Freakery: cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body

Abstract

"Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction : From wonder to error--a genealogy of freak discourse in modernity / Rosemarie Garland Thomson -- The social construction of freaks / Robert Bogdan -- The "careers" of people exhibited in freak shows : the problem of volition and valorization / David A. Gerber -- Intolerable ambiguity : freaks as/at the limit / Elizabeth Grosz -- Monsters in the marketplace : the exhibition of human oddities in early modern England / Paul Semonin -- Death-defying/defining spectacles : Charles Willson Peale as early American freak showman / Edward L. Schwarzschild -- P.T. Barnum's theatrical selfhood and the nineteenth-century culture of exhibition / Eric Fretz -- Social order and psychological disorder : laughing gas demonstrations, 1800-1850 / Ellen Hickey Grayson -- Photography and persuasion : farm security administration photographs of circus and carnival sideshows, 1935-1942 / Ronald E. Ostman -- Of men, missing links, and nondescripts : the strange career of P.T. Barnum's "What is it?" exhibition / James W. Cook, Jr. -- Aztecs, aborigines, and ape-people : science and freaks in Germany, 1850-1900 / Nigel Rothfels -- The "exceptions that prove the rule" : Daisy and Violet Hilton, the "new woman," and the bonds of marriage / Allison Pingree -- Cuteness and commodity aesthetics : Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple / Lori Merish -- Ethnological show business : footlighting the dark continent / Bernth Lindfors -- Ogling igorots : the politics and commerce of exhibiting cultural otherness, 1898-1913 / Christopher A. Vaughan -- "What an object he would have made of me!" : tattooing and the racial freak in Melville's Typee / Leonard Cassuto -- The Circassian beauty and the Circassian slave : gender, imperialism, and American popular entertainment / Linda Frost -- "One of us" : Tod Browning's Freaks / Joan Hawkins -- An American tail : freaks, gender, and the incorporation of history in Katherine Dunn's Geek love / Rachel Adams -- Freaking feminism : The life and loves of a she-devil and Nights at the circus as narrative freak shows / Shirley Peterson -- Teaching freaks / Brian Rosenberg -- The dime museum freak show reconfigured as talk show / Andrea Stulman Dennett -- Freaks in space : "extraterrestrialism" and "deep-space multiculturalism" / Jeffrey A. Weinstock -- Being humaned : medical documentaries and the hyperrealization of conjoined twins / David L. Clark and Catherine Myser -- Bodybuilding : a postmodern freak show / Cecile Lindsey -- The celebrity freak : Michael Jackson's "grotesque glory" / David D. Yuan.