Stella Young and the idea that outlived her: inspiration porn, named

Stella Jane Young was born in Stawell, Victoria, on 24 February 1982, and died in Melbourne on 6 December 2014, of a suspected aneurysm. She was 32. She was a comedian, a journalist and a disability rights activist, and she did not treat those as three separate careers.

She was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and used a wheelchair for most of her life. At the age of 14 she audited the accessibility of the main-street businesses in her home town, which is a fair summary of the method she used for the next eighteen years: take a claim about inclusion, check it against the physical world, publish the discrepancy.

The editorial

Young edited Ramp Up, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s online disability magazine. In an editorial published there in July 2012, she named something that had been widely produced and rarely described.

The target was a genre: images and stories in which a disabled person is presented as remarkable for doing something unremarkable, captioned in the register of achievement. Her analysis had two parts. First, the framing is “in spite of” — the disability is positioned as the obstacle the person has heroically overcome, which requires the audience to treat an ordinary life as an extraordinary outcome. Second, and more sharply, the material is produced for a non-disabled audience. Its function is to make that audience feel motivated. It is not addressed to disabled people, does not benefit them, and is not really about them.

She called it inspiration porn. The word is deliberately confrontational, and it is doing precise work: pornography, in this usage, means material that uses a class of people as raw material for somebody else’s feeling.

Why the term travelled

It gave people a way to object to something that had previously been unanswerable. The difficulty with a well-meant compliment is that rejecting it looks ungracious. Naming the genre moved the objection from personal ingratitude to a structural criticism: the problem is not that a particular photograph was insulting, it is that the whole format is organised around the wrong beneficiary.

The concept reached its widest audience through her TEDxSydney talk in April 2014, I am not your inspiration, thank you very much. The title is the argument in one line.

There is a corollary that gets less attention and is arguably more useful. If a society is producing a steady supply of stories about disabled people overcoming obstacles, that supply is evidence about the obstacles. Inspiration porn is not only a representational problem; it is a symptom of an environment that has not been fixed, dressed up as a story about individual character.

Afterwards

She died unexpectedly in December 2014, at 32. In 2017 she was inducted posthumously onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, recognised as a “journalist, comedian, feminist and fierce disability activist”.

The vocabulary she introduced is now standard. It appears in advocacy organisations’ style guidance, in editorial training, and in the ordinary conversation of disability communities well outside Australia — including in the bulletins of the Asia-Pacific Development Center on Disability, which was among the organisations circulating coverage of her death at the time.

That is an unusual afterlife for a piece of criticism. Most coinages that catch on do so because they are catchy. This one persisted because the analysis underneath it was correct, and because it handed people a way to decline a compliment they had never wanted.

The objection to the objection

The strongest criticism of the term is that it can be applied too widely. Not every positive story about a disabled person is exploitative, and a rule that treats all of them as suspect makes ordinary coverage impossible: a disabled athlete winning is a story, and reporting it is not a moral failure.

Young’s own formulation survives that criticism better than most restatements of it, because her test was not about tone. It was about who the material is for. A profile written for an audience that includes disabled readers, about something the subject actually did, is journalism. An image of a stranger captioned to make a non-disabled viewer feel motivated is not about the person in it at all.

She had the biographical standing to make the distinction, having been on both sides of it since childhood, and she made it as a working editor rather than as a theorist. Young studied at Deakin University and the University of Melbourne, and she was running the ABC’s disability magazine when she wrote the piece that named the genre.