There is an elite sporting competition taking place in South Korea right now. Maybe you’ve encountered it as “the inspiration we needed to get up and kick ass today.” Maybe you’ve heard there’s “no event in the world more inspiring,” or seen a YouTube compilation of “Inspiring Paralympians to Watch.”
As the competition of Winter Paralympics begins this week much of the coverage won’t focus on the hard-fought competition but on the patronising concept of “inspiration.”
A familiar trope in the discussion of disability, the idea seems to be that the adversity overcome by people with disabilities should act as a motivation to able-bodied people.
As well as creating a ludicrous false equivalence between different challenges, it also acts to reduce disabled people to metaphors rather than fully-rounded human beings.
The athletes taking part in the Winter Paralympics are—in spite of what I just said—inspiring. They are elite athletes who will putting their bodies on the line to go faster, higher and stronger than ever before.
But it is this remarkable achievement that is inspiring—not their disability in and of itself.
Thankfully, although too much of the coverage of the Paralympics is still focused on this narrative of meaningless “inspiration,” it is increasingly out of step with the attitude taken to the Paralympic Games.
The history of the Paralympics is one of development from medical recovery to genuine sporting competition. The earliest iteration of the games were the 1948 Stoke Mandeville Games, which had the specific mission of acting as rehabilitation for those who had incurred spinal injuries during World War II.
Since 1988, they have been organised in parallel with Olympic competition, using the same venues. This move recognised the equal status of the games and its place as a competitive sporting event.
This status is recognised in coverage which is increasingly led by disabled athletes, who provide analysis of the Paralympics as sport.
The "inspiration porn" industry
The term ‘inspiration porn’ was invented by the late Australian comedian Stella Young when criticising the former Olympic skater and cancer survivor Scott Hamilton, who has become known for the phrase “the only disability in life is a bad attitude.”
As Young points out, this phrase has become the caption to 1,000 inspirational posters presumably on office walls around the world.
A cursory search for the phrase shows pictures of a child running with Oscar Pistorius (so that’s aged well), a woman running along a beach wearing blades—a pair of which, England Athletics estimates, cost up to £12,000—and a wide variety of sympathetic-looking disabled children.
The implication is clear: the lives of disabled people exist primarily as a measure against which the struggles of the able-bodied can be measured. If she can cope with that, you can cope with this; “Yes, that is a challenging sales target, but at least I don’t have that life.”
It is a form of objectification that is all too common, and so insidious that it is often ignored.
If you spoke to the people in those pictures you wouldn’t find people wanting de-humanising sympathy—you’d find people just getting on with their lives.
Time for better representation
The Paralympics is now one of the few occasions where the successes of disabled people are put front and centre, even if those achievements are still too often patronised. Elsewhere, we still have a way to go.
Disabled people have as many varied interests as the able-bodied, but in society and culture, this is rarely represented well.
Away from the nine days of the Winter Paralympics there is a consistent under-representation of disabled people in the media. According to 2016 figures from Scope only 2.5 per cent of people on television have disabilities. This is compared to 22 per cent of people across the UK.
What this means in practice is that the scope of roles that are imagined for people with disabilities is far too limited—and fails to reflect lives that have the same storylines of triumph, disappointment, love and loss that makes up so much popular drama.
And it is also less likely that you will find disabled people in your office, with them being twice as likely to be unemployed, and needing to apply for 60 per cent more jobs than able-bodied jobseekers before finding a role.
If you want to seek inspiration from disabled people let’s see more of their stories on stage and screen, and in offices, and not rely on outdated, patronising clichés.
