Hashtag Activism against Ableist Perspectives in Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg, whose focus is on references to co-morbidities in discussions of COVID-19: much of the rhetoric here implied that the death of some disabled people as a result of COVID-19 was simply a fact of life that was to be accepted. Disability studies have long shown that disability is often stigmatised as a form of abnormality; this is tied to capitalist logics, and often leads to the marginalisation and infantilisation of disability – positioning disability a as form of deviancy.

During COVID-19, this led to the emergence of the #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthy hashtag, similar to #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, to support the community and enable it to perpetuate a discussion about its marginalisation. Such hashtag activism is sometimes dismissed as slacktivism, but it also enables historically marginalised groups to be heard – critiques of hashtag activism can therefore also be seen as a form of marginalisation.

Hashtag activism in this case connected disability discrimination to eugenics, pointing out the use of similar rhetoric in justifying the killing of disabled people; and to neoliberal capitalism, pointing out that disabled people are making important contribution to society but also that making such contributions shouldn’t be a prerequisite for being worthy in the first place. Others tweeted for vitality and visibility, for example only tweeting the hashtag by itself in order to identify themselves as part of the community as well as increase its metrics in order to make it more visible on social media platforms.

The community continues to push even now for a more forceful acknowledgment of their worth, fighting back against perceptions that the death of a number of disabled people is a necessary sacrifice in returning to a sense of post-pandemic normalcy, and the decline in civilisation that that perspective would imply. Disabled life is worthy, not expendable.