Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Open your Eyes to the Possibilities


There is such great pleasure to be found in looking. The senses adore being inundated by colors, beauty, novelty, and opulence. Our eyes drink in the splendor of the natural—and more and more the digital—and fabricate a picture of our world. But sometimes the eye hits a snag. Something leaps out and dares (or perhaps invites) us to look longer, to gain understanding, and infer meaning .

In short, we love to stare.

We stare at the things that are discordant with our everyday visual stimulus. We stare at extremes, at tangible perfection and apparent deformity. Questions arise when we let our eyes linger too long upon people that have been pathologized as disabled. Is our staring considered rude? Do we break eye contact and glance away? What is the proper behavior when our eyes beg us to LOOK but our socialization demands we LOOK AWAY? Rosemarie Garland-Thomson delves into this murky area of the desire to visibly explore and the social desirability of doing so.

Garland-Thomson is a proponent of staring. “Intense, persistent looking, and the ability to interpret such stares are fundamental to our survival as social beings…” (17). We stare because it is enjoyable, natural, and practically unavoidable.

The key to ensuring that staring exists as a positive experience for both the so-called starer and the staree is to transform the act from a self contained experience of passing judgment into an opportunity to reach out and create a viable human connection.

An example of this I found interesting in the text was the photography of Kevin Connolly. “…The most potentially generative staring situation is one that produces mutual interest. Rather than turning away his starers, Connolly engages them…They begin to imagine what it is like to be him” (92). The idea of the act of staring as potentially mutually beneficial originally caught me off guard. I was so engrained with the notion that to stare points out a person's “deficiencies” and that to not even look at them would be the better, kinder option. Prompted by the reading, a reexamination of that idea reveals how ludicrous it is! I need to look in order to widen my scope of understanding and empathy and people need to be looked at in order to feel human, to feel validated. I am intrigued by the idea of staring as a mutually beneficial act, as a medium for expression of identity and normalcy (or should I say instead the affirmation of a life well lived?). Staring, as long as it is not malicious in intent, has the possibility to open up dialogues and encourage human interaction, which is a beautiful and vital event.

Garland-Thomson notes that in order for staring to be mutually beneficial it must converge with activism of some sort. We cannot simply look, we must do as well. “We become ethical starers by being conscious in the presence of something that compels our intense attention” (188). I wonder though: is the action that we are expected to take as an “ethical starer” always supposed to be as proposed in the text along the lines of volunteering our time or petitioning Congress or can it be as simple as desiring to hear the story of the subject of our stare? I think that, yes, activism is extremely important. But I also feel that before people can be compelled and expected to relate image to action they must first make the small (but potentially difficult) step of establishing a human connection. As a starer, we must allow the staree to visually relate their story.

So, go ahead. Look at me and I’ll look right back at you.

1 comment:

  1. I like this approach on staring. That we must learn about a person before just looking away or classifying them as a particular type. It's a form of stereotyping. We don't only stare at the disabled and instead of hearing someone's story we're always very quite to judge them; to classify them as a certain type of person.

    Perhaps, people will learn that staring isn't always the right answer. Your blog connects to Jess's blog where she writes of a personal experience with staring. I urge you to read it.

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