Guest author: Ariella Goichman Garber
A fashion history researcher and lecturer, Fashion & Pop Culture podcaster
And an online disability activist.
This September, an article in The Telegraph titled “How Having a Disability Became Cool” aroused justified outrage from numerous people with disabilities online.
Although, as a person born with the physical disability called “Spina Bifida” (a neurological condition which affects my lower limbs, kidneys and bladder), I am thrilled that anything about my condition is at long last deemed “cool” by mainstream media. The outrage was aimed at the actual meaning of the writer, Poppy Coborn, who followed her title with the description: “Young women nicknamed ‘Sickfluencers’ are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend and entrenching a culture of economic inactivity”.
In her article, the writer criticizes young and disabled online “influencers” for not only openly sharing their daily struggles but also decorating their mobility and medical aids with fashionable and colorful accessories. Claiming that they are glorifying illness and disability for attention and “influencing” able-bodied followers to invent disabilities for attention. It is therefore no wonder that disabled people the world over issued swift and angry responses.
Firstly, the term “Sickfluencers” (an amalgamation of the terms ‘Sickness Influencers’) itself is not only ableist and derogatory but actually ridiculous. People with disabilities who share their daily struggles online often do so to create a community and provide support and much-needed advice to others in their condition. And those who choose to accessorize their mobility and medical aids with fun, colorful fabrics, custom- made personalized sacks, or glittery bandages do so as a defiant act of participating in the sphere of fashion and beauty, which was never designed to accommodate us and has only in recent years made attempts to include us.
Furthermore, the writer goes on to argue that many disabled “influencers” participate in online business ventures such as paid partnerships and promoted posts, which, according to her, may function as an alternative to the active integration of people with disabilities in the real-world job market, and may encourage others to do the same.
Yes, social media has thankfully created financial means for many active participants by way of paid partnerships and promoted posts. And for many people with disabilities, this is nothing short of a crucial lifeline.
The daily routine of people with various disabilities often depends on how our bodies respond upon waking up in the morning. Also, our hours revolve around the availability of our doctors to meet with us, and whether or not our daily medications have been included in this month’s funded medical aid. All things the mainstream job market is still ill-equipped to handle. And so, many disabled people resort to alternative and more flexible means of occupation such as freelancing, remote-working or indeed- creating online paid partnerships. Or as I once replied to a curious relative who remarked that I ‘was so intelligent that I could easily become a CEO’:
“I could be the CEO of ten companies. But if none of them have a working elevator, I will never be able to get to the office!”
Indeed, as a person with disability who grew up in the nineties when “hustle culture” was at its peak and admitting that you are chronically tired or in pain was considered both “Career suicide” and socially isolating, I am exceedingly grateful to be living in the age of social media. Grateful to finally be living at an age when online discourse around disability has made terms like “chronic pain” and “chronic fatigue” socially recognizable. And we have the online disability “influencers” to thank for that.
As for that name “Sickfluencers”, we must ask ourselves: Can sickness or disability really be influenced? After all, being truly disabled or ill in our ever-polarizing world is hardly a condition anyone would try to emulate. And as for such extreme cases of “Munchausen Syndrome” or “Illness fakers”- Those have been around long before the online disability community has ever existed. So can disabled “influencers” really be responsible for “encouraging” such fakers or attention seekers?
In short, I believe that disabled influencers aren’t looking to “normalize” their various conditions, since each and every one of us can only know the “normal” of our own individual lives.
But the only thing to take from this is that people, whoever they may be, only ever seek to survive and thrive with the cards that they’ve been dealt, and the only thing any of us may strive to do is expand our understanding of that deck of cards.
Ariella Goichman-Garber
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arielle.goichman
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fashionhistory_by_ariella/?hl=en
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