Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

THE UNEXPECTED AND EXTRAORDINARY
A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP 37
Expectations about the ways bodies should look and work affect how we
see each other as well. “The ordinary—and the interruption to the expected
experience,” according to Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh
Star, “are delicate constructions made and remade every day” (1990, 296).
Take for example the seemingly straightforward state of “attractiveness.”
Physical attractiveness is a form of social capital. The more attractive one’s
self-presentation, the more competent and esteemed one is thought to be,
which translates into economic and social advantage. What social scientists
term “expectation states theory” analyzes group interaction to reveal
how a complex web of status cues—some categorical, like race, gender,
and ability and some traits, like articulateness or confidence—works to determine
“the status hierarchy where members with high expectations will
participate more and will be more influential than members with low expectations”
(Eiseland and Johnson 1996, 72). In other words, people who
cannot convincingly present high status cues are devalued. Expectation
states theory suggests then that attractiveness is not so much a collection
of positive bodily attributes, but rather it is the successful presentation of
a normative standard. Simply put, expectation states theory lays out how
beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
Within the ever-shifting circumstances that determine what we expect
when we confront each other, some people are less successful in achieving
the ordinary and are thus accorded uncivil attention. Indeed, some of us
cannot be visually unremarkable, regardless of how we structure our performances
of self in everyday life. When bodies begin to malfunction or look
unexpected, we become aware of them. They expose themselves by becoming
bodies rather than tools of our intentionality. Sick, disabled, or pained
bodies both experience and invoke what Drew Leder (1990) calls “dysappearance,”
meaning that their differences from acquiescent bodies make
them appear to us and others. 6 Extraordinary-looking bodies demand attention.
The sight of an unexpected body—that is to say, a body that does not
conform to our expectations for an ordinary body—is compelling because it
disorders expectations. Such disorder is at once novel and disturbing. This
interruption of expectations, of the visual status quo, attracts interest but can
also lead to disgust, according to William Ian Miller (1997). Unusual bodies
are “unsettling because they are disordering; they undo the complacency
that comes with disattendability; they force us to look and notice, or to suffer
self-consciousness about looking or not looking. They introduce alarm
and anxiety by virtue of their power to horrify and disgust.” Such bodies
fascinate; they demand that we “sneak a second look” (Miller 1997, x).