Pornographication: exploring the ‘porn’ in ‘inspiration porn’

ABSTRACT

This article brings aspects of disability and pornography studies together by exploring the phenomenon of ‘inspiration porn’. Inspiration porn broadly refers to problematic and ableist representations of disabled people, and it has been suggested within disability studies that this term has resonance given its objectifying and dehumanizing qualities. Engaging more critically with porn studies, however, I interrogate the resonances between inspiration porn and pornography, and question what is at stake in the construction of non-pornographic material with the descriptive suffix ‘porn’. Building and extending Hester’s work in Beyond Explicit, I find that inspiration porn likewise contains attributes associated with pornography, namely prurience, the real, authenticity, intensity, and transgression. The findings suggest that there are significant overlaps between inspiration porn and pornography, and ones that go beyond reductive notions of objectification and dehumanization. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings, particularly in relation to the displacement of sex within conventional understandings of pornography and broader pornographication trends.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornographication
• inspiration porn
• disability studies
• disability representation
• porn studies

Pornography – ‘At its most fundamental level, pornography refers to the graphic depiction of sexually explicit acts made available for public consumption on a media platform. Moreover, those acts are deemed pornographic because their intention is understood to be primarily for the sexual pleasure of the audience member’. (Sullivan and McKee 2015, 4)

Inspiration Porn – ‘Inspiration porn is the representation of disability as a desirable but undesired characteristic, usually by showing impairment as a visually or symbolically distinct biophysical deficit in the person, a deficit that can and must be overcome through the display of physical prowess’. (Grue 2016, 847)

This article explores the phenomenon of inspiration porn, but does so in a way that is distinct from the existing literature. Whereas the bulk of existing scholarship explores the negative practices and effects of inspiration porn, this article instead dwells upon the descriptive suffix ‘porn’ in ‘inspiration porn’. Disability studies scholars have suggested, largely implicitly, that it is because disabled people are objectified and devalued in ‘inspiration porn’ that the suffix ‘porn’ has resonance (Grue 2016). From a porn studies perspective, however, inspiration porn does not contain any explicit sexual practices intended to arouse a viewer. Its designation as ‘porn’ is therefore questionable, not to mention the taken-for-granted assumption that porn is automatically objectifying and devaluing (Paasonen et al. 2021). But this slippage in terms is not a unique phenomenon. Food porn, architecture porn, travel porn, and other such designations have entered the social vernacular, and these types of ‘porn’ likewise do not display explicit sexual practices intended to arouse. All of this perhaps begs the question: why do we apply the term ‘porn’ to material that does not appear to deserve the description?

Hester (2014) has provided a robust excavation of this phenomenon in their book Beyond Explicit. In this text, Hester (2014, 188) charts the ways in which the ‘concept of the pornographic has migrated away from adult entertainment and become attached to other, less rehabilitated forms of prurience … or any other type of representation that depicts authentic scenes of psychic or bodily intensity in a culturally designated fashion’. Investigating medical porn, misery porn, and war porn, Hester (2014, 65) charts the ways in which the ‘meaning of the contemporary pornographic is progressively mutating’ and exceeding ‘any straightforward notion of the sexually explicit’. Hester (2014) suggests that genres and representations that dwell upon bodies (medical porn), trauma (misery porn), and military destruction (war porn) are undergirded with resonances of transgression, authenticity, prurience, intensity, and the real, and these are also central attributes of pornography. It is not so much the case that pornography has ‘expanded into new cultural territories’ (2014, 181), but rather that these genres and representations so closely align with pornographic principles. That none of these genres contain sexual practices intended for arousal gestures towards the displacement of sex within mainstream and conventional understandings of the pornographic.

