A few thoughts on eye contact

There’s something unbelievable, even verging on the magical  for me  about the idea that most people have the ability to catch someone else’s eye, draw, hold or avoid their gaze, lock eyes, stare someone down through this thing called Eye contact. It  can convey desire, longing, irritation, encouragement, questioning, support, pleading, anger, hatred, love, sadness, confidence, control, threat, contempt or anxiety ; it can be the vehicle for messages to ‘stop’, that it’s time to leave, communicate the desire for a drink, request to be rescued from a bore or harasser In a party…

 

Without direct experience, I only have some limited understanding of how  people can communicate so much through their eyes and over a distance. I am therefore regularly surprised at the sheer extent and power that the eye and particularly eye contact apparently have in so much human communication – a facility that I have no access to. You’d think that it is a wonder that blind people are able to communicate with others at all(!)

 

I have a small amount of eyesight, but not enough to make eye contact. I generally manage (and enjoy) communicating with others perfectly well, and rarely think of my lack of sight as intrinsically limiting.  However, there are regular reminders of it through others’ reactions that still bring me up short. I’m also reminded of the ways that psychological theories of the development of communication and relationship are often fairly rigid in the lens that is applied to the subject, they also easily become popularised and lead to  common negative judgements like ‘having something to hide’, ‘shiftiness’, ‘inability to relate’, ‘arrested psychological development’. As I flippantly alluded to above, however fundamental a part in human social interaction eye contact plays, there are clearly people (not least those who can’t see) who nonetheless manage to interact effectively without it. As far as I’m aware, these theories, the research that they are based on and the professional and popularised judgements that flow from them don’t take account of the experience of communication of people who cannot see and therefore use other means of connecting with others.

 

It doesn’t take much googling either to begin to understand that while eye contact is obviously universally available to sighted people and offers an important facility, it really doesn’t have a universal meaning or use. It has very different social and psychological meanings across different cultures. For example,  in the west, people are judged for not using eye contact, where in Japan, avoidance of it is seen as a sign of respect. This puts blind people’s experience and the expectations of sighted people into a far more culturally determined context, and while assumptions about it and attitudes to it might be culturally fixed in the west, they cannot be fixed on an international level.

 

There have, for more than 40 years, been important  discussions and arguments (with associated campaigning)about whether, (or the extent to which) aspects of disabled people’s impairments are themselves intrinsically limiting, or whether the structural, physical/environmental/technological and attitudinal barriers are so strong that they are responsible for imposing the limitations that we face. While I don’t see these as (either/or) polarities, I hope that it is clear from this blog that my position lies strongly with the view that it is the structures and social systems, inaccessibility and diminishing attitudes that cause and maintain most of the barriers I face in my life as a blind person. However, the more that I am aware of and understand the importance, potential and extent of eye contact, the more I realise that it is the single aspect of sightedness that I think I miss out on most.

 

This post has taken me many weeks to write and in the process, I’ve realised that while sure, I want a bit of this magic, the lack of it has not devastated my life, nor meant that I’ve been unable to communicate, relate to or engage with people who are open to engaging with me.

 

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