Scopophilic Spectators/Scopophobic Performers: The Politics of Staring and Being Stared At in Ada M. Patterson’s Lookalook (2018)What does it mean to stare or to be stared at? In this essay, I discuss the relationship between queerness, spectatorship and performance by analysing Ada M. Patterson’s performance art of Lookalook. First, I examine the hegemonic power of a stare from heteronormative society towards queer people that the piece engages with. I define this stare as a subsection of existing theories on the gaze, but one that has a specific meaning of regulation. I contend that when heteronormative people stare at queer people, unwanted spectatorship turns the queer person into an unwilling performer. I explore this question through ideas of scopophilia and scopophobia, suggesting that hegemonic heteronormative culture’s desire to stare is due to a commodifying fetishism that invokes negative affective responses in those being stared at. Consequently, staring back allows queer people to reclaim the homo/transphobic power of a stare that attempts to commodify and regulate queerness in capitalistic, heteronormative society.
I first saw Ada M. Patterson’s Lookalook in February 2022, within the Life Between Islands exhibition at the Tate Britain. The exhibition brings together varying media from Caribbean-British artists ranging from the Windrush Generation of Caribbean immigrants to now. Lookalook is situated within the ‘Past, Present, Future’ room, involving recent artistic Black British life through the continuing after-effects of slavery and colonialism in the West Indies. As I walked into this final section of the exhibition, there was a small, unassuming screen displaying Lookalook, beside multiple different artworks. As the piece is shown on a small screen near the end of the exhibition, it would be easy to skip over; however I found myself drawn to it.
The film documenting Lookalook is in black and white, depicting Patterson dressed in a long black robe that completely covers his body, with a black and white checked pattern over the chest. The robe obscures Patterson’s body and gender. Most notably, black material with barnacles covers Patterson’s face, giving the appearance of multiple eyes. Where Patterson’s actual eyes are looking is hidden, instead seeming as though the “barnacle-eyes” are looking in every direction. The film follows Patterson silently walking around the streets of Bridgetown, Barbados, while ordinary Bajan passersby look at, and interact with the strange alien figure in their midst. However, Patterson does not only become a foreign object of other people’s gaze, but turns his barnacle-eyes onto the people that stare. Just as they stare at him, he stares back through the barnacle-eyes. Non-diegetic subtitles are displayed along the bottom of the screen following the figure’s internal thoughts, occasionally disclosing diegetic comments from passersby.
(03.56, Lookalook)
Intrigued but unsure of what I was looking at, I turned to the plaque beside the screen. The plaque stated that Patterson’s performance was a reference to Barbadian vernacular phrases of ‘stink look’ and ‘cut-eye’, specifically that which is garnered by LGBTQ+ people when outside in public. Patterson portrays queerness through its etymology of strangeness or eliciting suspicion. Thus, Patterson dresses as an alien figure to emblematise the hypervisibility of queer people in Barbados and expose the “stink look” that visible queerness invites. During an interview with Patterson, Jessica Taylor notes: ‘Lookalook calls out the violence that is elicited when a group of viewers are unable to name or understand something that they are looking at’. This inability to comprehend links to visible queerness that disrupts the heteronormative gender binary. Therefore, as Taylor highlights, this look that Patterson engages with is not innocuous: stares directed at queer people bring with it the threat of homo/transphobic violence. Rosamond S. King in her sociological study of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean states:
Those who inhabit unconventional genders— whether deliberately or unconsciously and whether through behavior, dress, speech, or some combination of these— are often considered ineligible to be full, legitimate members of Caribbean societies. As in the global North, their sexuality is automatically suspect, and since they are far from ideal citizens, too often the state sees no need to treat them as full citizens or to protect them from others’ mistreatment.
King emphasises that heteronormative gender expression is intrinsically linked to citizenship, so refusing to assimilate grants queer people fewer national rights. Simultaneously, King asserts that this is not only a feature of the Caribbean, thus we must resist demonising the Global South for homo/transphobia, especially as many Caribbean countries’ criminalisation of homosexuality originates from colonial policy. The Live Art Development Agency in an introduction to its screening of Lookalook comments: ‘The Caribbean region and the self-image of its citizenry has always been held under and shaped by the projections, desires and fears of the colonial and now touristic gazes’. As highlighted, this heteronormative stare within Patterson’s work is subsumed into (neo)colonial gazes that have capitalised and profited off of the Caribbean. As a result, Patterson’s focus on violence towards queer people in the Caribbean is further problematised by histories of colonialism.
