Ableism and Inspiration Porn
Jul 02, 2025(Part 2:)
If we truly believe every person bears the image of God, then any act, whether intentional or unconscious, that reduces a human life to a tool for someone else’s emotional or spiritual benefit distorts that sacred dignity. Recognizing our misperceptions is the first step toward restoring right relationship.
Activist Stella Young vividly describes how “inspiration porn” as she calls it, distorts disabled people’s bodies. As shocking as it sounds, please listen to Stella in her 2018 TED Talk describing what inspiration porn feels like to a person who uses a wheelchair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9Gg164Bsw
As you can hear, people with disabilities simply want to be people, not people who are pitied or inspiring just for living their lives. For Stella and other people with disabilities who subscribe to the “social model” of disabilities, I described in my last blog, it is society and the lack of accessibility that “disables” people, and not a biological condition or accident. One way to think of this in Christian terms is that instead of praying for a person with a disability to be “cured” and “perfect” when they are in heaven, we ask instead for a heaven in which people with disabilities find curb cuts in every intersection on the streets paved with gold and that there are no impediments to thriving for people with disabilities. This is a far cry from assuming that the disabled body is somehow “broken” and that God will “fix it” in the next life. What needs “fixing” and “curing” are attitudes, doorways, countertops, and signage so that all people can have access here, in the very real life. We pray that the “perfect life” is not a fully abled life, but a place where everybody’s differences can be accommodated.
This kind of ableism—the one that privileges complete bodies and complete minds—is sneaky. Many kindhearted, loving, sensitive people carry with them some vestiges of ableism. Inspiration porn is one way to advance ableism, that kind, Christian folks do almost without thinking. Do we speak aloud or think to ourselves that folks who use wheelchairs or who are blind are courageous and inspirational for being able to live in an ableist world? Let us pray less for a complete body or mind but for complete accessibility and accommodation to everyone who needs it. Disability Rights activists, like Stella Young, remind us that we are all only temporarily able-bodied.
At some point in the aging process or the course of life, we will “lose” abilities that we have taken for granted. It is then that we need the social/emotional world to be ready to embrace and make space for our hearing loss, our limited mobility, our mental illness, our memory loss, and our neurodiversity.
Now that you know, you can be aware of and help other people be aware of the ways we and they might unknowingly be engaging in “inspiration porn.”
~Emily Askew, PhD, Second-Year Student in WTC's School of Spiritual Direction
Missed Part 1 Blog? Read it here!
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