Cripping Girlhood on Service Dog Tok

Abstract

This article explores how disabled girl handlers crip girlhood on service dog tok, the emergent subculture on TikTok comprised of disabled handlers who upload and post videos about their everyday life in partnership with a service dog. Looking at the TikTok accounts and self-representational practices of three disabled girl handlers—Ava of @avaandcheddar, Claire of @rosie.the.sd, and Lexy of @muslimservicedogmom28—this article traces how their videos evince an audio–visual representation of interspecies intimacy, a becoming with, that complicates the familiar story of the disabled girl handler/service dog dyad that one might see or scroll past online—one of rehabilitative exceptionalism, disability disavowal, and chrononormative understandings of girlhood. On service dog tok, Ava, Claire, Lexy, and their service dogs broadcast the quotidian and move against a service dog sentimentalism that seeks to depoliticize disability and the relationship between disabled handlers and their service dogs. Their videos produce and circulate a nuanced understanding of interdependence, care, and ableism forged via the mutual entanglement with their service dogs. Ultimately, this article argues that disabled girl handlers on service dog tok upend what we think we know about disabled girls and girlhoods, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds, experiences, and their relationships with their service dogs in their own terms.