Authors: Rosemarie Thomson
ISBN-13: 9780814782224, ISBN-10: 0814782221
Format: Paperback
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: October 1996
Edition: 1st Edition
Rosemarie Garland Thomson is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University.
Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal.
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.
Freakeryis a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.
List of Illustrations | ||
Foreword | ||
Preface and Acknowledgments | ||
1 | Introduction: From Wonder to Error - A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity | 1 |
2 | The Social Construction of Freaks | 23 |
3 | The "Careers" of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization | 38 |
4 | Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit | 55 |
5 | Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England | 69 |
6 | Death-Defying/Defining Spectacles: Charles Willson Peale as Early American Freak Showman | 82 |
7 | P.T. Barnum's Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Exhibition | 97 |
8 | Social Order and Psychological Disorder: Laughing Gas Demonstrations, 1800-1850 | 108 |
9 | Photography and Persuasion: Farm Security Administration Photographs of Circus and Carnival Sideshows, 1935-1942 | 121 |
10 | Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P.T. Barnum's "What is It?" Exhibition | 139 |
11 | Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany, 1850-1900 | 158 |
12 | The "Exceptions That Prove the Rule": Daisy and Violet Hilton, the "New Woman," and the Bonds of Marriage | 173 |
13 | Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple | 185 |
14 | Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent | 207 |
15 | Ogling Igorots: The Politics and Commerce of Exhibiting Cultural Otherness, 1898-1913 | 219 |
16 | "What an object he would have made of me!": Tattooing and the Racial Freak in Melville's Typee | 234 |
17 | The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Popular Entertainment | 248 |
18 | "One of Us": Tod Browning's Freaks | 265 |
19 | An American Tail: Freaks, Gender, and the Incorporation of History in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love | 277 |
20 | Freaking Feminism: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Nights at the Circus as Narrative Freak Shows | 291 |
21 | Teaching Freaks | 302 |
22 | The Dime Museum Freak Show Reconfigured as Talk Show | 315 |
23 | Freaks in Space: "Extraterrestrialism" and "Deep-Space Multiculturalism" | 327 |
24 | Being Humaned: Medical Documentaries and the Hyperrealization of Conjoined Twins | 338 |
25 | Bodybuilding: A Postmodern Freak Show | 356 |
26 | The Celebrity Freak: Michael Jackson's "Grotesque Glory" | 368 |
Contributors | 385 | |
Index | 389 |