Lookalook indicates that this colonial and sexual violence is dependent upon spectators looking at a person. Patterson’s work deals with a passerby’s stare which is then turned back around onto the spectator. I define a stare in this essay as a look from someone at an unwilling object. I determine this stare through key work on the gaze, particularly via Laura Mulvey on the male gaze and Michel Foucault on the inspecting gaze of the Panopticon. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright state that ‘to gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking’. As Mulvey and Foucault demonstrate, this gaze is a relational process, but specifically one that acts along a hierarchical relationship to vision. Mulvey and Foucault published their respective works of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and Discipline and Punish in the same year, proposing somewhat similar theories of a dominating, hegemonic gaze; yet the two arrive at their conclusions differently. As Clifford T. Manlove notes: ‘in most cases, the gaze is used to help explain the hierarchical power relations between two or more groups or, alternatively, between a group and an “object.”’ Consequently, these two works that engage with a hierarchical gaze are fundamental to my analysis of the stare from heteronormative society towards queer people.
Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has become a core feminist thesis surrounding filmic portrayals of women. Although Mulvey’s theory is about cinema, it has been taken up by performance theorists due to her focus on the visual that is also key to theatre. Mulvey takes on Freudian and Lacanian registers to examine the ways in which psychology has shaped gender differences within the visual. Mulvey writes:
The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. [...] Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.
Through a Freudian focus, Mulvey suggests that cinema narcissistically reinforces scopophilic tendencies, providing sexual pleasure in film spectatorship. She suggests that this scopophilic disposition in film ‘arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’. She also theorises through Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage:
the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject.
Consequently, the male spectator locates himself through an identification with male characters and alienation of female characters in films.
Thus for Mulvey, it follows that a heteronormative society ordered by sexual hierarchies would prioritise the heterosexual male’s visual pleasure in looking at a woman:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
Mulvey’s idea of the ‘determining male gaze’ is that the male spectator ‘gains control and possession’ of the female character through disidentification and erotic pleasure gained by her appearance.
Although Mulvey’s thesis of the male gaze is a vital feminist work within wider gaze theory, it has its limitations. Firstly, I question her emphasis on the Freudian castration complex in the male spectator. Mulvey highlights the power of castration anxiety, suggesting that the ‘woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified’. She concludes that this castration anxiety induces ‘voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat’ as the reasoning behind the male gaze. By using Freud’s controversial psychoanalytic framework of castration anxiety, Mulvey undermines the significance of her theory, suggesting that the male gaze is due to a fear of castration instead of society’s naturalisation of heteronormative ideals.
Additionally, Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze is limited when defining a threatening stare. Manlove asserts: Mulvey’s ‘account of the visual drive in psychoanalysis overemphasizes the role of pleasure’. In the stare that Patterson engages with, there is not necessarily an erotic pleasure gained from the heterosexual spectator’s stare at a queer person. In defining a stare, I turn to Foucault’s inspecting gaze, which is not dependent on erotic pleasure but hegemonic regulation.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s chapter on ‘Panopticism’ considers Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, in which prisoners in a backlit circle of cells are watched constantly from a central tower. Foucault writes that within the Panopticon: ‘Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere’. Foucault uses the specific design of Bentham’s Panopticon to exemplify the imprisoning effects of surveillance in society. Thus Panopticism is ‘the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that [assures] the capillary functioning of power’. Foucault suggests that this inspecting gaze within society is a form of ‘regulation’ which he states is part of a ‘whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal’. This is what Patterson engages with: a stare from heteronormative society turned onto a queer person is not only violent from an assailant. Even simply staring at a queer person is a form of a violence that wishes to ‘measure, supervise and correct the abnormal’, which here is a visible subversion of the heteronormative gender binary. Within the subtitles of Lookalook, the monologue states: ‘Stink looks and cut-eye keep us in our places’ (3.22). Patterson suggests that these negative looks maintain a hierarchy, thus hegemonic heteronormativity uses stares to police queerness. Mulvey’s contribution via the male gaze is also key to the stare as one that operates through heteronormative alienation; however I do not believe that the stare here is gender-specific for male spectators, nor is it dependent on erotic desire. The stare that Patterson deals with is a violent look that functions as a regulation of the abnormal–visible queerness.
Consequently, Patterson’s Lookalook represents spectators staring at an unwilling queer person. I analyse this through ideas of scopophilia, the desire to look, and scopophobia, the fear of being looked at; however, my focus is not on the psychological uses of these terms, but rather the ways that they can be applied to performance. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker argue, ‘the performative has thus been from its inception already infected with queerness’, highlighting the intrinsic relationship between performance and queer studies. Indeed, Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity emphasises the role that performance has in constituting one’s gender, through ‘stylized repetitions of acts’. Queerness and looking - central to Lookalook - are already grounded in questions of performativity. Thus, as scopophilia and scopophobia are dependent on looking and the visual, these terms connect to performativity. For a spectator, the ontological state of spectating arises from a desire to look. For a theatre performer, there is a desire to be looked at as one’s labour gains value when being seen. However, spectatorship can be problematised when considering unwilling performers and/or audiences. Therefore, I infer from Patterson’s representation of staring that the scopophilic spectator turns the queer person being stared at into an unwilling performer.
