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This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates, the freak show model into a "new American freak show." It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC's Push Girls (2012-2013), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freakshow but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. The Mediated Freak Body.- 3. Horror Movies, Horror Bodies: Blurring the Freak Body in Cinema.- 4. Reality, Normality, Sexuality: "Authentic" Portrayals of the Freak.- 5. Disability Pornography and the Cultural Politics of Disabled Sexuality.- 6. Born This Way?: Disseminating Identification.
About the author
Jessica L. Williams is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at SUNY College at Old Westbury, USA.
Summary
Explores the history of the freak show and how it was transformed through the emergence of media
Focuses on what changes in viewing mean, and why and how the viewer stares at freakish bodies through specific media including film, television, and live performance
Explores bodies which would have been considered freaks of nature—a person who was born with their physical anomaly or who obtained it through an accident, such as bearded ladies, people missing limbs, and conjoined twins—as well as cultural freaks—a person whose anomaly was obtained by choice, such as heavily tattooed and pierced people, sword swallowers, and other novelty acts
Raises questions about representation and authenticity in its exploration of mediated bodies across horror film to reality television, disability pornography to the mediatization of popular musicians' bodies
Analyzes the relationship between viewer and the figure of "the freak" to reveal the cultural organization of different bodies in contemporary society
