Looks like keeping Music the hell away from my review schedule wasn’t enough to stop me from dealing with the topic of ‘inspiration porn’. For the uninitiated, no, we’re not talking about Tony Robbins’ sex tape (thank fuck for that), but instead an aspect of depictions of disabled people in mass media. Put simply, it’s how even the simplest of everyday tasks suddenly become ‘inspirational’, purely because they are being done by a disabled person. It’s basically a term for media that, while depicting and centred on disabled characters, largely exists for able-bodied people to feel good about themselves because ‘if this person (who I subconsciously consider to be in an inherently worse position than me) can do things, so can I’.
Speaking as someone with disabilities, I have mixed feelings about this whole conversation. Part of that is due to my previously-mentioned attitudes towards abled actors ‘passing’ for disabled characters, but there’s also how… well, I don’t really know how else to put it: Far as I’m concerned, I’ve done inspiration porn in the past with Employable Me. Don’t get me wrong, no part of me regrets taking part in that documentary… but I can’t say I haven’t, both at the time and even today, worried that I was simply becoming part of that same voyeuristic equation. That quick snapshot of disabled life that makes the abled consensus feel good for a moment, and then never consider that reality again until the next picture develops.
