Yup, here she is again—our good old RGT. And in Staring, RGT builds on the theories she has cultivated in her early career to explore the human impulse to look and then to explain what we see. She pulls from a variety of sources—the media, the visual arts, and even the psychological and biological sciences—to assess this impulse to stare and then to name and to understand through the stare.
At the same time, RGT also explores the process of being stared at and how this connects to self-awareness, to shame, and to pride. In doing so, she shows that it is in this reciprocal exchange, this give-and-take, between staring and being stared at, that we construct a sense of our world, others, and ourselves.
This links in important ways to disability studies because, as we have seen so often, it's through the visibility of the non-normative body that people so often construct and enforce their own identities and the identity of their communities. This means, as we have seen, that extraordinary bodies have at times throughout the centuries been made very visible, for example, in the form of the freak show.
But in modern, medical society, the visibility of extraordinary bodies has fallen under stringent control. The visibility of the non-normative body is often confined to the examining room or to photos in a medical textbook. "Keep it away" is our modern world's motto.
RGT shows us that how we look (both in terms of "looking at" and of "appearing") is a fundamental and instinctive human process through which we organize and explain our world, our community, and ourselves. So, this forces us to ask how we should approach and understand the visibility of extraordinary bodies.
Should the visibility of injuries, illnesses, and deformities be confined only to the examining room? If not, then how can we look at non-normative bodies, or have our non-normative bodies looked at, without falling into exploitation, appropriation, or stereotyping?
In other words, how do our practices of looking and being looked at shape our sense of self and community? And how can we harness this human instinct in the service of equality, freedom, and inclusion? Does the stare always have to be negative or abusive?