ENGLISH 124 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Absolute Difference, Visual Rhetoric, Rhetorical Modes
5 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
The politics of staring: visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography. The history of disabled people in the western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous while politically and socially erased. Earliest records of disabled people were of their exhibition as prodigies, monsters, omens from the gods, and indexes of the natural or divine world. The bodies of disabled people have been considered to be freaks and monsters and displayed for entertainment and profit in courts, street fairs, dime museums, and sideshows. Disabled people have variously been objects of awe, scorn, terror, delight, inspiration, pity, laughter, or fascination - but they have always been stared at. Staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant; it creates disability as a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form.
