Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 43
The kind of staring that “fixes” a person in gender, race, disability, class,
or sexuality systems is an attempt to control the other. The study of the political
nature of visual relations began in some sense with Simone de Beauvoir’s
analysis in 1949 that Woman is the essential Other. Man subordinates
Woman by setting himself up as the Self, according to De Beauvoir. This
mandate for men to be Man and women to be Woman pressures gender relations
toward inequality. In other words, men need to assume the position
of dominators and women of subordinates to uphold social order and find
their place in it. In a skeptical turn, contemporary theorists in philosophy
and cultural studies have understood looking itself as a form of domination
and produced abundant critiques of vision. 17 For example, Fredric Jameson
sneers that the “visual is essentially pornographic,” its purpose being “rapt
and mindless fascination” and its aim to seduce us “to stare at the world as
if it were a naked body” (1990, 1). Staring here is more corrupt than gazing,
an emblem of distorted vision.
This view of vision as surveillance advanced with Michel Foucault’s
(1979) parable of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s
utopian and utilitarian architectural model of supervision in which a tower
allowed observers to visually monitor inmates so as to discipline them. 18 Foucault
recruits this architectural proposal as a metaphor for the self-regulation
characteristic of modern individuals. The Panopticon enforces docility and
self-control on those within visual reach through its potential for concealed
domination staring. According to this revision of Freud’s superego function,
we have internalized the threat of visual dominance, of being regulated
by the stare. This form of institutionalized spying by those with authority on
those without agency is for Foucault a fundamental social act of modernity.
The Panopticon might be seen as a nascent high-tech form of Medusa’s evil
eye. By institutionalizing the dominating stare, the idea of the Panopticon
tames Medusa, stripping away her petrifying stare and replacing it with the
banal surveillance camera we’ve all come to accept at the bank or the convenience
store. Surveillance differs, however, from interpersonal face-to-face
staring in that it is controlling, static, and exercised by the few on the many.
In contrast, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre offers a parable of interpersonal
shaming through domination staring. The significance of the primal
scene for Sartre is not simply seeing the sex act but rather imagining being
caught staring at the primal sexual act through a keyhole. Driven by “jealousy,
curiosity, or vice,” a starer is vulnerable for indulging in such profligate
and inappropriate looking (Sartre 1956, 235–36). This scene asserts the
perversity of staring and the anxiety of being a staree. For Sartre, the Other
is not the object of the dominating stare but instead the Other threatens
witnessing the self as staree. “The Other looks at me,” Sartre claims, “and as
such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am . . . . The Other has