Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

FACES 113
Although they are genetically identical, as are all conjoined twins, Reba is
significantly smaller and does not walk as a result of spina bifida. One of
the resourceful adaptations they have devised to live together in a world
built for other embodiments is for Reba to sit on a kind of rolling bar stool
that is propelled by the sturdier Lori as she moves along. Attached and
identical as they are, Reba and Lori have quite different temperaments,
aspirations, and tastes. Reba, the feistier of the sisters, is a redheaded country
and western singer with a fierce sense of independence, although not
from Lori. Lori, with her simple brown haircut and sensible shoes, wants
to work in a hospital and have a family. Although they imagine different
careers, lifestyles, and pleasures, neither woman questions their fleshly or
familial attachment to one another. There is not a hint of drama here about
the question of surgical separation. They are committed to accommodating
one another in ways that go beyond the imagination of any pair of
ordinary singleton partners. 7 Their conjoinment is an opportunity for resourceful
adaptability that those of us for whom the world is conveniently
structured could hardly imagine.
Lori and Reba do extreme face-work in the film. The twins cruise through
the public realm with great poise, confidence, and good cheer, narrating
their own lives, experience, and opinions. Their myriads of first-time viewers,
however, are awestruck, stopped in their tracks with mouths agape and
eyes out of control. The twins are virtuosos of every face-work strategy that
Partridge or Goffman describe. They anticipate and maneuver staring encounters,
often instructing starers how to handle themselves appropriately.
The twins seldom adopt the didactic largess of David Roche, but instead
they save face for their gawkers by pragmatically easing them away from
frozen astonishment or maudlin sentiments, which always end in mutual
embarrassment. Reba, for instance, brandishes a tourist’s camera that she
uses to stare back at her visual interlocutors, but at the same time she firmly
informs people who try to take pictures of her and Lori that they must obtain
Lori’s permission to be photographed, then adds that because she is a
country singer, they are free to photograph her as if she were a celebrity. 8
With some indulgence and often strained patience, the twins let us know
that they understand their starers’ loss of composure and social grace as
simply ignorance about the intricacies of human variation and of alternative
ways of being in the world.
The film’s project is to make the viewers—like the starers it shows—comfortable
with the Schappell twins by presenting them as regular people
getting through their day (figure 8.3). The twins relish being a spectacle,
making a virtue out of necessity as does Roche. All three cultivate a certain
celebrity that comes to them from transforming unwanted attention
into effective face-work. Reba and Lori maintain face by taking pleasure in