Para athletes: "Inspiration porn" and stereotypes, difficult access to sponsors
As the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games get underway, not all participating athletes have benefited from sponsorship, despite the crucial importance of this support to fully and serenely engage in their sporting careers.
Yann Beldame, University of MontpellierHélène Joncheray, Université Paris CitéRémi Richard, University of Montpellier and Valentine Duquesne, Université Paris Cité
For Paralympic athletes, access to sponsorship is not solely dependent on sporting performance... far from it. The disability and its story often take precedence over the sporting performance itself. The problem? Not all disabilities and not all Paralympic disciplines are seen as inspiring by non-disabled people, so some para-athletes find themselves overlooked by sponsors.
These are the findings of a survey of 15 Paralympic athletes shortlisted for the latest Tokyo Games, and 42 members of their staffs (sports directors, coaches, physiotherapists, physical and mental trainers, doctors, sports assistants, guides, family members).
A vision of the parasportive distorted by bias
The interviews conducted for the survey highlight that access to sponsors is not solely - or even primarily - linked to sporting performance; it is highly dependent on the disability, and above all on the type of recognition associated with it.
Two categories of para-sporters are more likely to be sponsored, as summarized by one of the athletes interviewed:
"In general, amputees are very able-bodied. [...] And even at the limit, if it's a prosthesis, there's a bit of technology, it's beautiful, bionic. People can identify with them," he confides. Then there's someone who's athletic, but a bit pitiful, a double amputee, a little guy. In that case, it's more a question of sponsoring, like we have to help him, because he's got courage."
In fact, this description corresponds to a vision of the disabled athlete that is distorted by two major biases, defined as early as 1989 by sociologists Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron (who identified them in their studies of the working classes): populism and miserabilism.
The first tends to aestheticize the disabled body and the life paths of Paralympic athletes, viewing them as superheroes of sorts. The latter, on the other hand, sees "every difference as a lack, every otherness as a lesser being".
[Already over 120,000 subscriptions to The Conversation newsletters. What about you? Subscribe today for a better understanding of the world's major issues].
At the intersection of these two biases lies "inspiration porn": this is the tendency of non-disabled people to be inspired by people with disabilities, based on their every move, considered exceptional, given a disability situation that is itself supposedly tragic. https://www.youtube.com/embed/SxrS7-I_sMQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Australian comedian, journalist and disability rights activist Stella Young's talk on inspiration porn and the objectification of disability, TEDxSydney 2014.
The porn inspiration thus combines miserabilism, which presupposes that the lives of disabled athletes are necessarily harder and more miserable than those of non-disabled athletes, and populism, which transforms ordinary people and facts into heroes and exceptional actions.
A rejected bias: miserabilism
In high-level parasport, for example, this miserabilism is reflected in the photos published in the media: according to a 2011 study carried out in five European countries, Paralympic athletes at the Sydney (2000), Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008) Games were photographed in much less active postures than non-disabled athletes, reinforcing the miserabilist vision that presents people with disabilities as weak and inactive individuals.
While the tenderness and compassion associated with miserabilism may encourage some sponsors to finance athletes, this bias is clearly denounced and rejected by athletes and their staff: some regret that the media dramatize their story and neglect their sporting career, others consider that parasporters are often presented as necessarily unhappy athletes, while still others want above all to be considered as high-level athletes.
Miserabilism can also have a counter-productive effect on access to sponsorship, and is even detrimental to certain disciplines, such as boccia - a sport similar to pétanque, but played in wheelchairs, by mixed teams, with leather balls. The reason? The interest generated by misery diminishes as the degree of disability increases. In other words, a mild disability is worth more, in terms of interest and sponsorship, than a more severe and visible one.
Added to this is the fact that boccia has no equivalent among non-disabled people, and is therefore less "inspiring" for the able-bodied: not incorporating porn inspiration, the sport is therefore less worthy of interest... and funding.
A risky bias: populism
A possible way out of the misery of misery is to take a closer look at the imaginary cyborg athlete, equipped with mobility technologies (wheelchairs, prostheses).
In fact, a study published in 2011 estimated that the further a Paralympic athlete's body is from this ideal, the more likely it is that a tragic - rather than heroic - imaginary will develop about this athlete, and that he or she will fall victim to miserabilism.
According to the survey by INSEP and the University of Montpellier, Paralympic athletes perceived as cyborgs would, on the other hand, be well protected from a miserabilistic media representation... but the exaltation around their superhuman abilities would expose them more to a populist representation of their practice.
The aforementioned 2011 study on media coverage of para-sporters also revealed an over-representation of wheelchair and/or prosthetic athletes in published photos, and an under-representation of athletes with less technologized impairments.
Beyond stories of cyborg athletes, another populist view of Paralympic athletes is that they are "supercrips": athletes who make heroic, high-performance use of their disabled bodies.
The theme of resilience through sport is then often brought to the fore, around a story that recounts and glorifies the extraordinary and heroic qualities of a Paralympic athlete - as well as his or her very special exploits beyond and in spite of their disability.
A bias with multiple risks: it claims that individual effort makes it possible to achieve anything, thus erasing injustices and inequalities of opportunity between able-bodied and disabled athletes.
It also spreads the idea that only extraordinary people can succeed in parasport. This vision is far from realistic, and falls back on porn inspiration: non-disabled people find it hard to assess the real abilities of parasporters, and often project low expectations onto them, thus eliciting unjustified praise.
Para-athletes both victims and actors of bias
The survey reveals, however, that the athletes themselves, through the presentation they offer to the media, to companies or in their publications on social networks, do not necessarily seek to oppose populism or porn inspiration... since these biases enable them to gain access to sponsors.
"It's really the sacrifice I make every day that seems to interest them more," says one Paralympic swimmer.
The athlete is thus confronted with pornographic inspiration, and is obliged to accept it, since the story line is what the sponsors want to sell. Surpassing oneself, the heroic aspect of life in spite of disability, are the subjects that sponsors expect and prefer to finance... and therefore that parasportives stage.
For the latter, the question is: do sponsors give them money because of the admiration they feel for their sporting experience despite their disability, or does the funding reward the efforts they put in on a daily basis in their quest for medals?
Finally, the study highlights two important findings: firstly, social norms exclude the least inspiring parasporters from access to sponsors; secondly, they force them to highlight their disability rather than their sporting performance.
A change of prism is needed
To change this vision distorted by miserabilism, populism and porn inspiration, the sportsmen and women interviewed have some ideas. Starting with the elimination of the distinction between sport and disabled sport. "The aim is to reach the same level... to become a sport. Not a disability sport, not handisport [...], but to become a sport like any other," explains a member of a national wheelchair rugby team. To be at the same level as the others, so that we can benefit from the same things." He also pleads for disability to become the norm.
According to researchers at Insep and the University of Montpellier, developing a "policy of taking difference into account" would make it possible to recognize not just those parasports that are inspiring for non-disabled people, but all parasports on the basis of the single sporting experience.
Pending such a change of perspective, the sociologists' publication is already paving the way for new studies. In particular, to reflect on the gendered dimension of representations of Paralympic athletes and its importance in the allocation of sponsorships. It would be interesting, for example, to direct new investigations towards an intersectional perspective, in order to analyze how gender and disability are articulated in the process of Paralympic athletes' access to sponsors.
Yann Beldame, Anthropologist, University of MontpellierHélène Joncheray, Sports sociologist, HDR, Université Paris CitéRémi Richard, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport and Disability, University of Montpellier and Valentine Duquesne, PhD in Sociology of Sport, Université Paris Cité
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.