Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

34 WHAT IS STARING?
To behave toward unknown others effectively and ethically, we need to
gather information about them. We use their appearance as clues to who
they are and how to relate to them. What you look like, rather than who you
are, often determines how people respond to you. Social interactions among
strangers are generally highly scripted, delicately choreographed situations
in which persons read one another and assemble on the spot a behavioral
repertoire to draw from in relating to one another. Sorting through the web
of perceptual indicators allows us to categorize the unknown others that
surround us so we can respond to them. We need to determine whether
the strangers we encounter are going to help us, mug us, bother us, see us
again, or just leave us alone. Intricate visual codes such as costuming, insignia,
behavior, expression, and comportment—not to mention race, gender,
age, size, and visible disabilities—converge to create conclusions about
strangers. 2
Modernity and its attendant rationalization have made our fellow citizens
less distinct from one another, less legible to us. In preindustrial life, law and
custom differentiated people rigidly according to status, gender, rank, and
occupation and marked those distinctions clearly, usually through costuming
or symbolic decoration. Roman citizens wore only white togas; medieval
royalty wore crowns and robes; feudal guild members had elaborately distinct
uniforms; European women wore only skirts; English barristers donned wigs
and ribbons; criminals and beggars were branded or mutilated; monks wore
cassocks; only Frankish elites were allowed to have long hair; adulteresses’
breasts displayed the letter A; Jews wore yellow stars (Lofland 1973, 44–48). 3
Now The Gap, Brooks Brothers, Aveda, and aesthetic surgery clinics
produce a common appearance, even as they promise distinction. Industrialization
has standardized our appearance with ready-made clothes and a
mass- produced material environment; consumer culture urges brands, styles,
body shapes, and even skin colors upon us. The promise of democratic social
mobility gets expressed through achieving the right look. Even panhandlers
often wear Nikes, albeit scruffy and often imitation. This standardization
of our appearance herds us toward an undifferentiated self-presentation
that signals a quasi-middle-class status. While subtle distinctions register
economic differences—Wal-Mart garb can be distinguished from Armani
adornment—our advice for success is usually to look discreet. World leaders,
women, and janitors now can show up at important occasions in similar dark,
tailored suits. Teeth whiteners and orthodontics, diets and fitness regimes, as
well as unisex hair salons try to regularize our actual bodies, crowding us toward
the center of the bell curve of human variation. 4 Visual extravagance is
often a bold grab for attention, understood usually as a counterculture move
or a risky affront to good taste. So while the consumerist rhetoric of choice,
individualism, nonconformity, and diversity prattles about being yourself,