Not Your Inspiration 1.25" Button

In the words of the fantastic Stella Young:

"...ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we’ve been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It’s a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t make you exceptional.

And in the past few years, we’ve been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: 'The only disability in life is a bad attitude.' Or this one: 'Your excuse is invalid.' Indeed. Or this one: 'Before you quit, try!' These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration p*rn.

And I use the term p*rn 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.'

But what if you are that person? I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I’m brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. [Laughter] And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren’t so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective."

(You can learn more from Stella on this topic here.)

Available in two different colorways and designed by Giraffe Party, these full color 1.25" diameter buttons are coated with a clear high-gloss UV & weather resistant mylar finish, are backed with a steel pin-back, and feature a high quality print.