Performing the Stare in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
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This article intends to explore the materiality of disability through the notions of staring and bodies, as existing in the case of disability. The dynamic interactions that flow back and forth between the starer and the staree are inverted as the scales of who is staring and who is stared at are occasionally found to be at crossroads with the colonial or masculine gaze. This problematises the stare and its valorization within the field of disability as well as its valence with other kinds of gazes. This article shows how the ‘disabled’ person does not depend upon the able in conferring meaning upon itself in a society saturated with assumptions of ableism and that claims to own the power over the other in exercising the stare, demanding a story, and using language to assert itself. It raises questions around what disability is about and its notional creation in an able society. A slip often occurs from notional disablism to a notional ableism, with both categories being the subjects of a cultural construction. And this slip indicates the liminal space that disabled subjects often occupy while performing acts in their everyday life. The setting for this article is the powerful novel of Animal’s People and its intrepid hero Animal whose life is explored in a search of some answers to the questions raised here.
Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1