Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

38 WHAT IS STARING?
Furthermore, social scientists agree that disability is a visual cue for lower
expectations and discomfort for those who identify as nondisabled. Discomfort
comes in part from the social illegibility of the disabled body. The
social rituals in which we accord one another recognition depend on accurate
reading of bodily and gestural cues. Unpredictable or indecipherable
cues create anxiety. It is not that disability itself creates unease, but rather
people’s inability to read such cues disrupts the expected, routine nature of
social relations.
We are exquisitely sensitive to the nuances of meaning encoded in appearance
variations and to the rituals of social encounter that tell us who we
are in relation to others. Think of the hint implied in a wink, the moral equation
of good posture and upstanding citizenship, the gendered connotations
of sitting with one’s legs spread apart. 7 All these meanings rely on a certain
bodily stability, on a relatively narrow range of variations that we learn to
read with precision. Someone permanently seated in a wheelchair, however,
confounds the usual interpretive web of social significances clustering
around what we might call the postural arrangement of bodies. In another
example, height relations express a literal hierarchy. The dais and the pulpit
ceremonially raise kings and clergy above lesser beings; the arrangement of
gender pairings almost always yields a man made tall by a shorter woman.
The uprights among us usually do not know how to read or what to make
of a wheelchair user or the person of small stature who is waist-high in the
world. 8
Moreover, moving and seeing in expected and ordinary ways are central
to our sense of who we are in the modern world. In all of human history until
the first third of the nineteenth century, we moved ourselves and our products
by foot, boat, or draft animal. Within just one hundred years, trains,
cars, and airplanes along with the material public world of streets, stairs, and
runways they created expanded exponentially our capacity to move across
space and time. Similarly machines such as the printing press, the camera,
the x-ray machine, the microscope, the telescope, and the computer extended
our eye from the immediate surroundings to the previously hidden interior
of the body, the edge of the universe, the bottoms of the sea, or any place
on earth. These two actions merge in what Anne Friedberg (1993) calls the
“mobilized gaze,” a skill required by modern life and its built environment.
The ability to deftly use machines of mobility and vision furnishes access to
resources and public spaces. Such skills are forms of cultural capital often
unavailable to people with certain kinds of disabilities. All too often, social
and economic resources and the built environment are inaccessible to many
disabled people, excluding them from the privileges of being ordinary.
If staring attempts to make sense of the unexpected, the disabled body
might be the exemplary form of the unforeseen. We gawk when presented