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ABSTRACT
Recently, the field of girlhood studies has witnessed a growing body of research into girls' self-representation practices, but disabled girls are largely absent from this work. In this article, I intervene in this area by asserting the need to explore how disabled girls represent themselves online in order to consider the intersections between girlhood and disability. I attempt to move away from discourses of risk that circulate around girls' digital self-representation practices by demonstrating how these practices provide disabled girls with visibility in a postfeminist mediascape that renders them invisible, and also act as a form of social advocacy and awareness raising. I then explore how disabled girls represent themselves online in a postfeminist cultural landscape through a case study of a severely sight-impaired blogger, looking at how they must be seen as both motivated and motivational.
KEYWORDS
disability, Instagram, motivation, postfeminism, selfie, social media
A growing body of work in girls' media studies, with which this article is aligned, addresses girls as active users and producers in the digital media landscape (Holmes 2017; Kearney 2011; Keller 2015; Shields Dobson 2015) and seeks to subvert the dominant risk discourses that deem girls' self-representation practices to be trivial at best and dangerous at worst (Shields Dobson 2015; Tiidenberg and Gomez 2015). However, this article intervenes further into this work by specifically exploring disabled girls' digital self-representation practices since disabled girls are largely absent from existing research in this area.1 In her article "Trumping All? Disability and Girlhood Studies," Deborah Stienstra (2015) calls for the removal of the "trump card of disability and [shows that we need to] see girls with disabilities as an integral part of girl and girlhood studies." Stienstra argues that disability is often framed as a problem or lack, and that experiences of disability for girls appear to trump or silence other experiences, such as those of sex and gender, and the intersections that exist between these. She notes that we "know little about how girls with disabilities see themselves ... We know little about the intersections of being ... a girl, and disabled" (2015: 54). Indeed, this article explores further some of the intersections between girlhood and disability through its examination of disabled girls' digital self-representation practices. In doing so,...