By: Rebecca Monteleone

NB: This post contains nudity. Read at your own discretion.

Hey pals, welcome back to [Insert Disability Euphemism Here]! I’m so glad to see you here. Today, I wanted to delve a little more deeply into a topic that I brought up previously: the politics of staring.

Wait, what does that mean?

With a constant barrage of media flying at our faces 24/7, I think it is valuable to reflect on the intention of the images being presented to us, as well as how we, as viewers, interpret them. (Ugh, but introspection is SO hard, Becca!) I know, darling readers, I know. Please don’t interrupt, though. It won’t be so bad as all that. If we equip ourselves with kick-ass theory, the introspection comes naturally, I promise.

To aid in our reflection, I am going to outline some work by the brilliant Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, which discusses the invitation to stare and the intent behind certain representations of disabled bodies. Alongside her framework, I will lay out some modern examples of what she refers to as the four “visual rhetorics” ( Source ).

Before we get into all that, however, there are some assumptions I am going to make in this post (and, frankly, in my life) that you should be aware of:

1. Disability is a social construct. While there are some

very valid critiques

to the social model of disability, it is a useful device when attempting to understand how disability is situated in the sociological, political, and economic environments that shape our lives. Harlan Hahn describes disability as “the failure of a structured social environment to adjust to the needs and aspirations of citizens with disabilities rather than the inability of the disabled individual to adapt to the demands of society.” (Hahn, 1986). In the context of staring, the social model holds that the way in which individuals are viewed by others invariably impacts their social value, and in turn, their overall well-being.

“these stairs (are our way of telling you that you are not welcome here)” Carole Zoom









. Staring, as opposed to simply looking, suggests a certain relationship between the starer and the subject. Jean-Paul Sartre suggests the act itself is one of objectification, and shame (or pride) arises not from one’s features themselves, but those features as they are seen by others (Sartre, 1942). There is something inherently dehumanizing about staring, particularly in the context of image or video, as it produces a distance between the subject and

viewer that allows that viewer to gape without reciprocation or shame. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, “starers gawk with abandon at the prosthetic hook, the empty sleeve, the scarred flesh, the unfocused eye, the twitching limb, but seldom does the looking broaden to envelope the whole body.”

3. These rhetorics can be applied across the board. While disabled bodies have certainly been a ready subject of staring throughout history, they are not alone. These rhetorics can (and are) readily applied to any body deemed “other.” If you are able to pinpoint a feature on a body that could be deemed as aberrant to the norm (if you’ll recall from my last post on Crip Theory, the dominant sociological class maintains their place via the invisibility of their features), whether that be in ability, skin colour, weight, gender expression, or age, then this post is likely applicable to some extent. So that’s cool!



