Miss Wheelchair World: Is this really a win for women with a disability?

Earlier this month, The Only One Foundation held the inaugural Miss Wheelchair World pageant in Warsaw, Poland, with 24 candidates from all over the world.

The core purpose of the Polish organisation is to prove that disability is not a limitation. Every woman in a wheelchair has the right to “be whoever she wants and feel beautiful,” the foundation said; a sentiment that is simply impossible to argue with.

Indeed, the world we live in does very little to make women in wheelchairs feel beautiful.

Kirsty Liddiard, a sociologist who lives with a disability, says women like her have virtually no positive role models in mainstream media.

POST CONTINUES BELOW: We discuss Miss Wheelchair World on the latest episode of Mamamia Out Loud. 

“We are usually depicted as sexless, burdensome and pitiful…” she writes.

Penny Pepper, a wheelchair-user, echoes Liddiard’s sentiment. She argues, “Treating disabled people as asexual is exasperating and offensive.”

The intention behind the pageant is clear. These are women who have been told by popular culture, in no uncertain terms, that because they are in a wheelchair, they cannot be beautiful.

Their response, in the form of Miss Wheelchair World, entirely makes sense.

But a pageant, by it’s very nature, reduces women to the sum of their physical parts. They present women as spectacles to be ranked by a panel of judges. The contestants in Miss Wheelchair World paraded themselves in national costumes, cocktail and evening dresses, exhibiting only a particular kind of femininity; one where women speak only when spoken to, don’t take up a lot of space, and smile incessantly.

Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate who lives with Cerebral Palsy told Mamamia, “I think the concept of giving exposure to women in wheelchairs has good intention.”

“It’s definitely objectifying,” she said, “and is perhaps slightly misguided because whilst it creates visibility, there’s still segregation at play in the ‘wheelchair world’.

“I think if I were to do it with inclusivity as my goal, it would be alongside women of all colours, shapes, religions, identities, cultures and abilities,” Diviney said.

She qualified that her opinion is hers only, and cannot be taken as the “universal standpoint for the disabled community”.

But if Miss Wheelchair World wanted to promote inclusivity, and, in their own words “break down barriers”, then why have a separate pageant for women in wheelchairs?

The fact that Miss World has never had a contestant who also happens to be a wheelchair user, highlights the absurdity and narrow-mindedness of the entire institution.

And the women who did compete are traditionally stunning, in a way that just reinforces our standards of beauty. Is that really transgressive and exciting? Or is it a way of telling women with a disability that their bodies are acceptable, but only if they're otherwise conventionally beautiful?

It is our cultural obsession with how people look - and defining beauty within virtually unattainable parameters - that has marginalised women with a disability in the first place.

We are doing a disservice to all women, regardless of their physicalities, to index their worth as a human being on their appearance.

And Miss Wheelchair World is no exception.

You can listen to the full episode of Mamamia Out Loud, here. 

This content was created with thanks to our brand partner Bad Moms 2.