I used to watch videos of abandoned dogs finding their forever homes and deaf people being able to hear for the first time to help soothe me on a bad day.
I did not realize until recently how condescending it was to put a human being’s experience and a dog’s experience in the same category of “feel good” videos. A person’s life was reduced to a few seconds of tear-jerking happiness, and then on to the next video.
Any video that displays a deaf or disabled person’s success at doing something that would be deemed as “normal,” is what the community calls inspiration porn.
Inspiration porn is a term coined by disability rights activist Stella Young. She defines porn as the objectification of one group for the benefit of another group. Just as a man or woman’s body is objectified to satisfy anyone’s particular fetish, deaf and disabled people’s “incapabilities” and “challenges” are often objectified as a comparison to an able-bodied person’s problems.
Young’s most important point was the falsehood society has taught us about disabilities.
“We’ve been sold the lie that disability is a bad thing,” Young said. “And to live with disability makes you exceptional.”
Inspiration porn makes a person want to pick themselves back up and tell themselves that life is not all that bad. It makes them think, “At least I’m not deaf.”
That is what the hearing world gets from inspiration porn. But what does the deaf community get from these videos that make others praise curing deafness?
The problem is no one in the hearing world has any exposure to deaf culture and their community. Without the knowledge of a community that is diverse and capable, how can the masses even know what being deaf is like?
Cochlear implant activations have become the representation of deaf culture. To many in the deaf community, these false representations are extremely damaging.
Getting a cochlear implant is not the miracle that doctors and the hearing world preach it to be. Inspiration porn promotes a false idea that cochlear implants will automatically make a deaf person’s life better. They will accumulate a language, hear music, communicate with hearing children and have an easier time making friends.
This is true to an extent, but there is a whole other side of the coin that no one is looking at.
Cochlear implants cost $50,000 without insurance. Inspiration porn does not show people the decades of speech therapy and auditory training the deaf child will need to go through in order to start using their voice. It also does not represent the steep costs that come with breaking and replacing implants. Even if a child took great care of their implant, technology will improve and eventually make an implant obsolete, forcing parents to spend more money on the improved version of the implant. Inspiration porn also masks the issue that few will be compatible for a cochlear implant.
Southwestern College American Sign Language (ASL) professor Shaun Mains said he was six years old when he was forced to get a cochlear implant. After several cycles of them breaking and buying replacements, he did not care to replace them for 10 more years. When his son was born, Mains said he decided to get his implant fixed in order to hear his baby cry in case anything was wrong.
What the hearing world fails to realize is that a cochlear implant is a tool, not a language. The idea that cochlear implants are the only form of accessibility ironically further disables the deaf community. Mains said more research needs to be done about deaf culture and that there are unseen opportunities with learning ASL.
“Ninety percent of deaf babies are born to hearing families, the more implants are given (because it’s the only solution those hearing parents know or will consider),” Mains said. “The deaf population dwindles and pretty soon most will be implanted and illiterate to sign language or the community in which they could relate better.”
Southwestern College ASL professor Ana Cesia Madera recounted having a deaf friend with a cochlear implant when she was ten years old.
“He would have headaches while he was playing because of the implant,” Madera said. “He didn’t feel normal even with the implant. Hearing people thought he was normal, but that is not how he felt.”
In Madera’s ASL 201 class, she discusses the common loss of identity when it comes to deaf children deprived of language. When a deaf child does not know sign language, they do not know the language that they can best express themselves in. Just as Mains said, they become deprived of a community that they have the most in common with. Rather than constantly accommodating to the needs of hearing people around you, the deaf community understands the struggles and are there to help combat them.
Nyle DiMarco, American model, actor and deaf activist advocates for the acceptance for ASL as an acquirable language for deaf babies. He uses his success as a platform to inform the hearing world about deaf culture.
“Every time there’s an inspiration porn video of a deaf baby hearing for the first time, I’m going to share a video of a deaf baby recognizing and acquiring an actual language… that is sign language,” DiMarco said.
In one such instance, there is a video of a deaf baby and their deaf grandmother communicating through sign language.
“You are so cute,” the grandmother signs. “Can you sign ‘grandma?”’
Absolute joy radiated from this baby girl (who is less than a year old) as her grandma helped her learn to sign by using slow and exaggerated hand movements. This learning technique is the same as when a hearing family tries to teach their child new words by exaggerating vowels and speaking slower.
Happiness from these babies in both videos are the same. The only difference is one baby is being exposed to deaf language and the other is being deprived from it.
The hearing world grossly underestimates the deaf community’s capabilities and assumes that none of them can take care of themselves. The lie that Young brings up is the real injustice to the deaf community. Young said she does not consider herself disabled but subscribes to the social model of disability.
“We are more disabled by the society we live in rather than our bodies or our diagnoses,” Young said.
Instead of watching a “deaf baby hears for the first time” video for a daily dose of happiness, people need to learn more about the group in which these videos objectify.
Deaf people do not need pity, but people need to question the morality of letting inspiration porn tell their stories for them. Videos that should go viral are ones of deaf individuals actually achieving something and celebrating their deafness, not antagonizing it.
