Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 41
But human dominance staring is usually more complex than chest
pounding. Often staring as a manifestation of dominance veils aggression
with a restraint enabled by the hierarchy the staring enacts. In other words,
a harsh stare can do the work of a foot on the neck because the subordinate
accedes to the system of domination that is in place. Take, for example,
the much analyzed concept of the male gaze, which feminism has fruitfully
elaborated. 12 The male gaze is a position of privilege in social relations which
entitles men to look at women and positions women as objects of that look.
As John Berger succinctly puts it: “men act, women appear” (1972, 47). In
other words, the male gaze is men doing something to women. This ocular
gesture of dominance acts out the gendered asymmetries of patriarchy as
it proliferates in institutionalized cultural forms such as films, beauty contests,
advertising, striptease routines, and fashion shows. Laden with sexual
desire, predation, voyeurism, intimidation, and entitlement, the male gaze
often achieves the prolonged intensity of staring. Nonetheless, cultural narratives
about romantic love, feminine beauty, and heterosexual or homosexual
desire can obscure the male gaze’s endorsement of gender dominance.
Both individual intention and reception of the male gaze can thus depart
from gender scripts, as for example when women relish the arousing aspects
of being the object of the male stare or men intend their stares as affirming
feminine attractiveness. Simply flipping through any women’s fashion
magazine confirms the way that erotic narratives mask power relations implicated
in heterosexual relations of intense looking.
This theory of a regulating visual dynamic describes masculine and feminine
positions, not necessarily actual people. Not all men can or do exercise
the male gaze, and women are often posed to cast a surveying look on
themselves—as before the mirror, for example—or to identify with the male
position, as in watching another woman in a movie. So the male gaze not
only occurs in lived gendered relations such as a man leering at strippers, but
also when women look at one another from both heterosexual and lesbian
positions. Regardless of which sex the partners in the exchange identify with,
looking masculinizes, then, and being looked at feminizes. Moreover, this
gendered dynamic is part of the set of social practices that call us into being
as men or women (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 70; Butler, 1990). 13 We internalize
and identify with the gender system’s requirements in the same way
that the modern subject described by Michel Foucault (1979) agrees to selfmonitoring.
In other words, the male gaze as a form of dominance staring
makes us into men and women.
The opposite of staring as a dominance display is smiling. Studies suggest
that smiling not only mitigates hostility perceived by a staree but also signals
a response of submission in a starer (Ellyson and Dovido 1985, 143; Rutter
1984). Smiling, like staring, is a way to manage the uneven distribution of