Crip Encounters in the Corporate Hashtag: Complicating #BellLetsTalk

Abstract

This article investigages the annual #BellLetsTalk mental health awareness campaign through the lens of critical disability studies. Created by the telecommunications company Bell Canada, the campaign encourages social media users to share, promote, and like posts about Bell, mental health, and hyperindividualist narratives of overcoming disability and illness. However, delving deeper into the archive uncovers dissenting crip voices that resist Bell's hegemonic narrative of wellness and cure. Focalizing my analysis around a sample of 5000 tweets (including 2093 unique tweets) from the 2018 campaign, I identify distinct disabled networks emerging around the hashtag on Twitter/X: 1) feminine therapeutic networks, 2) masculine sick publics that retain an attachment to capitalism and nationalism, and 3) queer communities that keep company with ghosts. Furthermore, I identify users deliberately disidentifying with the network and occupying the role of the killjoy or "bad" avatar. This article articulates an ethical, hybrid qualitative and quantative method for working with data.