Stella Young has died, unexpectedly, at the age of 32. I am shattered. So are a hell of a lot of other disability folk on the Internet.
In a fairly recent TED Talk, Stella pushed back against disabled people being called “inspirational”. A few commenters here and there had the audacity to say that her TED Talk was inspirational. Honestly, I get where they were coming from, but really, Stella wasn’t “inspirational”. She was “fucking amazing”. There’s a difference.
To me, Stella was another teacher. Mostly through her writing, she taught me to really believe rhetoric that I had previously just recited, about disabled bodies … disabled people ... being beautiful.
