In the Eyes of the Beholder

Week of 10/17-10/23

This week, it has been brought to my attention that when people do not fully comprehend a situation, they tend to stare. When I was walking through Copley with some friends, this idea of staring was clearly apparent. There was a disheveled looking man, maybe a veteran, on the side of the park there with a sign that read “Missing Leg, in need of change”, and all people really did was stare at this man and walk past. And if anything, these were stares of judgment and contempt. Applying this to the Disabilities Studies Reader, I found a specific chapter by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson on the act of beholding and the assigning of value we give to it. Staring is a communicative gesture, no doubt. But where does the act of staring at a disabled person become a positive occurrence rather than a negative one?
According to Thompson, a stare is a response to someone’s distinctiveness. And these stares are an important factor in interpreting our relationships internally and externally. Many people that stare at others find themselves in an uncomfortable position because of a relationship that Susan Sontag fleshes out as a “repulsive attraction”. But rarely its because people think other people are ugly. Take the man without a leg: I do not think people were staring at him because they found him to be particularly ugly; I just believe they did not know how to look at him in the appropriate fashion. So the reactions are decidedly negative ones. According to Harriet Johnson, what people usually see when they look upon someone disabled, especially if that person is on the streets, they see unbearable pain, insurmountable adversity, and a desire for a normalcy. She would rather have people look upon these “repulsive attractions” as merely unremarkable encounters. In doing so this allows her audience to find common ground between who they are staring at: someone with a live as uninteresting as theirs. In doing so, these strategic staring encounters do away with Sontag’s worries of stigmatizing.