Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

REGULATING OUR LOOKS 75
need to be similar to our fellow citizens, as the philosopher Charles Taylor
(1994) points out. To be accorded the equal respect that democracy promises,
we need to be wholly ourselves and at the same time just like everyone
else. Staring is the social flash point where these competing demands for
distinction and homogeneity collide. As a recognition of human variation,
staring validates our individuality, calls out our differences from others.
Sameness does not merit stares. But even though stares affirm our distinctiveness,
we can never be sure of the meaning attributed to our personal
idiosyncrasies by our visual inquisitors. So our belief in pliable appearances
becomes a dilemma about whether to hide or display our differences. This
communal worry about seeing and not seeing, being seen and not being
seen, rises to a new intensity under the scrutiny of stares.
Despite our uneasiness about looking at each other too keenly, we gawk
relentlessly at the myriad spectacles American life began abundantly providing
by the late nineteenth century. 14 Today, we navigate a daily avalanche of
reiterated images that at once stimulate and enervate us. The surging demands
that we produce and consume bid us insistently to look at products
and expect the life they promised. Indeed, Walt Whitman, the poetic voice
of nineteenth-century America, exalted public viewing as our national virtue
and right: “ . . . what I am,” writes Whitman in Song of Myself (1900),
“Stands, amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, / . . . Looks
with its side curved head curious what will come next, / Both in and out
of the game, and watching and wondering at it” (lines 74–78). The rapidly
changing world Americans were gaping at was filled with new things to see
and new ways to see them. Nights were aglow with new artificial light. Gas
street lamps and electric home lighting dazzled the eye. Civic celebrations of
progress and nationalism flourished. The World’s Columbian Exhibition of
1893, for instance, drew 716,881 people on a single day and the 1927 ticker
tape parade for Charles Lindbergh in New York City attracted four million
spectators. Even ladies, if properly accompanied, might risk this kind
of staring. Most novel to Americans out on the street and looking around
was merchandise. The burgeoning commercial culture and the beginnings
of consumerism demanded display and desirous looking. Ladies, especially,
could shop in order to fill their role as ornaments that displayed the status
of the men on whose arms they gracefully leaned. Spectacles such as the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, begun in the 1920s, fused commercialism
with traditional forms of spectacle such as religious carnivals and processions.
Ersatz tableau vivants behind department store windows allowed
Americans to look at new goods and imagine them as indispensable. 15 This
appetite for the new animated American eyes.
All of this excited looking occurred at the same time that the prohibition
against staring at one another was being codified in conduct manuals and