From the Archives: Working Out Some Issues
A version of this piece was originally published in the print edition of Bitch (RIP) in 2014. I am reprinting it here since the "inspirational memes featuring people with disabilities" trend will not die.
Recently, I contributed an essay on being nonbinary, disabled, and surviving the so-called heyday of feminist blogging (*vomit emoji*) to the Conversationalist.
If you’ve browsed social media in the last decade or so, you’ve probably seen a photo, or several, along these lines: a person with a visible disability is shown working out, flexing impossibly huge muscles, accomplishing some extraordinary physical feat, or is depicted in a before-and-after photo showing their transition from un-fit person to an extremely swole one (see above). The crown jewel of “inspiration” in these images is usually a snide caption that asks the viewer, “What’s YOUR excuse?” The implication here is that everyone --especially nondisabled people -- can and should aspire to a level of fitness that very few people reach. After all, if these DISABLED people can do it, what’s to stop the average (read: nondisabled) person from getting ripped, instead of sitting in front of a computer all day?
The phrase “inspiration porn” has been used by disability activists online and off for years in describing these images and similar r/MadeMeSmile-ready “inspirational” photos, a significant number of which show people with disabilities accomplishing so-called extraordinary — and, not insignificantly, very physical — things. Here’s just a sampling of “What’s your excuse?” images: A double amputee summits Mount Everest; guys from a wheelchair basketball team pose shirtless to show off their well-muscled physiques; a young boy with two prosthetic legs delightedly runs on an outdoor track. These images are presented entirely free of context, a mocking caption usually substituted for a deeper explanation or examination of the many factors that allowed those depicted in the photos to achieve physical “perfection.”
As disability activist Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg wrote in a 2012 post about inspiration porn and the nondisabled gaze, “in its zeal to get able-bodied people to stop being such shleps, inspiration porn manifests itself for their delight in both visual and textual form. Visually, the genre makes use of a photograph of a disabled person with ‘inspirational’ and guilt-inducing text attached.”
While there’s nothing wrong with being inspired by human achievement, “What’s your excuse?” images tend to use disability in a highly specific way: showing viewers “amazing” disabled people — mostly men — achieving peak physical fitness and therefore overcoming, or at least compensating for, their disability. These images are targeted at nondisabled people because they make use of well-worn binary narratives about disabled people: we are either pathetic and out of shape, or able to overcome our “limitations” by striving towards the inherently able-bodied goal of being in visibly great shape. The popular overcoming disability narrative is also rife with weird contradictions -- remember the debates over whether runner (and later convicted murderer) Oscar Pistorius’s high-tech prosthetics would give him an “unfair advantage” over his non-disabled competitors in various races? Deployed in “What’s YOUR excuse?” images, the overcoming narrative also serves to keep people with disabilities who do not or cannot perform amazing physical feats further out of the public eye. Disabilities that feature symptoms such as chronic pain, fatigue, or that make movement more difficult are never fodder for the “inspiration porn” mill; in the world of inspiration porn, if nondisabled viewers can’t see it, it’s just not inspirational enough to be overcome. Even disabled animals haven't been safe from this sort of inspirational gawking, as I wrote about in 2017.
It’s no accident that many of the “What’s your excuse?” memes feature men with unusually toned physiques; inspiration porn’s emphasis on seeing some sort of visible difference fits nicely with the cultural expectation that men should have fit, muscular and oiled-up bodies to be considered conventionally attractive and manly enough. In the parlance of inspiration porn, a perceived loss of masculinity due to visible disability — usually the loss of one or more limbs — can be overcome if one just works (out) hard enough, and if you’re lucky, random people on Facebook/Reddit/X will be so inspired by your commitment to getting ripped (even with your limitations) that they’ll put down that bag of chips and pick up some free weights.
And although these images can be taken, in some ways, to be a positive representation of people with disabilities -- that is, of cis men with visible disabilities who have the time and money to spend at the gym -- so-called “positive” representation can still (re)tell a very old, and limited, story.