But inspiration porn has thus far evaded detailed explanation, and this article attends to this research lacuna. Informed by and extending Hester’s (2014) work, I consider the ways in which ‘porn’ figures in ‘inspiration porn’. My intention is to consider the ways in which non-sexual images and representations have accrued the description ‘porn/ography’. As Hester (2014, 181) notes, ‘sex has, to a certain extent, been displaced within contemporary perceptions of the pornographic’, and this has coincided with the rise of signifiers such as ‘inspiration porn’. This type of investigation is important because the non-sexual labelling of texts and representations as pornography means these texts and representations become associated with discourses of shame and stigma that are mobilized by forces intent on hijacking the pornographic term. As Hester (2014, 182) also notes, ‘it may not simply be that sex is displaced’, but that ‘other cultural anxieties are displaced onto sex’ (original emphasis). In so doing, the taken-for-granted hostility towards pornography (in many quarters) results in two circular outcomes regarding pornographication: first, non-sexual phenomena labelled ‘pornographic’ are constituted in negative ways because of the association with pornography; and second, pornography itself is constituted as objectionable via its connection with the phenomena (e.g. inspiration porn) under inquiry (Hester 2014). The conflation between seemingly disparate texts and representations under the collective rubric of ‘pornography’ simplifies and collapses diverse phenomena that are otherwise nuanced and complex (Smith 2010). It is thus important to consider how these designations and conflations occur before we can begin crafting responses to them.

This article starts by reviewing the origins of ‘inspiration porn’ within the academic literature and complicates the uncritical conflation between ‘inspiration porn’ and ‘porn’ made within the field of disability studies. Trying to advance a more critical line of inquiry, I examine two forms of inspiration porn –reality television featuring disabled performers, and disability sporting events – and interrogate the relevant features that might explain their associations with pornography. The findings suggest that these two forms of inspiration porn likewise resonate with central features of pornography, namely prurience, intensity, the real, authenticity, and transgression. These terminological slippages in the case of ‘inspiration porn’ can thus be explained via the shared resonances between these (otherwise seemingly diverse) phenomena. Importantly, however, I am only interested in accounting (and not celebrating) these slippages, and the article concludes by considering the increasing pornographication occurring within contemporary culture. I contemplate the risks, implications, and opportunities that are at stake in the imbrication of non-sexual images and representations within the orbit of the ‘pornographic’. Tracing the ways in which ‘pornography’ is tied to non-sexual practices, the article concludes by suggesting that a level of scepticism towards these trends is warranted. Notwithstanding the resonances across and between ‘porn’ and ‘inspiration porn’, the usage of a non-sexual pornographic vernacular should be reconsidered in contexts where such practices are intent on weaponizing the pornographic label and pornography more generally.

Inspiration porn: the existing literature

The origin of the term ‘inspiration porn’ is opaque. While it has been suggested that the term has floated around blogs since 2006 (Gagliardi 2017), it is widely recognized that the late Australian disability activist Stella Young popularized the term in their 2012 ABC News article (‘We’re Not Here For Your Inspiration’) and 2014 TED Talk (‘I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much’) (Grue 2016). Young wrote:

[i]nspiration porn is an image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary – like playing, or talking, or running, or drawing a picture, or hitting a tennis ball – carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’ or ‘before you quit, try’. (2012, n.p.)

Inspiration porn re-appropriates or re-contextualizes disabled people’s activities to serve the abled viewer. Young (2012, n.p.) suggests that inspiration porn serves the abled person by ‘put[ting] their worries into perspective’, and by reminding them that they are not disabled. In short, inspiration porn shames disabled people because it exceptionalizes and objectifies them for the benefit of the abled subject.

Several scholars have taken up Young’s contribution. Grue (2016), whose quote is contained in the epigraph, has modified Young’s conceptualization in efforts to foreground its visual/physical/symbolic dimensions, suggesting that inspiration porn often features physical disability and emphases on physicality and strenuous activity. They also highlight the ‘overcoming’ narrative central to many inspiration porn representations (Grue 2016). Liddiard (2014), in contrast, has highlighted the dual meaning of ‘inspiration’ in inspiration porn, suggesting that abled people see disabled people as inspiring, and as holding the capacity to inspire that person in their own lives. Martin (2019) and Schalk (2021) have also noted the similarities between inspiration porn and the supercrip, which the latter refers to as narratives and representations of disabled people who are deemed inspiring/extraordinary for engaging in mundane or exceptional activities.

