Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance

Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists & the Dynamics of Staring

Dares to Stares Disabled Women Performance Artists & the Dynamics of Staring rosemarie garland thomson We fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. . . . And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Everyone knows that you are not supposed to stare. Yet everyone does. Both furtive and compelling, the staring encounter generates discomfort and provokes anxiety. So potent is staring that the Western imagination has persistently seized upon this formidable interchange as a source of vivid narrative . Medusa, for example, turned men to stone with her stare, and her severed head was a fount of power for those who appropriated it. The traditional curse of the evil eye pervades, as well, all European cultures, even into modernity.1 Staring is an urgent effort to explain the unexpected, to make sense of the unanticipated and inexplicable visual experience. A more emphatic form of looking than glancing, glimpsing, scanning, surveying, gazing, and other forms of casual or disinterested looking, staring starkly registers the perception of strangeness and endows it with meaning. Staring witnesses an intrusive interest on the part of the starer and thrusts uneasy attention on 30 the object of the stare. At once transgressive and intimate, staring breaches the conventionalized anonymity governing visual relations among strangers in modernity. Staring is thus a kind of potent social choreography that marks bodies by enacting a dynamic visual exchange between a spectator and a spectacle. Staring, then, enacts a drama about the people involved. The strongest staring prohibition surrounds people who are considered different, who are the most unexpected. Perhaps the most censured form of staring is looking at people with disabilities. Every mother at some point admonishes her child not to stare in an effort to minimize the rawness of astonishing visual confrontations. Yet, as anyone with a visible disability knows, persistent stares are one of the informing experiences of being considered disabled. If staring attempts to make sense of the unexpected, the disabled body is the paradigmatic form in modernity of the unforeseen. Modern culture’s erasure of mortality and its harbinger, corporeal vulnerability , have rendered the disabled body extraordinary rather than familiar, anomalous instead of mundane—even though the transformations of bodily form and function that we think of as disability are so common to the human condition as to be the ultimate effect of living. Nevertheless, the disabled body is novelty writ large for the captivated starer, prompting persistent curiosity and launching a troubling tangle of identi‹cation and differentiation . For the person with disabilities, staring is an unwelcome exposure, a clumsy trespass into realms casual social relations forbid, and a tedious challenge to one’s relational management skills.2 Thus, encounters between the disabled and nondisabled are exemplary social dramas in which the contradictions and complexities of staring most vividly play out. Despite the ubiquitous admonitions not to stare, even children learn very early that disability is a potent form of embodied difference that warrants looking, even prohibited looking. Indeed, the stare is the dominant mode of looking at disability in this culture. Staring thus enlists curiosity to telescope looking toward diagnosing impairment, creating an awkward partnership that estranges and discomforts both viewer and viewed. Starers gawk with ambivalence or abandon at the prosthetic hook, the empty sleeve, the scarred ›esh, the unfocused eye, the twitching limb, seeking a narrative that puts their disrupted world back in order. Even “invisible” disabilities always threaten to disclose some inexplicable stigma, however subtle, that undoes the social order by its presence and attenuates the human bond based on the assumption of corporeal similarity . Because staring at disability is illicit looking, the disabled body is at once the to-be-looked-at and not-to-be-looked-at, further dramatizing the staring encounter by tending to make viewers stealthy and the viewed defensive. In this way, staring constitutes disability identity by visually articulating the subject positions of “disabled” and “able-bodied.” Dares to Stares 31 Many cultural critics have noted that modernity is ocularcentric. Although Western gaze theory is too complex to be adequately addressed here, three general, interrelated strands of critical analysis predominate the attempt to illuminate the workings of this hypervisuality. They can be classi‹ed as the psychoanalytic, the materialist, and the ethnographic models , all of which are sustained or shaped by Michel Foucault’s formulation of the politics of surveillance.3 The psychoanalytic underpins much of the robust theory on the patriarchal gaze that...