The portrayal of disabled people as sources of inspiration is a form of ableism, denounce activists, who call for listening to those concerned and rethinking our vision of disability.
“Just because a disabled athlete is going to achieve the feat of swimming 200m doesn’t mean he can put on his underwear by himself in the morning,” says Tsilla, his tone caustic. For this 26-year-old from Montpellier, herself with multiple disabilities, the over-heroicization of people with disabilities, particularly during the Paralympic Games, is not representative of what they experience on a daily basis. “There is this idea that disability can be overcome. But for some people, overcoming it is just getting out of bed in the morning,” recalls the young woman. Problem: the content offered around disabled people often shows them performing exploits, sometimes in disregard of the reality of everyday life. With the same challenge: to inspire.
Portraying people with disabilities as sources of inspiration is such a common practice that a term has been coined to describe the phenomenon:«inspiration porn» (or “pornography of inspiration”). The originator of the concept: Stella Young, Australian activist for the rights of people with disabilities: “I can’t count the number of times a stranger has come up to me and told me how brave or inspiring I am. […]. He congratulated me on being able to get up in the morning and remember my own name,” she explained in 2014, during a TEDx conference. Adding, as if disabled people could not have any other social role: “For many, disabled people are not our teachers, our doctors or our nail technicians… We are not real people, we are here to inspire.”
Injunction to exceed
Behind the concept of inspiration porn, what the activist and anti-ableism associations point out is the objectification of the disabled person, who becomes inspiring because of their disability and not for what they are. “It’s an unhealthy vector of inspiration because it relies on someone’s lack of abilities, or their difference. It makes the person invisible and reduces them to their disability. But disabled people are not there to inspire,” says Manon Cools, coordinator at Esenca, the Belgian union for people with disabilities. She explains: “We see a lot in the media, the promotion of life stories that focus on experiences: how and when the disability occurred, etc. This does not allow the person to explain who they really are, with their passions, their work…”
A form of social comparison thus begins, between the spectator and the person who testifies. The former feels relieved not to be in the other’s place, but uses the testimony to motivate himself: “If she can do it, so can I.” For Manon Cools, this is a form of validism, which is certainly benevolent, but which can be disastrous, in particular because it induces the injunction, for disabled people, to have to surpass themselves. Stella Young illustrates this in her conference, with memes and quotes taken from social networks. Example: “The only handicap is a bad attitude.” The activist mocks: “I can smile all I want, but it doesn’t change a staircase into an access ramp.” Béatrice Pradillon, co-founder of the association Les Dévalideuses, goes even further: “This gives the image of the good disabled person on one side, the one who does not complain, who will try to overcome his situation, to keep smiling, full of energy and then on the other side, the bad disabled person, the one who lets himself go in his handicap, who does not try to overcome it.”
“Leaving the narrative phase to place disability in a political context”
“Individualizing disability means sweeping away everything we don’t want to see,” continues Béatrice Pradillon. This is the other pitfall of inspiration porn: the personification of disability. Inspirational content only shows a tiny part of the daily lives of disabled people and does not allow us to encompass the collective, societal and political issues.Every time we highlight an individual, we don’t talk about the others who remain in the shadows and whose problems are ignored.” explains the activist of the Dévalideuses. Same story from Esenca. Understanding disability as a collective issue is a first lever to overcome our biases, according to Manon Cools, who insists on the importance of “leaving the narrative phase to place disability in a political, societal context in order to understand what is causing difficulties for disabled people today.”
Porn inspiration is a mechanism present everywhere: in movies, in books, in the media and in each of us. “We all did it before we knew what it was,” relativizes Béatrice Pradillon. So how can we fight against this internalized bias, which starts with a benevolent approach? For the activist, it starts with listening and awareness: “We feel that it touches people when we speak with examples.” And for Tsilla, “we must rebuild our relationship with fragility and suffering”, to no longer see in the other only what inspires us, but also to take vulnerability into account: “That’s what makes you human.”
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