Quite rightly, most of the existing scholarship on inspiration porn investigates the negative effects associated with its practice. It is obviously problematic that disabled people are represented in objectifying ways for the mere benefit of the abled viewer. It is also problematic that depictions and representations of disabled people living their lives are appropriated by others for nefarious and self-interested ends. Yet scholarly work on inspiration porn lacks engagement with ‘porn’, although it is worth noting a few exceptions. Young foregrounded its use in their TED Talk, suggesting:

I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So, in this case, we’re objectifying disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, ‘Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.’ (2014, n.p.)

Young implicitly interprets pornography in heteronormative ways, suggesting it objectifies women for the benefit of the male performer and viewer. The conflation set up by Young situates disabled people and women porn performers as objectified people, and as subject positions that should be avoided at all costs.

Ayers and Reed recognize that the usage of ‘porn’ is controversial, yet nevertheless suggest that:

[p]orn objectifies one party or group for the self-satisfaction of another. It is devoid of art or nuance. The spread of these images or portrayals is often difficult to contain because they reinforce power structures that oppress disempowered groups. While traditional forms of sexual pornography typically objectify women and promote sexist attitudes, the forms of porn discussed throughout this chapter objectify disabled people and promote ableist attitudes. (2022, 90)

Ayers and Reed draw parallels between inspiration porn and pornography, suggesting they both objectify those who are represented, and do so for the viewer’s satisfaction and gratification. They also draw a distinction between porn and art, suggesting they share little resonance with each other (Ayers and Reed 2022). Grue (2016) and Hoggatt (2023) acknowledge the non-sexual elements of inspiration porn, but invoke former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous aphorism of obscenity, ‘I know it when I see it’, to broaden definitions of pornography and to highlight its opaque and nebulous character. Hoggatt (2023, 2) even suggests that pornography involves ‘any work, including visual or literary, that seeks the emotional arousal of the recipient’.

These accounts are limited, however, because they fail to seriously consider pornography scholarship, and this article is partly motivated towards attending to that gap. The aforementioned accounts fail to take pornography seriously as a form and reduce it down to a doomed phenomenon that pathologizes performers and viewers alike. The accounts abandon the well-acknowledged fact that pornography ‘refers to the graphic depiction of sexually explicit acts’ that are intended ‘primarily for the sexual pleasure of the audience member’ (Sullivan and McKee 2015, 4). The strongest link they make is that pornography objectifies, and while this can certainly be the case, it is disingenuous to homogenize all forms of pornography as the same (Paasonen et al. 2021). It is also problematic (and perhaps ironic) to critique the denigration of disabled people while at the same time denigrating porn performers (and to a lesser extent, viewers). The broad and indistinct usage of ‘porn’ also has wider repercussions – as Hester notes:

[t]he broad, indistinct usage of ‘porn’ – at both the linguistic and the conceptual levels – may therefore risk playing into the hands of those who would restrict the circulation of certain forms of representation; if sexually explicit material has long been at risk for being positioned as obscene, then to align other types of representation with the idea of pornography may risk rendering a great swathe of material more vulnerable to attempts at censorship. To be loose in our definition of porn may also be to invite or to make possible the emergence of ‘catch-all’ legislation. (2014, 181–182)

Hoggatt (2023, 2) makes this slippage, in the quote I introduced earlier, when they state that pornography contains ‘any work … that seeks the emotional arousal of the recipient’. Such a definition is too unwieldy, and also contradicts Ayers and Reed’s (2022) claim that porn and art are incompatible. While many can agree that inspiration porn is problematic, I am not so sure we are interested in censoring it. After all, the problem is not the ways in which disabled people participate in these practices, but the ways in which they are interpreted and represented in them, and at times it can be difficult to draw the line between what is benign and what is problematic (Williams 2017).¹ These accounts, then, fail to take seriously the ways in which inspiration porn accrues the descriptive suffix ‘porn’. In the following section, I seek to advance a more critical line of inquiry by exploring the points of connection between ‘porn’ and ‘inspiration porn’ often evidenced in reality television and sporting events.

