I am working on finishing up my book this summer, and part of that process is looking through some stuff I've long intended to read but never actually got around to. My book is about the epistemology of science as a visual practice in Victorian literature, and at some point I must have encountered a reference to this monograph by a disability theorist about staring.
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Published: 2009 Acquired: December 2017 Read: June 2024 |
The subtitle made me think it was going to be about looking in a broad sense, but it's actually specifically about staring as the main title indicates. For Garland-Thomas, staring is distinct from the gaze, which she calls "an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim" (9). By contrast, staring is a physiological response we can't control (13, 17), focused on seeking and attempting to subordinate novelty (18-19). While attention confers mastery on spectator, the starer is a befuddled spectator (21-2). Paying attention is good, staring is bad (23). She particularly highlights the concept of baroque staring, which is "unconcerned with rationality, mastery, or coherence" and "overrides reason" (49).
Having laid out what staring is, the book then examines how we attempt to regulate staring and what the relationship between starers and starees is. The second half of the book then highlights different things one might stare at: faces, hands, breasts, bodies. The book is an easy read, broken down into six parts and twelve chapters with lots of sections that chunk out topics and ideas very clearly.
The test of any theory, though, is in its explanatory power—and this is of course contextual. What I need explained is probably quite different from what someone else needs explained. For my own work on scientific vision, I found there was a lot of good material in the first half of the book, in how Garland-Thomason highlights the distinction between staring and the scientific/medical gaze, but also how she points out ways in which these often slip into one another. For example, the relationship between base curiosity and elite curiosity (48), which we might think of as gossip versus science. She distinguishes baroque staring from the scientific gaze (57-9), but I see a lot of connections between the issues raised by baroque staring and those raised by scientific vision. There are a lots of bits and bobs I can imagine working into my book, especially into my introduction where I try to lay out what scientific vision is, and I think it will also be useful for my discussion of dilettantism.
Less useful to me was the book's second half; there is some good stuff in the face chapter that I can use in my explorations of physiognomy and eugenics: "physiognomic thought universalized people by offering a generalizable taxonomy by which all could intuitively judge the value of our fellow human beings" and "reading human bodies as a means of evaluating them logically extended into using that evaluation to produce the kinds of bodies that the social order values" (99). But I did not get much out of the discussions of hands, breasts, and bodies. (Perhaps, as a heterosexual man, there is nothing about staring at women's breasts that I need to be told!) I don't think this is a failure of the book, just an indication of what it's doing is not what I am looking for. Like I said earlier, Garland-Thomson is a disability theorist, and I imagine these parts would be very useful for someone working in that field, that's just not me!
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