Books
Scholars and Critics Praise Staring:
Staring: How We Look
Publisher: Oxford University Press (March 2009)
Paperback:
256 pages
ISBN13: 978-0-19-532680-2
ISBN10: 0-19-532680-6
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Drawing 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.
"So much effort is put into trying to stop staring: mothers scold children, doctors try to 'fix' bodies marked 'abnormal.' But enough of that. Garland-Thomson takes staring as the inevitability it is, and, with compelling stories and beautiful insight, tells us where we could go from here-intellectually, socially, artistically, humanely.
— Alice Dreger, Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Northwestern University
"'So I stared at him . . . I felt really ill-at-ease . . . .' Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's book explains that universal feeling in ways that are comprehensible to every one of us who has felt this discomfort at one time or another. Staring is a vital book for our understanding of disability and its impact on each of us. It is a bold and path-breaking book that should be on the reading list of everyone in education, public affairs, and social policy."
—Sander L. Gilman, author of Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery
“People with disabilities, argues Garland-Thomson, a professor of women's studies at Emory University, are not merely the objects of other people's gazes, but also take some control of the experience of being stared at. To the extent that they do that, they change the experience for the starer, who may come away from it with greater understanding. Staring extends Garland-Thomson's pioneering work in disability studies, which has developed mainly over the last 20 years and which has an unabashedly activist component.”
—Peter Moynihan, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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