Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 45
conditions such as alcoholism, homosexuality, mental disability, criminality,
and unemployment. Finally are what he calls the “tribal affiliations” of race,
ethnicity, nationality, and religion. The people remaining without supposed
besmirchments are the “normals” (5). Everyone with potentially discreditable
traits must navigate a web of shifting social expectations and sources of status.
Stigma, in short, is prejudicial judgment against appearing different from the
“normals.”
When the social sorting process of stigmatization shaves off everyone
from the mildly discredited to the “abominations,” the lingering untainted
“normals” are an elite minority. Goffman (1986) sums up this archetypal
“normal” as the “only one complete unblushing male in America: a young,
married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college
education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a
recent record in sports” (128). The ironic point in this description is that
the prototypical figure of normalcy is not what we actually see everywhere
but rather is what we expect to see. The illusion of the normal is often what
people reach for in creating self-presentations, particularly those in the public
eye such as politicians, executives, or news anchors, for example. This
phantom figure of the “normate” is “the veiled subject position of the cultural
self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies
shore up the normate’s boundaries” (Garland Thomson 1996, 8). 19 Actual
normates are as scarce as hen’s teeth, whereas imagined normates preside
over the public landscape. So while the “abominations” that life makes of
so many of us are always among us, their presence is a perpetual surprise.
We become inured to our own “abominations” for the most part, so when
the uncivil attention of the stigmatizing process comes our way, it seems an
indignity, as we saw with Fanon’s experience of racism.
Stigmatizing is a social process that hurdles a body from the safe shadows
of ordinariness into the bull’s-eye of judgment. As appearance became
standardized in the modern world, particularity came to be understood as
aberration rather than simple variation or distinctiveness. The seen body
is our primary mode of perceiving and understanding scale, symmetry,
balance, which are the coordinates of ordinariness. Comparisons to what
we expect determine our understanding of “abominations,” of the disproportionate,
grotesque, deformed, miniature, gigantic, or unusual (Stewart
1984). A proto-ordinary body becomes an authentic body, the one we think
of as normal or call able-bodied.
The stigmatizing process is uncomfortable for everybody involved. Stigma
comes to people not only from violating ordinariness but also from disrupting
the effortless mutual granting of civil inattention that gets us through
our day. Social co-presence requires that we do not spark one another’s fears,
anxiety, embarrassment, or disgust. “The stigmatized,” as William Ian Miller