Reality television, disability, and inspiration porn

Reality television has been around for a long time, but emerged as a distinct and popular genre of television at the turn of the twenty-first century (Ouellette 2014). One popular form includes music competitions, such as The Voice or The X Factor, which involve a series of performances and eliminations that seek to turn ordinary people into singing stars (Bignell 2014). Primary ‘competition’ segments are interlaced with ‘interviews’ or ‘confessionals’ by performers and judges, and overcoming narratives are often central to the genre, which often chart journeys from humble origins to global sensations.

Disabled people sometimes feature in these programmes, and in such cases disabledness is almost always remarked upon (Cheng 2017). Disability blends perfectly with the genre’s emphasis on overcoming narratives, and provides the perfect opportunity to lean into ‘inspirational’ stories that document triumph over adversity. Cheng (2017, 185) argues that producers of these programmes ‘expertly play up disability narratives to maximize emotional impact and popular appeal’. Auditions are often supplemented with on-site and off-site interviews, footage, and photographs, and music underscores and voice-overs, which are aided by cross-fades, stirring music, and other visual effects, which all help to create a sentimental and sympathetic atmosphere (Cheng 2017).

Take Emmanuel Kelly’s 2011 audition for The X Factor Australia as one version of this. Kelly is introduced to the viewer prior to the audition, and as the camera provides close-ups of his smiling face and innocent demeanour, coupled with uplifting music in the background, Kelly tells us his dream to become a professional singer. This section precedes the ‘plot twist’ to come: Kelly, now shown with noticeably different arms and legs and a non-normative gait, walks to the stage. Brief pleasantries are exchanged before Kelly is asked his age: he is ‘not exactly sure’ because he was found in an orphanage in Iraq by his adoptive mother with no birth certificate or passport. Silence fills the auditorium, and a cutaway shows Kelly walking through a backstage area with machine-generated fog filling the air. Cheng (2017) notes the not-so-subtle nod to the ‘fog of war’. Kelly discloses in another cutaway that he was born in a war zone, found in a shoe box with his brother (also with non-normative arms and legs), and taken to an orphanage where he could hear the constant sound of gunshots and bombing. Dramatic music and old photographs of Kelly in the orphanage add to the storytelling. He tells us that he and his brother were adopted by an Australian woman and moved to Australia, and surgeries were performed to heal their injuries.

We return to the stage to hear that Kelly will sing John Lennon’s Imagine. As Kelly sings, the crowd goes wild, the judges become emotional and some cry, and a standing ovation and long applause unfolds. Emotional and dramatic music resumes as two judges note his ‘courage’ and ‘bravery’, while another laments they were ‘won over from the minute you stepped on this stage’. The judges unanimously vote to put him through to the next round as the climactic part of Thirty Seconds to Mars’ King and Queens roars in the background. As Kelly walks off stage to hug his family, the camera cuts back to one judge who, reflecting on the story and situation, states: ‘It just makes everything that you worry about just so pathetic’.

This story is dripping with the characteristics of inspiration porn. While there is nothing wrong with a disabled person wanting to showcase their talents, the representation feeds into stereotypes that disability requires overcoming, that disability is about personal tragedy, and that abled people are oh-so-lucky they are not disabled (Grue 2016). As Young (2011, n.p.) observed following the event: ‘I could count on one hand the times I’ve seen a straight-up, honest, bullshit-free representation of a disabled person on Australian television’. Kelly is objectified and reduced to nothing but disability. But what makes this representation porn/ographic? It is self-evident that the representation contains no sexually explicit activity intended to arouse, and it is perhaps a little too simplistic to suggest that the objectification present in the representation builds the association with ‘porn’. There must be some other facet that prompts this representation and others – such as Rachael Leahcar and Harrison Craig from The Voice Australia, Lazaro Arbos from American Idol, and, to a lesser extent, Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent – that generate their considerations as pornography.²

Notwithstanding the element of authenticity (‘real bodies really experiencing corporeal phenomena’; Hester 2014, 60), a more useful starting point might be considering reality television and its association with the freak show. Perhaps most popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, freak shows exhibited disabled and anomalous bodies for public entertainment at circuses and carnivals (Clare 2015). They have existed throughout history, and still live on today in different iterations. Williams (2017, 79) argues that there is ‘something implicitly pornographic about the freak show’.³ The freak show enables the viewer to look at things interesting or unusual, or the things that ‘turn us on’ (Williams 2017). The freak show provides the viewer access to intimate bodies, and a range of hidden desires, curiosities, and prurient interests coalesce.

