Have you ever shared this?
Liked an image on Facebook? Said “oh how inspirational!” Or thought “nothing is impossible.”
Well Stella Young, disability advocate and wheelchair user has a message for you, and it’s not going to make you feel ‘inspired’.
The above image is an example of what Stella calls, “inspiration porn” in her recent TEDxSydney talk.
She uses the word ‘porn’, because these images objectify one group (people with disabilities) for the benefit of another group (able-bodied people).
Images like this are made to remind able-bodied viewers that no matter how bad their life is, it could be worse, because they could be ‘those’ people.
And that’s not okay.
“I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception but the norm,” Stella says.
She points out that as a society we don’t think of people in wheelchairs as our teachers, or our accountants or our manicurists first, we think of them as disabled.
She says, “We [people in wheelchairs] are not real people, we’re there to ‘inspire’.”
But she argues that people with disabilities shouldn’t be used as motivational poster-children by the able bodied. It’s not having a disability that makes you exceptional.
What makes you exceptional is questioning what you think you know, and challenging yourself.
Do you think the media objectifies people with disabilities? How can we change societies view on this?
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It's not the disability that's inspiring - it's that the person who is living with it doesn't let it define their limits ... that's the inspiration in the message ... that things that seem insurmountable don't have to define you - and here's someone who's living that message.
I agree with some of this lady's points, but not on the inspiration.
My brother Ben (not his real name) is disabled. He's adopted, and about ten years younger than me. Before I met Ben, I never really thought much about disabled people beyond "oh wow those wheelchairs look like fun" (when you're a naive kid, the parts about the wheelchair being a compensatory tool don't really register) until I met Ben, but it opened my eyes in a lot of ways. The first of these was that people didn't treat Ben like he was a real person. He was an object of pity, curiousity, and occasionally even revulsion/avoidance. Whenever we went out, I could stand back and watch as people decided that they were going to do their good deed for the day by giving him free things or special attention, or would dramatically step out of his way, either to give him what was deemed as appropriate room, or to avoid looking at him. Sometimes they would see Ben's significant physical disabilities and make assumptions about his mental capability. He used to love shocking people whenever they talked over him by being rather articulate for his age. People need to be aware of how to properly treat those who are disabled as people, because for some reason it's not obvious.
Ben isn't inspiring. He's just a kid with a lot on his plate, who wakes up every morning ready to deal with his disadvantages because he has to. Would people find Ben an object of inspiration if he was an under-fed, unvaccinated kid in a developing nation picking over garbage to feed their younger siblings?
Frankly, Ben's childhood would have been significantly better if people could only figure out how to treat him as a normal human being.