Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

REGULATING OUR LOOKS 67
subjects to display their status and position through elaborately legible costumes
and uniforms that announced who they were to everyone who looked
at them. Citizens of democracy, in contrast, supposedly had the opportunity
to change their status at any time. Appearance needed to reflect this ideal of
equality. To realize this promised social fluidity, people’s appearances should
not lock them into a particular status but should accommodate aspirations
toward social mobility. Nevertheless, a person’s social position at a given moment
needed to be proclaimed. What you looked like, then, should suggest
who you were to your anonymous visual interlocutors but not reveal enough
information to trap you into any particular fixed identity. Aspiring Americans
were on the move—socially, economically, and geographically. They
displayed that mobility in the appearance of being busily headed somewhere
else. To be pinned down by a stare made them wiggle with anxiety.
An illegible appearance gives Americans room to travel; inconspicuous
looks let you make yourself up. Nonetheless, social interaction also requires
that we be able to recognize one another. The confidence man and the humbug,
for example, must be distinguishable from the genuine thing. 4 Spectacles
of hierarchical status such as royal crowns and robes, heraldry, coronations,
and elaborate insignia encourage obeisant staring. In contrast, middle-class
status repudiates flamboyance, demanding instead the stealth signification
of gray flannel suits and briefcases that now mark undifferentiated proper
democratic attire. So while accruing middle-class status benefited Americans,
conspicuously displaying status was considered inappropriate. The
dandy, for instance, who attracted attention with expressive costuming and
behavior, was a residually aristocratic figure especially targeted for social approbation
(Kasson 1990, 118–28). 5 The egalitarian ethic of appearance contained
contradictions that staring troubled. Middle-class men were doers not
lookers. You wanted to appear comfortably middle-class without flaunting
it. 6 Even aspirations toward middle-class status needed to be muted so as not
to disclose any vulnerability. The trick was knowing how to declare yourself
without revealing too much of yourself. The strict visual conduct detailed
in the popular etiquette guides suggests that staring led to Edenic forbidden
knowledge—too dangerous for everybody’s own good.
GENTLEMANLY LOOKING
Gentlemen do not stare. As unmoved movers, middle-class men should
strive to be self-possessed agents of their own futures. The vulnerable openness
or intrusive presumption of staring violates a hands-off ethic among
citizens uneasily scrambling to appear both equal and aspiring at the same