It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that non-sexual portrayals of disabled people are pornographic, especially when sex is not taking place, and where disabled people have so systematically been removed from sexual cultures (Siebers 2008; Liddiard 2020). Yet given disability is so pervasively constituted as incapacity – as a lack of physical, intellectual, emotional, mental, psychic, and sexual ability – and is subject to interrogation and surveillance that must be measured and evaluated, perhaps it is not surprising that these ‘absences’, including prurience and sex, so often rear their head. Williams (2017) makes a similar observation in their analysis of freak shows in the form of reality television, noting how audiences are always interested in lascivious sexual curiosity no matter how minimally or non-existent sex even features in these representations. The television programme Abby and Brittany is a case in point. This programme documents conjoined twins Abby and Brittany doing completely normal things, such as going shopping, holidaying, or socializing, but everyone watching is interested in just one thing: sex. The coupling of disability and gender (and other social categories such as race and class) influence the sexualization created for the audience, and as Williams (2017, 118) notes, ‘[a]udiences are mesmerized by bodies that differ from theirs and much of this has to do with sex’.

Noting that Abby and Brittany share a pelvis, a vagina, and reproductive organs, Williams notes the raft of questions the audience possess:

Can the two girls marry the same man or different men? If one is kissed, does the other feel it? When they have sex, do they both feel the orgasm? Who is their sexual partner actually having sex with? If the other doesn’t condone it, is it rape? Is it incest? Polygamy? What about masturbation? Parenting? (2017, 86)

Evidently, the viewers’ minds run wild. In their analysis of viewer responses to Abby and Brittany, Williams (2017, 86) notes that they ‘have not been able to find a single comment-enabled article about the twins on the internet that is not mainly comprised of graphic questions about the girls’ sex lives’ (original emphasis). Grosz (1996, 64) echoes these observations by suggesting that the:

initial reaction to the freakish and the monstrous is a perverse kind of sexual curiosity. People think to themselves: ‘How do they do it?’ What kind of sex lives are available to Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, bearded ladies, and midgets? There is a certain morbid speculation about what it would be like to be with such persons, or worse, to be them.

The freak body connotes a lack or excess that is sexually fascinating to its viewers (Williams 2017; original emphasis).

It appears, then, that inspiration porn in the form of reality television accrues the pornographic label through the freak show and its inherent sexual qualities, and additionally the sexual titillations that are attached to disabled/different bodies. These attributes are also suffused with other pornographic principles, such as prurience and transgression. Prurience refers to lascivious curiosity, or an ‘“interest” that no one wants to own up’ (Williams 2008, 122). Hester (2014, 92) suggests prurience can be positioned ‘as one element of the insatiable contemporary appetite for affect’. Additionally, inspiration porn in the form of reality television aligns with transgression, which is also associated with pornography and contains a similar ‘affective charge’ (2014, 78). Norms instantiate acceptable modes of identity, behaviour, and representation, and breaching such rules and frameworks transgress modes of acceptability. Transgression builds and maintains excitement, desire, fascination, and disgust, and transgression features centrally within many forms of pornography and disability representations in the form of the freak show. People are interested in watching transgressive acts and bodies (non-normative forms of pornography, non-normative ways of being on television, and non-normative bodies generally) as this affirms their own identities, satiates (hidden) desires and interests, and exposes alternative ways of doing, being, and knowing (Young 1990; Garland-Thomson 2009). Inspiration porn also features in sporting contexts, and it is worth considering the dynamics of such representations that make it associated with the seemingly counter-intuitive notion of the non-sexual pornographic.

