Rosemarie
Garland Thompson, “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists and the
Dynamics of Staring,” in Carrie Sandahl and Philop Auslander, eds., Bodies in Commotion: Disability and
Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2005)
"staring starkly registers the perception of strangeness and endows it with meaning. Staring witnesses an intrusive interest on the part of the starer and thrusts uneasy attention on the object of the stare." p.30-31
"Staring is thus a kind of potent social choreography that marks bodies by enacting a dynamic visual exchange between a spectator and a spectacle. Staring, then, enacts a drama about the people involved." p.31
Thompson argues that through staring, a person with a disability is informed by the person staring, that they are unexpected.
"For the person with disabilities, staring is an unwelcome exposure, a clumsy trespass into realms casual social relations forbid, and a tedious challenge to one's relational management skills." p.31
Thompson highlights the dramatic nature of the stare, engaging the starer and the stared-at in a theatrical performance, creating a subjecthood based on contradictions and otherness.
"Because staring at disability is illicit looking, the disabled body is at once the to-be-looked-at and not-to-be-looked-at, further dramatizing the staring encounter by tending to make viewers stealthy and the viewed defensive." p.31
Hypervisuality of Western society- psychoanalytic: patriarchal gaze. Materialist: critique of consumer capitalism. Ethnographic: colonising gaze (imperialist, medical or aesthetic arenas) p.32
"If—as critics such as John Berger and Laura Mulvey have suggested— gazing is the dominant controlling and defining visual relation in patriarchy between male spectators and female objects of their gazes, staring is the visual practice that materializes the disabled in social relations" p.32
Thompson draws on the theory of gazing to argue that while the male gaze produces a female subject, according to Laura Mulvey, the staring done by the 'normative' subject, produces the disabled. However, the difference is that the gaze is charged with sexuality and desire, whereas the stare is probing, intrusive, and creates a medicalised discourse, a desire to find out 'what is wrong'.
About the artists: "By boldly inviting the stare in their performances, they violate the cultural proscription against staring, at once exposing their impairments and the oppressive narratives about disability that the prohibition against staring attempts to politely silence." p.32
The artists attempt to break the one-way direction of the stare - they engage with it and transform it into an exchange, activating their subjectivity where before they were passive. The power of the stare is not deflected, but it is instead operationalised by the artists who realign it on their own terms.
Thompson argues that the body, which is the site of performance in the social realm, stared at by 'normative' bodies, is an effective tool for renarrating disability as the artistic tool of performance.
Why invite stares? "such performances are forums for profoundly liberating assertions and representations of the self in which the artist controls the terms of the encounter." p.33
All three artists discussed are women, and through their performances, not only do they redefine notions of disability, but also of femininity. Both the male gaze and the 'normative' stare are invited rather than endured.
"The male gaze enacts normative heterosexual desire and constitutes a normalized feminine subject from a female body that is understood to be unimpaired. When the female spectacle is a disabled one,
however, male heterosexual desire is no longer imagined as normative, but rather it becomes pathologized as deviant." p.34
"Wade, Duffy, and Sandahl exploit this transgressive potential in disabled female sexuality in order to renarrate a version of sexual subjectivity that is neither pathological, nor victimized,
nor passive." p.34
Cheryl Marie Wade performs poetry, subverting the image of the static reader by employing the use of her disabled body, "demanding that her audience look at what they have been taught is not to be seen outside the clinic." p.34
"Her performance foregrounds the particularity of her disabled body. From her wheelchair, she brandishes the hands that are usually hidden in polite society, their shape and function a bold affront
to the delicate hands femininity fetishizes." p.35
Through speaking the language that is usually forbidden from use by the nondisabled, Wade pushes against the social etiquette associated with bodies like hers. She is control of the conversation, she denies victimhood and pity, claiming empowerment and agency. Thompson argues that Wade is the agent of her own sexuality, distorting the male gaze by tenderly threatening to stroke the male thigh.
Here she reclaims the stare from her audience and transforms it into the look of love, a self-love here that is not narcissism but rather the affirmation of her own body as whole and right. p.36
Mary Duffy distorts the iconic image of female beauty by posing as the Venus de Milo, her unarmed, naked body exchanging the "fleshly disabled body that has been hidden or sensationally displayed" with the perfect, cold white marble. p.36
"By making herself into an art object, she shifts the visual display of her body from the medical or freak-show context to the discourse of aesthetics." p.36
"Such arresting choreography hyperbolically fuses two opposing visual discourses: staring at the freakishly different body and gazing at the female body as a sexualized aesthetic object." p.36
Like Wade's performance, Duffy forces the audience to stare at her body, to break the rules they have grown up following out of politeness, as her body breaks the rules of what is feminine, what counts as a body. Thompson argues that Duffy's art "transforms consciousness, grants a new way of seeing the known world." p.37.
"She refuses the reconstructed body completed by prosthetics that testify to the inventiveness of
technology to standardize body. She asserts instead her wholeness" p.37
Wade and Duffy, Thompson argues, seek to transport the disabled body from the realm of malformation, from lack, to a realm of new interpretation. In her performance, Sandahl looks to normalise the conditions she has been labelled with through medical diagnosis, by making her disabilities hypervisible; labels written all over her white suit, prescription slips handed out to audience members. In this action, she subverts the traditional role of the patient by inhabiting various medical roles and diagnosis. The medical world and medicalisation of disability has barred the disabled body from the public sphere, but with this performance, Sandahl reclaims her space and her right to be. Her disabled body becomes the theatrical subject, transforming the street into a theater, but not without risks; outside of the safety of the theatre, where audience are made to watch and performer is allowed to perform, the street opens up the possibility of misbehaviour.
"By performing in public the identity that is privatized and stigmatized by the discourse of
what Michel Foucault calls "the case," Sandahl violates the norms of anonymous public encounters." p.38
"their performances unmask the dynamic of staring by forcing the audience to become starers, to violate the social proscription against being captivated by the desire to stare." p.40
These performances, Thompson argues, tell us as much about disability and ableism as they do about the cultural narrative of the 'normative' body being normal. What is more normal, meaning expected, average, typical, usual; is human and body variation. To expect otherwise, and the invisibility of disability, is abnormal.
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