Staring Ho We Look [Hardcover]

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,Staringcaptures 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.

A trailhead that offers branches back into the many fields of study from which this book draws. It also suggests connections with new ones...[An] important, challenging, and often brilliant book. --American Literary History

So much effort is put into trying tostopstaring: 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 wecouldgo 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