“Disability is not a bad word” – A Discursive Analysis of Imani Barbarin’s Activism on TikTok

Abstract

This project examines how Imani Barbarin—a disability justice advocate, scholar, and content creator—strategically employs humour and rhetorical critique to challenge dominant narratives on disability, race, and systemic oppression. Analyzing her work across TikTok, blogging, and public speaking, I explore how these different mediums interact to form a multifaceted activist praxis. Drawing on intersectional feminist and disability justice frameworks, I examine how Barbarin’s humour functions as both resistance and reimagination, disrupting ableist logics. Through critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak & Meyer 2009), I trace shifts in her tone, types of audience engagement, and her use of affective shaming techniques, to highlight how her short-form TikTok videos, in particular, demand audience participation to unpack systemic critiques (Billingsley, 2021; Carlson & Peifer, 2013). I argue that Barbarin’s activism extends beyond disability representation to actively re-shaping disability discourse, using humour as a means of both survival and disruption (Pickens, 2019; Mitchell & Snyder, 2020). Additionally, I reflect on my own relationship to Barbarin’s work, considering the role of emotional investment in scholarship (Ahmed, 2017) and the complexities of studying activist media as both a researcher and participant in the online disability justice sphere. By situating Barbarin’s work within broader discussions on humour, activism, and digital media, this paper demonstrates how online platforms serve as sites of critical resistance, knowledge production, and community-building (Berlant, 2011; Broderick & Ne’eman, 2021).