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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.
Ryan Thorneycroft (Mon,) studied this question.