Framing disability and sexuality: An analysis of Instagram users’ comments

In February 2022, the world-famous lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret announced the debut of the Love Cloud collection of bras and panties centered around all-day comfort. The launch was considered as a milestone in the company’s new vision, inspired as it was by eighteen dynamic and, above all, ordinary women including Celilo Miles, a firefighter, Gia Kelsey, a design consultant, Yacine Ndaw, a production coordinator, Miriam Blanco, a former graphic designer with disability, and Sofía Jirau, a Puerto Rican woman with Down syndrome, among others. In a press release, the company stated that their promotional campaign was a ‘first of its kind campaign for the brand, reinforcing Victoria’s Secret’s commitment to welcoming and celebrating all women’. As the company continues its ongoing initiative to become more inclusive by giving prominence to a hard-to-find advertising representation especially of disability in the media, the images of Miriam Blanco and Sofía Jirau, in particular, were welcomed with contrasting attitudes and opinions by Instagram users. If, on the one hand, some commentators hailed the models’ participation as a history-making achievement, others criticized them as objectifying and exploitative, arguing it is wrong to sexualize a person with disability and, above all, with Down syndrome, the campaign manipulating them. Drawing on the concept of framing as a key interpretative tool (Tucker 1998; Scheufele 1999; Reese, Gandy and Grant 2001; Ziem 2014), this paper investigates Instagram users’ reactions to Victoria’s Secret campaign, to get insight into how the issue of sexuality at the intersection with disability is publicly framed and discursively elaborated. For this purpose, a corpus of Instagram comments to the images posted on Victoria’s Secret’s profile has been collected to examine the emerging cognitive frames on such a debated issue, by taking into account salient and recurrent linguistic and discursive features, the inherent tensions and personal stances. Bodies with disabilities are usually under-represented in the media, often over-medicalized, infantilized, and desexualized (Shildrick 2007; Loeser, Pini, Crowley 2017). Therefore, the contrasting images proposed by Victoria’s Secret have made some viewers uncomfortable, camouflaging ableist attitudes with patronizing concerns, which is more or less overtly encoded in their online responses, signaled by the language they use.