Sport, disability, and inspiration porn

Inspiration porn often features in the context of sport, and particularly the Paralympics. In fact, inspiration porn plumbs to such depths during the Paralympics that a whole range of articles emerge, both from disability advocates and Paralympians, warning readers/viewers not to fall into the inspiration porn ‘trap’ (Knapp 2021). Yet inspiration porn nevertheless persists, even for the most well intentioned, which reinforces the fraught politics of disability representation (Quayson 2007). Channel 4, the UK television network which broadcasted and promoted Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Summer Paralympics, was accused of inspiration porn in their promotional material. The 3-minute advertisement ‘We’re the Superhumans’ was seeped in inspiration porn. Featuring many disabled people engaging in sporting activities, the music alternates between ‘Gee, I’m afraid to go’ to ‘Yes I can’, indicating that a change in mindset is all that is needed to excel. As Orr reflected at the time:

[p]romoting the idea that people with disabilities can overcome their disabilities, be happy, and even become amazing athletes if they shift their attitudes – if they just declare, ‘Yes I can’ – encourages enabled individuals to think of disability as a personal issue, not a socio-political issue that they influence. (2016, n.p.)

The individualizing rhetoric of inspiration porn places the burden on individuals and absolves the broader contexts that control, pathologize, and violate disabled bodyminds.

But what is it about disability sport particularly that makes it available for consideration as pornography? Porn studies scholars have in fact suggested that pornography sometimes resembles extreme sport (see Zecca 2012; Attwood, Smith, and Barker 2018), and it is also worth noting the non-sexual themes that run though pornography (Hester 2014). Pornography can feature bodies pushed to their limits, where particular acts involve skill, endurance, flexibility, stamina, and risk-taking. Just as sportspeople craft their skills that are then showcased for sports fans, porn performers likewise showcase their talents – such as the endurance of sexual activity, the ability to stretch orifices to the extreme, or the ability to experience BDSM practices – for their porn viewers. Both forms, sport and pornography, involve an exploration and extension of bodily capacity and corporeal self-expression (Sparkes 1999; Dean 2014).

Hester (2014, 105) notes that certain forms of non-sexual explicit imagery can ‘trigger the itching, voyeuristic desire or lascivious curiosity typically associated with pornography’. Central to this is intensity, which occurs when ‘the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow “beyond” those connected to psychic organization’ (Bersani 1987, 217). Intensity thus moves between thresholds, including the sexual and non-sexual, pornographic and non-pornographic. Hester (2014, 122) suggests that intensity involves a ‘desire to witness the human subject suffering or enjoying extreme physical states’, and this can occur in both sport and pornography.

Watching sport can also generate affective responses similar to pornography viewing. Existing research suggests that television sport is so popular because of its hedonic functions, euphoric feelings, positive affect, arousal, enjoyment, excitement, and suspense (Bartsch et al. 2018). Bartsch et al. (2018, 528) write that the ‘heightened level of arousal that accompanies suspense can serve to regulate aversive states of under-arousal and boredom, and can help to distract viewers from negative thoughts’. The preceding quote is referencing sports viewing, but these sentiments likewise resonate with attitudes of pornography viewing as well, and particularly the association that boredom, distraction, and arousal plays in porn viewership and engagement (Keilty 2018; Bernstein et al. 2021; Paasonen 2021). The presence of disability adds another dimension, both positive and negative, to viewer responses.

