Have you ever heard that sermon about the disabled kid? You know the one.
Small child becomes disabled, parents are heartbroken, predictions are grim…
Then skip forward about twelve years and this same kid is smart, sweet, funny, an A student, an award-winning artist, etc. The message is about the love of God, the power of prayer, or maybe our Christian responsibility to serve those less fortunate. And you sat back in your pew, a tear in your eye, thinking how amazing that poor little kid you have never met must be.
That’s inspiration porn.
Inspiration porn, a term coined by disability activist Stelle Young, refers to media in which “people with disabilities are called inspirational solely or in part on the basis of their disability.” This includes stories, writings, and images that portray disabled people doing things that would be ordinary to non-disabled folks, but calling them “inspirational” because the person doing them is disabled.
As a young, white, disabled woman, I have experienced this all my life. Friends, teachers, and even strangers tell me how “amazed” they are by my success in school, my ability to navigate my physical environment, and many other things that I do every day.
Church is also fertile soil for more generalized inspiration porn. Pastors often preach and write about people with disabilities with a heavy bent towards inspiration porn, and I often have to listen to it on Sunday mornings.
I can never get anyone to understand why this is a problem. Inspiration porn is always framed as highlighting the success of disabled people without any examination of the biases inherent in it.
Here is a brief rundown of some of the problems lurking behind these narratives:
1. Inspiration porn sets an able-bodied, neurotypical standard of “normal” as exceptional for disabled people, and therefore assumes that we are expected to do “worse” at any given task than our non-disabled peers.
What I hear when most people call me inspirational is: “I didn’t think a blind person could do that.” Which is all very well, except that there’s usually no good reason why a blind person couldn’t have done that, and I didn’t volunteer to be their heartwarming story anyway.
2. Inspiration porn hurts the people who aren’t on the posters and in the stories. Some disabled people can’t or don’t want to live their lives the “normal” way. Many of them are highly accomplished, but you will never hear about it because their ways of moving, talking, or interacting make abled people uncomfortable, and their creative, non-normal solutions to daily struggles are just too “weird.”
When we focus on people like me who are “disability pretty” and can fit into the white, American, middle-class normal, we lose a lot of amazing stories.
3. Worse, inspiration porn allows us to forget the people who could be doing amazing things but aren’t because they’re trapped by institutions, poverty, over-protective families, lack of assistive services, lack of useful education, and many other factors that are part of an insidious force called ableism.
Inspiration porn tells us that people like me succeed because we are smart, courageous, and never give up on our dreams. This may be true, but we also usually have other support systems, or other societal advantages, like whiteness or money.
When we leave these details out, we are able to assume that the disabled people who don’t succeed in this way are not smart enough, brave enough, and give up too easily, and are therefore not worthy of our attention.
This is a lie.
I will not be an inspiration for you so that you can forget about the people in understaffed group homes, the mentally ill black men behind bars, the children channeled to Special Ed classes and away from APs. I will not listen when you try to tell me I am better than them. I am not. What I am is privileged.
My challenge to the preachers, writers, and storytellers among us, including myself, is this: Stop telling stories for a moment, and listen. Listen, even though the voice speaking to you is slurred. Listen, even though the voice comes through an ASL interpreter or a computer. Listen, even when the voice has been effectively silenced, and honor that loss. Our voices and our silences are sacred. Pray with me that they may all one day find the sacred space they deserve.
Bekah Anderson is a writer, student, and disability activist currently studying at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She is passionate about disability justice, queering the church, and fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly at bekahmaren.blogspot.com.