Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

20 WHAT IS STARING?
through closeting our conditions. This hiding of disability has made it seem
unusual or foreign rather than fundamental to our human embodiedness.
Rather than accepting disability and accommodating it as an expected part of
every life course, we are stunned and alienated when it appears to us in others
or ourselves. 6 When we do see the usually concealed sight of disability writ
boldly on others, we stare in fascinated disbelief and uneasy identification.
Why, we ask with our eyes, does that person with dwarfism, that amputee,
that drooler, look so much like and yet so different from me? Such confusing
sights both affirm our shared humanity and challenge our complacent
understandings. The visibly disabled body intrudes on our routine visual
landscape and compels our attention, often obscuring the personhood of its
bearer. Sometimes our startled eyes can stay with such a sight, and sometimes
they flee in strained distress. The appearance of disability in the public sphere
makes, then, for a stareable sight. As such, the way we imagine human disability
provides us with one of the best opportunities to understand how we
stare.
LOOKING RIGHT AND LOOKING WRONG
We harness the physiological impulse to stare to the pragmatic project of
connecting with the world and making it coherent to us by using staring to
gather information. This goal-driven form of exploratory visual behavior
can be called paying attention, which is a form of social capital, part of the
required skill set for living. 7 The problem of paying attention is how to keep
the interest that triggers staring alive when novelty abates. This type of staring
as information collection requires concentrated, focused, and prolonged
looking. To pay attention is to make staring productive and controlled, to
continue the visual engagement when surprise no longer drives scrutiny,
to resist ocular boredom and the lure of distracting newly novel sights. The
wide-eyed gawking that Langer calls stimulus-driven exploratory behavior is
promiscuous looking; it is always at risk of being seduced away by a fresher,
newly stimulating sight. Paying attention, in contrast, is visual monogamy, a
deferral of dopamine’s quickie gratification.
Paying attention involves multisensory perception, vision being the primary
vehicle for focused concentration. Jonathan Crary defines attention
as “an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of a subject to selectively
isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others
in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world” (1999, 17).
Proper attention is goal-driven, deliberately controlled by our intentions
and strategies (Yantis 1998). As early as 1890, William James, the father of