Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

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Faces
FACEDNESS
. . . the basic motivating factor for all human beings is not self
preservation or sex or love. It is the desire not to be embarrassed.
—David Roche, The Church of 80% Sincerity (2008, 61)
We stare with and at faces. The face is the “focus of human interaction,” apprehending
the world and revealing us to it (Yu 2001, 1). Faces are the first
part of a human embryo to differentiate. By eight weeks we have lips and
eyelids; by five months come eyebrows, tiny ears, and a distinct face ready to
recognize and be recognized (Sims 2003, 48–49). Newborns prefer to look
at faces more than any other object, and infants of a few months will smile
while gazing at another face (McNeill 1998, 205; Johnson and Morton 1991).
Children draw stick figure bodies attached to huge animated faces. We recognize
each other through facial distinctiveness captured in mug shots, classic
portraits, picture IDs, or exaggerated cartoon caricatures. We see faces
even where they are not—in the moon, the clouds, the mountains. The face
is the most usually unclothed part of human bodies, ready to look and be
looked at. Alert to the dynamics of communication and recognition, we are
perhaps most alive to one another when we are face-to-face.
Our faces engage in many information-gathering activities. Our eyes
stare; our ears hear; our noses sniff; our tongues taste. All of these likely
evolved in order to eat. At the face’s center, our mouths mediate between us
and our environment as we taste, suck, eat, kiss, talk, bite, smile, nourish,
grimace, sneer, and laugh our way through the world. The cluster of sensory
features that evolved to keep us fed also make us known to the world. Faces
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