Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

46 WHAT IS STARING?
notes, “disrupt the smooth-running social order that normals righteously
demand” (1997, 200). The ocular intrusion of people who cannot achieve
inconspicuousness is itself an occasion for discrimination. The visually indiscreet
ignite the uncomfortable partnership of staring. To be a stareable
sight is unseemly, then, in part because it outs the starer for inappropriate
looking. To use Sartre’s shame model of looking, staring as stigma assignment
doubly shames starees—both for their supposed flaws and for exposing
their starers. Staring, then, can be a matter of looking wrong and wrong
looking for everyone in the encounter.
We make the unexpected out of what we have learned to expect, out
of understandings of the world that come to us and that we remake. For
instance, the concept of “tribal affiliations” illustrates how received culture
structures expectations. The more commonalities we share, the more salient
minor differences seem. This patterning of allegiances and exclusions is the
root of nationalism and ethnicity, according to Michael Ignatieff (1997).
Developing Freud’s notion of “the narcissism of minor differences,” Ignatieff
asserts that we sort variations in behaviors, values, and corporeal traits
into essential cultural difference we call ethnicity (48). Nationalism is the
narcissistic overvaluing of differences rather than commonalities, a distortion
that defines those different from us as outsiders, and an occasion for
conflict. In another example, what we take to be gender, sexual, racial, and
ability differences are largely minor but receive great social significance.
Human variation matters when some characteristics merit privilege and
others are sources of stigma. 20
Human variation, in other words, is seldom neutral. “Abominations of
the body” are in the eye of the well-acculturated beholder. Modern culture’s
erasure of mortality and its harbinger, bodily vulnerability, make disabled
bodies seem extraordinary rather than ordinary, abnormal instead
of mundane—even though in fact the changes in our function and form
that we think of as disabilities are the common effects of living and are
fundamental to the human condition. What Goffman describes as “abominations”
come to most ordinary lives eventually. If we live long enough, we
will all become disabled. 21