces of queer culture I came across, growing up. As a neurodivergent and queer person interested in dressing in vintage fashions, it sometimes felt like the videos she uploaded were made just for me. In the 7 years since I first discovered her channel, I’ve become even more grateful for her content on chronic illness and pain. The holistic narratives within Jessica’s videos align with Dan Goodley’s work in Dis/entangling Critical Disability Studies (2013). Goodley begins their work with what Schalk establishes; the required nuance and awareness going into the field of critical disability studies, given the assimilationist and alienating practices of disability studies colonial history, ”the intersectional character of disability is one of a number of reasons why we might conceptualize the contemporary state of the field as criticaldisability studies. Critical disability studies starts with disability but never ends with it” (Goodley, 2013: 82). 

The logic of progression and possibility is what I want to focus on; specifically the lack of boundaries. The kind of culture Jessica’s content inspires has an additive effect; that is not to say that I aim to objectify her life. My object is not to moralize a particular way of living with disability (or in this case, disabilities). Rather, I want to use critical disability studies to identify the ways Jessica’s content both is crip culture and creates crip culture. As Jessica’s website describes, “My content encompasses not just vintage lifestyle and fashion but also disability and LGBTQ+ awareness” (Kellgren-Fozard, 2024). 

Over the course of YouTube-based career, Jessica has become more public about the specific disabling conditions, syndrome and symptoms she has. In keeping with Goodley’s work, Jessica has answered the question, “how do bodies matter or, perhaps more accurately, how do they become materialized: that is, made to matter?” (Goodley, 2013: 86) through her own embodied experience. In a video discussing her HNPP (Hereditary Neuropathy With Liability Pressure Palsies) and MCTD (Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder), she explains “my disabilities are just part of me, knitted into the very fabric of my being, so its strange to think of them like something other and pull them apart” (0:46, Jessicaoutofthecloset 2017). In addition to HNPP and MCTD, Jessica also creates content that reflects her life as partially blind and deaf person, among other intersecting disabilites. 

Goodley, Dan. 2013. “Dis/entangling critical disability studies”. Disability & Society, 28 (5): 82-84.

I’m a deaf YouTuber who, through warm and amusing videos adds vintage fabulousness to a life with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Showin

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What is Disability Culture?

In order to best understand and consequently identify disability culture, we must be familiar with an in-community understanding of disability. In their work Critical Disability Studies as Methodology, Sami Schalk explains that "...we can understand critical disability studies as a method, an approach, a theoretical framework and perspective—not (exclusively) a study of disabled people. One can study disabled people and not be doing critical disability studies and one can be doing critical disability studies and not be directly studying disabled people" (2017: 1). 

Schalk is establishing the current culture of disability studies, in which disabled people are not a spectacle or an abnormality of science to be poked and prodded at. Instead, critical disability studies makes note of the social context in which the construction of disability exists, and works to examine the external spectacle of an ableist world. The ‘critical’ element of disability studies ascribes the movement away from biological essentialism,  medical validation and medical models of disability, or legal definitions around bodies and being. 

The three cultural artifacts I have chosen to examine today are examples of a culture that has emerged through the shift from eugenist studies of disability to critical studies of disabilities. The field has evolved into the kind of social science that is more intersectional and investigates the methodology of determining disability altogether. This understanding of disability theory "runs parallel to work in crip theory, a strain of disability studies theory that draws upon insights in queer theory." (Schalk, 2017: 1). Once this perspective is utilized, the label of disability becomes inherently intersectional. Thus, a culture of voices and experiences emerge within, around and underneath the umbrella of disability and crip culture. This is because the creation of disability as culture directly opposes ‘normative’ (non-disabled) expectations of interaction with disability. Crip culture, specifically elevates this concept to the point of belonging; crip culture provides sanctity among those who cannot exist freely elsewhere. 

The three artifacts I have chosen to demonstrate the recognition of crip culture as a byproduct of critical disability studies are pieces of content from Jessica's channel; her disabilities explained in her own words, a vintage makeup tutorial amidst a palsy flare-up, and a reflection on a new aspect on her identity.

Sami Schalk, "Critical Disability Studies as Methodology," Lateral 6.1 (2017)

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Hello there!

Welcome to my blog, @cripcreativecorner

For my blog, I'm going to be analyzing some of my favourite disabled creator's content and consideringthe crip culture they create as a disabled person on the internet!

The creator I will be looking at is Jessica Kellgren-Fozard; specifically her YouTube channel!

Jessica Kellgren-Fozard

Adding vintage lesbian fabulousness to a life with disabilities and chronic illnesses, aided by my beautiful wife Claudia, our son Rupert an