As discussed earlier, Mulvey considers scopophilic tendencies within the male gaze through Freudian analysis. Freud first examines scopophilia within his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, suggesting that ‘pleasure in looking [scopophilia] becomes a perversion’ if ‘restricted to the genitals’, ‘connected with the overriding of disgust’ or ‘supplants…the normal sexual aim’. However, we can question Freud’s designation of scopophilia, as he labels any sexual behaviour outside of normative heterosexual intercourse a ‘perversion’. Furthermore, Freudian understandings of scopophilia are limited by only considering the psychosexual fetishistic aspects of looking.
Thus I expand psychosexual analyses of scopophilia. Kopano Ratele writes about interactions of looking at racialised queer bodies in South Africa, and concludes that ‘looking, being looked at, and generally looks [...] have become commodified’. Through Marxist analysis, Ratele suggests that external spectatorship fetishises the body as commodity. This links to Dominic Johnson who combines Freudian and Marxist fetishisms in Theatre and the Visual to consider ‘how fetishism might also influence the pleasure of looking’. Rebecca Schneider in The Explicit Body in Performance discusses the ‘ways in which perspectival vision and commodity fetishism are played back across the body as stage’. Schneider undertakes feminist analysis of the explicit body in performance, considering the ways in which the female body is performed within commodity capitalism. She links ‘perspectival vision’, ‘commodity fetishism’ and the body, providing a framework for reading spectatorship of the body as a form of commodity fetishism. Johnson similarly summarises his interest in visuality and fetishism: ‘how the fetish - as a theory of the magic of the image - conditions the way we look at objects and bodies in the theatre’. As Patterson’s work takes place in Barbados, racial capitalistic histories of slavery and colonialism further complicate this idea of the body being looked at through fetishism. Therefore, I contend that scopophilia does not solely describe a pathological state, but also a widespread desire to look at the human form within fetishistic capitalist society.
Patterson explores the trapping, homo/transphobic violence of scopophilic spectatorship. Lookalook opens with lines from In the Castle of My Skin by Barbadian writer, George Lamming: ‘The eye of another was a kind of cage. When it saw you the lid came down, and you were trapped.’ Lamming’s idea of the eye as a ‘cage’ that causes one to become ‘trapped’ connects to Foucault’s argument of the panoptic society, when he states that ‘visibility is a trap’. Queerness in Lookalook becomes the scopic object of a spectator, inviting unwanted stares. This is heightened by the fact that homosexuality is criminalised in Barbados. As King reminds us, laws against homosexuality are ‘rarely enforced’, but that ‘in Caribglobal communities, public gender transgression is more problematic than private homosex’. Returning to Foucault’s idea of vision as a regulatory force against the ‘abnormal’, LGBTQ+ people who visibly resist heteronormative gender expression face greater discipline, thus the punitive spectator’s eye is drawn to anyone who flouts these codes. This forms a scopophilic tendency whereby the spectator is subsumed into ‘mechanisms of power…disposed around the abnormal individual’ in order to ‘brand’ and ‘alter’ the queer person. Foucault asserts that the ‘major effect of the Panopticon’ is ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’. The staring subject induces a visibility with the potential to expose and endanger the queer object of their stare. The spectator thus assimilates into the panoptic society, facilitating the functioning of a heteronormative hegemony that punishes those external to its ideals.
The visibly queer person becomes an unwilling performer to the scopophilic spectator. This lack of choice in performing may invoke adverse affective responses in the person being stared at. This is what I explore through the term scopophobia. By existing as visibly queer in a scopophilic society, spectators commodify the queer body through stares, invoking scopophobic affects. Foucault writes of the object of the inspecting gaze:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Foucault suggests that the unwilling performer, conscious of the stares from external spectators, inscribes the ‘constraints of power’ and ‘subjection’ onto the self. Thus, scopophobic affects are a result of being aware of the hegemonic power within being looked at. A queer person who is being stared at experiences scopophobic affective responses such as shame, embarrassment or fear at being forced to perform the self in an exposing way. In Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout investigates an actor’s stage fright. He states that the modern actor is ‘required somehow to represent, through some mediation of her own life experience, aspects of this private psychic space in the rationalised public sphere of the bourgeois commercial theatre’. Ridout contends that due to this naturalist approach to acting, the actor is forced to ‘make use of the interior private experience for public purposes’ thus ‘the separation of spheres is experienced over and over again as discomfort’. Ridout argues that the modern turn towards naturalist acting places discomfort upon the actor who must expose their internal self for the exploitative practices of the bourgeois theatre. For the queer person who invites stares, their very existence becomes performative, unwillingly performing their selfhood for others, invoking shame and fear.
The scopophilic tendencies of spectators and the scopophobic affective responses of the one being stared at work in tandem. Both subject and object reinscribe this power dynamic onto the queer person being stared at. Foucault further states:
We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.
