Staring: How We LookDrawing on examples from art, media, fashion, history and memoir, cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tackles a basic human interaction which has remained curiously unexplored, the human stare. In the first book of its kind, Garland-Thomson defines staring, explores the factors that motivate it, and considers the targets and the effects of the stare. While borrowing from psychology and biology to help explain why the impulse to stare is so powerful, she also enlarges and complicates these formulations with examples from the realm of imaginative culture. Featuring over forty illustrations, Staring captures the stimulating combination of symbolic, material and emotional factors that make staring so irresistible while endeavoring to shift the usual response to staring, shame, into an engaged self-consideration. Elegant and provocative, this unique study advances new ways of thinking about visuality and the body that will appeal to readers who are interested in the overlap between the humanities and human behaviors. |
Contents
Regulating Our Looks | |
Looking Away Staring Back | |
SCENES OF STARING | |
Beholding | |
NOTES | |
REFERENCES | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Alison Lapper American amputated anonymous appearance armless attention Auld baroque staring beauty behavior breast cancer calls Cambridge civil inattention cognitive conjoined twins contemporary cultural curiosity David Roche Deaf disability dominance staring engaged staring Erving Goffman ethical etiquette example expect eyes face facetoface facework facial familiar figure film freak Frye gawking gaze gender gesture giants Goffman hands Harriet McBryde Johnson images intense interaction interpersonal Johnson Kevin Connolly Lapper living Lomnicki look Lori Matuschka modern monsters mutual narrative novelty one’s ordinary ourselves Ovitz Paul Wittgenstein people’s performances person Peter Dinklage photographs political portraits prosthetic Reba recognition recognize response Robert Wadlow Roche’s scenes of staring shape Sierra Leone sign language social Sontag spectacle stareable sights starer and staree staring encounters status stigma story understanding University Press unusual bodies viewers vision visual Wadlow Weegee wheelchair woman women wonder words York York Times Magazine