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. |
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Alison Lapper American amputated appearance armless attention Auld baroque staring beauty behavior breast cancer calls civil inattention conjoined twins Connolly cultural curiosity David Roche Deaf disability display dominance staring Doyne dwarfism engaged staring Erving Goffman ethical etiquette example expect eyes face face-to-face face-work facial familiar figure film freak Frye gawk gaze gender gesture giants Goffman hands Harriet McBryde Johnson images impulse to stare intense interaction interpersonal Jackson’s Jo Spence Johnson Kevin Connolly living Lomnicki look Lori Lucy Grealy male gaze Marie Wade Matuschka modern monsters mother mutual narrative normal novelty one’s ordinary ourselves Ovitz people’s performances person Peter Dinklage photographs portraits prosthetic Reba recognition recognize relations response Robert Wadlow Roche’s scenes of staring shape social Sontag spectacle stareable stareable sights starer and staree staring encounter startling status stigmatized story suggests tion understanding unusual bodies viewers Wadlow Weegee wheelchair woman women wonder words