Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

44 WHAT IS STARING?
the advantage over me” (473). Whereas Fanon sees this dynamic as forming
racial identity, here Sartre offers a triangulation complicating a simple formula
of visual domination and subjection. Sartre is stared at while himself
staring. The risk, then, in visually objectifying another is being caught doing
it. Such fascinated looking is simultaneous domination and subjection. The
lesson of this parable is that the excessive, indecorous enthrallment of staring
subjugates the starer by begetting shame.
Sartre’s keyhole metaphor is a limited model of staring however. His keyhole
captures the furtive and unseemly nature of a stare. This vantage point,
like Foucault’s Panopticon, provides a “cone of vision” that opens out from
the eye of a viewer (Melville 1996, 104). But staring without the restriction
of a keyhole reverses the shape of this visual cone. In fact, staring in modern
urban life is most often a form of involuntary telescoping in which our roving,
casual visual scanning focuses in on an unexpected sight.
Understanding the kind of staring that enacts dominance is useful for illuminating
inequities in power relations. The limitation, however, of focusing
on this narrow but currently popular interpretation of visual social relations
is that it can foreclose on the complexities of how we look at one another.
Sartre goes a way in questioning the idea of the crushing force of a starer’s
eye by showing his keyhole peeper to be simultaneously a starer and staree.
Nonetheless, Sartre’s model of staring shuts down rather than opens up the
encounter. Sartre’s starer/staree is “known” by his starer, but that knowledge
results in an “advantage over” that is ultimately a domination that threatens
the staree. The knowledge that the staring other gets from the encounter
crushes the staree with shame for his own eager but furtive looking.
STARING AS STIGMA ASSIGNMENT
Domination staring gives a starer power over a staree. Staring can also be a social
act that stigmatizes by designating people whose bodies or behaviors cannot
be readily absorbed into the visual status quo. Stigmatizing, according to
sociologist Erving Goffman (1986), is social discrediting of those we perceive
as different, as lesser than we are. Stigmatizing pushes others away rather than
dominating them. Stigma, Goffman suggests, is not in the bodies of people
considered disreputable but in social relations that deem some superior and
others inferior. In other words, social interactions—such as staring—assign
stigma to certain perceived traits. Goffman describes a hierarchy of stigma
designations that begins with disability—or what he rather harshly terms
“abominations of the body” (1986, 4). Next are character aspersions such
as dishonesty, weak will, or unnatural passions, which people associate with