I find myself thinking a lot about staring and comfort and power, so I figure I might as well bring you along for the ride!
First up – via Hoyden About Town – read this article at Science Blogs by Ed Yong: How objectification silences women – the male glance as a psychological muzzle.
Saguy found that women talked about themselves for less time than men, but only if they thought they were being visually inspected by a man, and particularly if they thought their bodies were being checked out. They used the full two minutes if they were describing themselves to another woman (no matter where the camera was pointing) or if they were speaking to a man who could hear but not see them. But if their partner was a man watching their bodies, they spoke for just under one-and-a-half minutes.
[…]
As Saguy explains, “When a woman believes that a man is focusing on her body, she narrows her presence… by spending less time talking.” There are a few possible reasons for this. Saguy suspects that objectification prompts women to align their behaviour with what’s expected of them – silent things devoid of other interesting traits. Treat someone like an object, and they’ll behave like one. Alternatively, worries about their appearance might simply distract them from the task at hand.
Secondly, via Liz at Dis/Embody, a video! Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s got a book out called Staring: How We Look (Oxford University Press, 2009). I rather want to check out. She of the fabulous name is a Women’s Studies professor at Emory University, which is in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. I can’t wait to see how her work on staring in a disability studies framework might relate to feminist work on the male gaze, given her background. If you’re interested, here’s a PDF of an article of hers called Ways of Staring. Here she is talking about her work, examining unexpected power dynamics and all (transcript under the cut.)
[University name and logo in white sinking back into a blue screen.] Voiceover: This program brought to you by Emory University.
Rosemarie-Garland Thomson [a woman with short white hair, dressed in a black suit]: I’m Rosemarie-Garland Thomson. I’m a professor of women’s studies [these details appear in white at the bottom of the screen, then disappear] and literary studies at Emory University. And I’ve written a book called Staring: How We Look [cover appears]. Staring involves an interesting conflict. [back to her] First of all, it’s an impulse. It’s neurological and it’s acted out in our eyes and through our eyes. Staring is actually a natural response to our own curiosity, to what cognitive psychologists call a novel stimuli. And our brains enjoy novel stimuli, they look for novel stimuli, and so staring is itself a very pleasurable kind of thing [as she’s talking, the camera pans across a painting of a starer/staree and then the title ‘STARING’ and a quote from her book: “… staring [is] a starer’s quest to know and a staree’s opportunity to be known.”]. At the same time, because staring is a bodily impulse, like sex or like eating, it’s very highly regulated by the social world. [An image of people on a bus, not looking at each other, and then a group of young people staring at someone who’s presumably talking to them.] So the conflict with staring is between our urge to do it and the social rules that say that we shouldn’t be doing it. Because it doesn’t matter which side of the staring encounter we’re on, people like to stare, but they don’t like to be stared at [back to Garland-Thomson]. Staring is imagined as a breech of ettiquette, a kind of intrusion, and it also reflects badly on the people who are starers. So it’s this conflict between our urge to stare and the rules against it that makes staring such an important and intense and provocative social interchange that makes meaning. [Images of starers/starees take over] Another aspect that staring brings forward is an historical one. The world has changed and has made us come in contact with different kinds of people. When we’re out and about in the public world we see people that are different from us in a way we didn’t a while ago. We’re in contact with people, this is a new, integrated world. And the people that have entered the world are people that were excluded from the world oftentimes before, from the public world. One group of people who were excluded from the public world were people with disabilities. They were largely excluded before the 1960s and the 1970s in the United States by various institutional and architectural barriers that literally kept people with disabilities out of the public world and out of view of the other people who were in the public world [as we move back to Garland-Thomson]. In researching the book I discovered that most of the studies about staring focus on the starers [back to the initial image and then more paintings] and there’s not very much done about the starees. I wanted to bring forward the experience and the perspectives of the starees, which is a word I actually had to invent in order to talk about people who get stared at. I spoke with many expert starees and discovered that they’re much more comfortable, often, with staring exchanges actually than starers might be. And the reason for that of course is that they have so much more experience with the staring relationship. [Back to Garland-Thomson] So that they themselves actually end up directing the staring relationship in many cases and leading it toward a productive end that they want to occur. [Back to the book cover] I wanted the book to make us think about how we appear to each other and what we think about each other and of course then [back to Garland-Thomson] how we treat each other in the world.
[Screen changes to black. Text appears: ‘In fall 2009, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson was named by “Utne Reader” as one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”‘]
[An image of four smiling people by the exhibition; a semi-transparent blue box appears over them with text in white: ‘The images used here are from the book and from an exhibition (based on the book) ad the Van Every Gallery, Davidson College.’]
[White on a black screen: ‘Photo Credits
‘Archer Coe, “The Bus”
‘Brigitte Faber, Portrait of Dr. Theresia Degener
‘Martin Glueck, Dr. Theresia Degener and Gisela Hermes
‘Jay Jafee, “Two Women in Subway”
‘John Mardere, Portrait of Harriet McBryde Johnson
‘Vince Maggiora (San Francisco Chronicle), David Roche’.
Next screen:
‘Ruth Morgan, Portrait of Simi Linton
‘Chris Toalson, “Portrait”
‘The Washington Post, Children from Sierra Leone arrive at Dulles Airport
‘The Washington Post, Army Sgt Brian Doyne
‘Steve Wewerka (Life Magazine), Britney and Abby Hensel’
Next screen:
‘Oil Paintings by Doug Auld:
‘”Brian”
‘”Fernando”
‘”Hugging Fire”
‘”Jelani”
‘”Rachael”
‘”Shalya”‘]
[New screen: ‘Produced by the Emory College of Arts and Sciences’. ‘Camera/Editor Hal Jacobs’ appears in the bottom left corner.]
[University name and logo in white sinking back into a blue screen. A copyright notice appears at the bottom of the screen] Voiceover: The preceeding program is copyrighted by Emory University.