Disability sport may also resemble Williams’ (1989) account of the ‘frenzy of the visible’. For Williams, pornography is driven by a desire for maximum visibility, and this is evidenced through gags, spasms, convulsions, and other such movements and reactions that illustrate a body has been touched, moved, and affected. Pornography holds a ‘desire to see and know more of the human body’ (1989, 36), and obsessively seeks knowledge ‘through the voyeuristic record of confessional, involuntary paroxysm’ (1989, 49). Sport also exemplifies these qualities, and many disabled people’s actions create spasms, convulsions, reflexes, and movements that prove bodily experience. Just as ‘the involuntary shudder induced by the gag reflex is capable of functioning for the viewer in ways reminiscent of the spasms of orgasm’ (Hester 2014, 137), other such bodily re/actions might induce similar affective responses, also indicating a displacement of sex ‘to any scene of the body in a state of intensity’ (2014, 122; original emphasis). Sports such as swimming, wheelchair basketball, athletics, and triathlon demand physical energy and endurance, and participating in these activities expose intense bodies – sweating, straining, spasming – experiencing something.

Discussion: findings and implications

My intention in this article has been to provide a more critical line of inquiry that better accounts for the ways in which ‘porn’ figures in ‘inspiration porn’. Existing research has suggested that the suffix ‘porn’ has resonance because disabled people are objectified and devalued. Such accounts, however, fail to engage with the definitions and logics of pornography, which unfairly denigrates porn performers, and obscures and distorts the phenomena and resonances under inquiry. I have also sought to commence a conversation between inspiration porn scholarship, which is currently couched within disability studies, and pornography scholarship more broadly, with the intention of interrogating the benefits and shortcomings of attaching the suffix ‘porn’ to ‘inspiration porn’. This article also adds to the increasing cross-pollinations occurring between disability and pornography studies more generally (see Dean 2014; Thorneycroft 2020; Thorneycroft and Smilges 2023).

The analysis has revealed that pornography has not expanded into new territories, but rather that certain practices and behaviours share similarities and resonances with pornographic principles. Attributes associated with inspiration porn – prurience, the real, intensity, authenticity, and transgression – are likewise suffused with pornographic principles, which helps explain the slippage that has occurred between ‘porn’ and ‘inspiration porn’. This account is more convincing, I posit, than the existing accounts that reductively construct porn and inspiration porn as objectifying and devaluing. After all, other slippages have occurred with other materials, such as property porn, travel porn, and food porn, that do not align with the simplistic and reductive notion that all forms of ‘porn’ are simply ‘bad’ or ‘objectifying’ (Hester 2014). The slippages taking place suggest that sex is somehow being displaced from conventional notions of the pornographic (Hester 2014).

Far from being an abstract or theoretical exercise, this analysis throws up important implications. Hester (2014) cautions that widened notions of pornography, or pornographication, may dilute the meaning of pornography as it has been predominantly understood, and may lead to unintended legal consequences. As mentioned earlier, ‘to align other types of representations with the idea of pornography may risk rendering a great swathe of material more vulnerable to attempts at censorship’ (2014, 182). The dilution or ambiguity of ‘pornography’ may mean that certain cultural objects get ‘dragged into the genre’s orbit’ (2014, 182), which leads to problematic and unintended political, social, and legal consequences. It is also the case that certain cultural forms may become ‘contaminated’ through their associations with pornography, and lead to the pathologization of that particular cultural form (food porn, for example) and pornography itself (Hester 2014). ‘Pornography’ is a contaminated term for many and is often wielded to ‘express many kinds of intense revulsion’ at different (and seemingly unconnected) forms of social phenomena (Rubin 1993, 37). There is a serious concern that engagements with the non-sexual pornographic may contribute to uncritical condemnations of pornography (Smith 2010; Hester 2014). This, in part, leads Smith (2010, 106) to conclude that ‘[p]ornographication is a problem, not a description’.

It is worth emphasizing and clarifying that I am not celebrating the proliferation or extension of the descriptive suffix ‘porn’ and pornographication more broadly. My focus has been on accounting for the slippages taking place, and not celebrating or promoting them. Like Hester (2014), I am not invested in the expanded usages of the ‘porn’ suffix. One problem associated with this expansion is that pornography is so difficult to define and often understood in broad and generalized ways (Kipnis 1999). The most commonly recognized definition of pornography – that I introduced at the start of this article and refers to sexually explicit material intended to arouse – is only one part of a much broader picture. Recently, McKee et al. (2022) consulted leading pornography scholars on their definitions of pornography. While the most popular definition featured heavily (‘sexually explicit material intended to arouse’), they also arrived at another complementary definition:

