Disability Porn

A critical term used within disability studies and disability communities to describe media content that frames disabled people as objects of pity, tragedy, or spectacle for a non-disabled audience's emotional consumption. Often paired with or related to 'inspiration porn,' the term critiques narratives that reduce disability experience to suffering or triumph-over-adversity tropes rather than portraying disabled people as complex individuals. AI and large language model outputs have been documented as frequently defaulting to disability-porn and inspiration-porn framings when asked to generate disability-related content, a concern for anyone designing or evaluating GenAI tools used in disability storytelling.