Product Description
From the Publisher
AMERICA'S DISPOSITION TOWARD THE VISUALLY DIFFERENT
FREAKERY: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body
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." The rapid social changes after 1830 that comprised modernization
resulted in a cluster of cultural condiditions which produced a
climate in which the freak show flourished.
Rosemarie Garland 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; 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; Tod Browning's landmark
movie "Freaks"; bodybilders 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.
FREAKERY is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected
aspect of American mass culture.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson is Assistant Professor of English at
Howard University.