ABSTRACT
The article that follows stays closer to home in the sense of focus-ing on “normal” people’s reactions, which upon closer exami-nation turn out to be rather extraordinary. Jane Frances’ article, Staring and phantasy: a speculative attempt to understand and address the widely observed misrepresentation and exclusion of people with disfigurements, explores how people respond to people with facial disfigurements. Such conditions that affect someone’s appearance may be scars from burns, a facial birthmark, vitiligo, eczema, or alopecia, or craniofacial conditions that affect the shape of their head. Social psychology research reveals that people with facial disfigurements are subject to visual and verbal assaults. Strangers stare while denying that they do so, they tend to stand further away from a person with a disfigurement, and make rude remarks or ask invasive questions. Normal social norms of “civil inattention” to strangers appear to be dispelled in encounters with people with disfigurements. The extensive research renders it unlikely, argues the author, that people with disfigurements “bring it upon themselves” through projective identification, thus the importance of focusing on those who express and communicate negative, awkward, avoidant, or hostile responses to disfigurement. Via Pliny’s (AD 77) descriptions of part-human part-alien creatures at the
edge of the known world, through “ugly laws” in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, targeting “unsightly” beggars and criminalising disability, the author confronts the reader with the contemporary examples of Keep Britain Tidy’s anti-litter campaign and the computer game BioShock that present severely offensive portrayals of people with facial disfigurements. Citing Freud’s (1914c) description of being in love, Frances notes that ordinary reactions to someone with a disfigurement appear to be rather strikingly close to its opposite: a compulsion to stare fixedly, depletion of the ego, a limited capacity to function as one does in other encounters, along with an absence of humility. Do these reactions, she asks, point towards an infant’s partobjects, bitten and chewed, grabbed, torn, and shat upon, the other’s face and body thus disfigured in the observer’s phantasy? Linking the observer’s staring with Kristeva’s (1942) thoughts on the abject’s ambivalent status as neither subject not object, evoked in the encounter with bodily processes and products, bodily damage and the dead body, the author suggests that the staring is an urgent attempt to discover or recover our sense of conscious self and our symbolic capacities as human subjects, challenged in the encounter with the ‘damaged’ other. The muddled self-other relation which facilitates an unrealistic and inappropriate quality of familiarity could thus be explained by the revocation of a paranoid-schizoid phantasy-“This horrible, bad person wants revenge on me and I’m scared”—assisted by culturally generated norms or stereotypes that train us to associate moral worth with appearance. Invasive and patronising behaviour, she suggests, might be seen as manic defences against experiencing a sense of guilt. The observation that people with disfigurements and good social skills are viewed particularly favourably compared with people without disfigurements could thus be explained by the hypothesis that our primitive, scary, phantasy-based story about their appearance has been radically revised: one expected something bad to happen in the course of the encounter, yet it did not; the fear giving way to a great sense of relief. The author concludes by recounting a film that shows the effect in reality of the viewer’s staring, offering an opportunity to think about one’s unwitting, marginalising behaviours, and opening the possibility of responding differently in one’s next encounter with a person with a disfigurement.
