“I Am Crying… This Really Touched My Heart”: Disabled Intimacy and the Thick Materiality of the Virtual

The book starts with Anastasia Todd’s piece on disabled vloggers Charisse and Rikki Poynter. Their vlogs, Todd argues, offer spaces of mediated intimacies that affectively reorient able-bodied publics into tolerant, neoliberal citizens. By using the comments sections of the vlogs as a means to unearth the affective readings of the vlogs, Todd extrapolates that the vlogs reorient the able-bodied viewer into being accepting of the diversity of the disabled body. As intimate publics, they are co-opted as signs of neoliberal inclusionism. Building on the work of Sara Ahmed, Todd states that the promise of diversity is future oriented and, in being included, erases the signs of exclusion. The affective reorientations that image futures of tolerance thus function to depoliticize disability.