When Sharing Isn’t Caring
Hannah Diviney and Matilda Boseley’s enlightening panel, Good Different, covered many important and all-too-often neglected topics at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival.
They including how to manage chronic pain as a writer, especially when the physical act of writing exacerbates that pain, and how to manage the process of writing a book, a highly deadline-driven process, while living with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition that makes sticking to deadlines difficult at best and impossible at worst.
However, it was a single sentence from Diviney during the Q&A section of the panel that has stuck with me. “Let disabled people be ambitious.”
This should be obvious. Disabled people should have the opportunity to be just as ambitious as their non-disabled peers but, all too often, disabled people are expected to accept less.
It starts in education. Diviney’s plea to allow disabled people to strive for something other than the bare minimum stemmed from a question regarding how best to advocate for the needs of disabled students sitting the HSC.
Hannah Diviney delivered some hard truths during Good Different. Photo: Jacquie Manning/SWF
Diviney recalled in response to the question, and more elaborately in her 2023 essay collection I’ll Let Myself In, that the NSW Department of Education expected her to use a scribe rather than access a computer to complete her HSC exams. Largely because it is more cost effective for the department to use scribes rather than the highly modified computers needed to prevent cheating in exams, student preferences be damned.
When Diviney pressed the department as to why she couldn’t use a computer, she was told “we don’t care what mark she gets, only that she completes the exams”.
Why is this the standard set for disabled people? Why is it not expected that we should achieve to the best of our abilities, once our disabilities are accommodated? The answer lies in the way people with disabilities are portrayed in the mainstream media.
The term inspiration porn was partly popularised by the late Australian disability advocate Stella Young, who gave an evocative TED talk on the subject in 2014. Put simply, inspiration porn is the idea that the media uses the life stories of people with disabilities achieving anything beyond the bare minimum to make non-disabled people feel good.
Not only is this exploitative, it holds disabled people back. It sends the message to non-disabled people that the people with disabilities are less capable and that relatively modest achievements, like getting a good grade on the HSC, are exceptional achievements for people with disabilities.
It also reinforces the perception for people with disabilities who cannot achieve the socially accepted bare minimum that they are less valuable than those people with disabilities who can serve as inspiration for the non-disabled community.
The question of what can be done about media representation of people with disabilities is a complex one. The media portrayal of disability is built upon a mountain of long-standing, and difficult-to-deconstruct stereotypes, but a starting point is to be more critical about the types of stories we amplify as a society about disabled people.
Before sharing a story about disability on social media, be analytical, ask is this story about highlighting something that deserves to be celebrated or needs to be addressed, or is it just making me feel good.