[p]ornography is not a thing but a concept, a category of texts managed by institutions led by powerful groups in society in order to control the circulation of knowledge and culture, changing according to geographic location and period. (McKee et al. 2022, 38)

While this is an entirely appropriate and sensible definition, it is still one that accepts broadness and fluidity over precision and clarity. Given the issues with pornographication and slippery notions of pornography, Hester (2014) suggests it might be more efficacious to deploy ‘adult entertainment’ rather than pornography, and to differentiate between them. While ‘adult entertainment’ is also problematic because it captures many different sex-related industries, it nevertheless retains a ‘strong generic identity’ (2014, 184) and is less ‘threatening’ than ‘pornography’. ‘Adult entertainment’, for Hester (2014, 186), is ‘“pornography” declawed’.

Conversely, it may be incumbent upon disability studies scholars to be more wary of the ‘inspiration porn’ label, given the present analysis, and instead move towards the ‘supercrip’ term mentioned earlier. The supercrip involves narratives and representations of disabled people who are deemed inspiring, special, heroic, and extraordinary for engaging in mundane (or sometimes exceptional) activities (Withers 2012; Clare 2017). The theme of ‘overcoming’ is central to both terms, and while they appear to have slightly different emphases (e.g. the focus is often tied to the supercrip, whereas inspiration porn is often about the viewers engagement/reactions), the supercrip term may be more appropriate than the discursively vague ‘inspiration porn’ label. Notwithstanding, Withers (2012) suggests the term ‘supercrip’ is likewise problematic because of the lineage between ‘crip’ and gang culture, and the emphasis on physical disability that ‘crip’ allegedly connotes. The difficulty of identifying concrete terms belies the fact that these phenomena are complex and shifting, and ultimately the terms may be difficult to isolate because their associated practices are so problematic and unwieldy. It is, however, hoped that engaging more critically in inspiration porn, both from a disability and pornography studies perspective and in concert with other ‘porn’ suffix designations, will hopefully permit a better engagement with pornographication and the displacement of sex within ‘pornography’ (Smith 2010). It may even be appropriate to encourage the proliferation of crip-produced pornography as a useful antidote to inspiration porn/supercrip narratives.

Conclusion

Inspiration porn is problematic for a whole host of reasons. The objectifying and dehumanizing practices and messages contained within inspiration porn sit alongside a whole range of other technologies that pathologize disabled bodies and lives. Rather than explore the ins and outs of inspiration porn, however, I have sought to explore an alternative line of inquiry that accounts for the association built between inspiration porn and pornography. Exploring inspiration porn in the form of reality television depicting disabled people and disability sports, the findings are such that these representations are suffused with principles strongly aligned with pornography – notably prurience, the real, authenticity, transgression, and intensity – that help explain their resonances that might warrant the descriptive suffix ‘pornography’. Such slippages have led to the development of a ‘non-sexual pornographic’ and increasing pornographication. Moreover, the findings also highlight the inherent difficulties associated with definitions of pornography. It will be important to think through the increasing designation of phenomena as ‘porn’, both in terms of its dis/alignment with pornography and potential regulatory and social implications.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Garland-Thomson (2001) has suggested that disability representation (in photography) has typically fallen into four (overlapping) categories: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the realistic (although, importantly, realism is just as constructed as the other categories). The exotic is also related to the freakish, and it makes disability distant, strange, and spectacled. Garland-Thomson (2001) also at times calls the exotic category the ‘transgressive’.

2 Harrison Craig and Lazaro Arbos were both represented for their stutters, while Rachael Leahcar was represented for her blindness. Susan Boyle’s representation is more opaque given her neurodiversity (Calvert 2014), and as Grue (2016) notes, inspiration porn mostly focuses on physical disability.

3 This sentiment was mirrored recently by crip artist Dan Daw in a Guardian interview (Dow 2023). Daw noted that the abled gaze upon disability and disabled people can have an ‘almost pornographic nature’ (2023, n.p.).