Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #498650 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

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.