Do We Stare Because We’re Close-Minded?

As a kid, I recall a particular jaunt to the local shopping mall. I wandered around for a bit as she browsed the isles of Macy’s, mindlessly rooting around in the aisles of the store, grabbing everything, and opening every container, door or piece of equipment that I could. Needless to say, I was a curious child.

But when my insatiable curiosity brought to an elder woman with what I then could only label as a “strange looking hand”, I simply stopped. At one end of the aisle was this elderly woman, pleasantly minding her own business; on the other, was me who, when she wasn’t looking, would sneak in uncomfortably long stares at her disproportionately shaped hand. I stared in part because I wanted to try and understand, but mostly because, to me, her hand represented something ugly. After all, I had had two perfectly functional and decent looking hands for my entire life. Never before that had I even seen something so repulsive and yet so intriguing.

And that scenario only stands to highlight much of what Thomson discusses in Staring: How We Look. Staring is an inherent human impulse. As Thomson describes, we stare at things that we haven’t seen in an effort to better understand them.

But she also notes that we stare at things in which we have failed to accept like, for example, disabilities or deformations. She notes that, “[the] hiding of disability has made it seem unusual or foreign rather than fundamental to our human embodiedness. Rather than accepting disability and accommodating it as an expect part of every life course, we are stunned and alienated when it appears to us in others or ourselves” (20). In essence, we live in a state of denial. Our refusal to accept the disabilities, imperfections and what some might determine as ugliness that often surround us is part of a culture that we have established and built upon for many years. Staring allows us to break through those boundaries and become voyeurs in that other world in which we have seemingly all but accepted.

Which begs the question; do we stare because we are intrigued and it is a psychological impulse or just because we are close-minded?

Although Thomson would most likely argue for both sides of the conflict, one startling example from Staring certainly suggests that there is some level of close-mindedness that is inherent in the act of staring.

In chapter 8, Thomson’s introduction of Lori and Reba Schappel, two conjoined twins that have experienced more than their fair share of staring, seeks to overturn at least some of the preconceptions that some might have with regard to handicapped or disfigured individuals. The twins, exhibiting a profound level of awareness and comfort in their disfigurement, embrace staring. As Thomson notes, in the film Face to Face, the twins relish in moments in which potential starers lose composure, because they recognize the ignorance with which most people exhibit towards those that are disfigured and different from everyone else.

Yet the most important thing to glean from that chapter isn’t necessarily that the twins recognize their differences and embrace them, but rather that they seem better than those who stare – freed, to an extent – because of those differences. As Thomson notes, “despite twenty-four years of forced institutionalization, they are in many ways more worldly and psychologically sophisticated than their starers” (114).

Undoubtedly, staring is a product of ignorance, something that Thomson recognizes in her early chapters. We stare because we want to understand something that we don’t understand.

But at the same time, that ignorance also seems to suggest and even breed a sort of close-mindedness. What we don’t understand, we feel compelled to ignore and only infrequently try to interpret. Because of that, it is often difficult for us to accept something that is much different than ourselves physically. For the most part, we thrive and feel much more comfortable around things in which we are familiar with.

Do you think that staring is a product of close-mindedness or simply our curiosity?