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In
Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining
Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).
List of contents
- FOREWORD by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
- INTRODUCTION: "Step Right Up! A New Introduction to the Old Freak Show" by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Michael Mark Chemers, and Analola Santana
- I. STAGING
- 1. "Abject Bodies in Performance Art" by Josefina Alcazar. Translated by Analola Santana
- 2. "The Normativity of the Extraordinary: Musical Theatre on the Page and on the Stage" by Stacy Wolf and Ryan Donovan
- 3. "Performance, Pleasure, and Profit at the Victorian Freak Show" by Nadya Durbach
- 4. "Chick Webb's Extraordinary Body of Music" by Meisha Rosenberg
- 5. "The Enfreakment of the Premature Infant: incubator baby shows in the United States" by Susan Kattwinkel
- II. HYBRIDITY
- 6. "The Tragic Journey of a Mexican Savage to the Civilized World" by Roger Bartra. Translated by Analola Santana
- 7. "Rest in Peace, Charles Byrne?: The Last Testament and Enduring Legacy of the 18th Century 'Irish Giant'" by David A. Gerber
- 8. "Chin Up: Befriending the Bearded Ladies" by Lilian Craton
- 9. "Spectacles of Prognosis: El Niño Fidencio in the 21st Century" by Susan Antebi
- III. MONSTROSITY
- 10. "Monstrous Births and the Religious Imagination" by Devan Stahl
- 11. "Human or Alien: Tracing Enfreaked Subjects in the 20th and 21st Century Theatre of Disability" by Danielle Bainbridge
- 12. "The Mortification of Harvey Leach" by Michael Mark Chemers
- IV. UNSETTLING
- 13. "Freakish Fecundity: Birth and Baby Reality Television as Eugenicist Discourse" by Katya Vrtis
- 14. "Alexandrine: A German Princess with Down Syndrome who Survived the Holocaust" by Robert Bogdan
- 15. "Dead Weight: Exhibiting Fatness Postmortem" by Joyce Huff
- 16. "Disornamentation: An Optic for Reading Depictions of Disabled, Asian Women" by Jenna Gerdsen
- 17. "Sex Mad: Gender and Disability in the Art of Eudora Welty and Reginald Marsh" Keri Watson
- V. LEARNING
- 18. "The Pedagogical Utility of Early Freak Show Scholarship" by Cynthia Wu
- 19. "Teaching the Extraordinary Body: A Generation of Freaks and Monsters in the Classroom" by Leonard Cassuto
About the author
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor Emerita at Emory University.
Michael Mark Chemers is Professor and Chair, Department of Performance, Play and Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Analola Santana is Associate Professor, Department of Theatre, Dartmouth College.
Summary
The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond.
This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of people that scientific and social-scientific discourses increasingly described - and sometimes still describe - as biologically inferior. Although much work has emerged recently about the history of eugenics, this collection highlights the specific ways that modes of exaggerated commercial popular performances create a public conversation that mirrors pathological narratives of human difference that are now firmly established as the categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, beneficial and harmful. This connection between narratives of freakery and normalcy gesture towards a fuller understanding of how eugenic thinking has re-emerged strongly as a force in medical science and cultural thinking aimed at producing the supposed “best” and “most useful” kinds of people.
Additional text
legacy of 'freaks,' those whose bodies do not conform to the cultural norms that define appearance and social value. Both an overview of eugenics, which aims to normalize and regulate bodies and their range of performances, and forms of morphological resistance to eugenics, this is an original and forceful collection on the capacities of extraordinary bodies for creation and defiance, and the external forms of constraint and containment that regulate many of them. Bodies resist what we make of them - they are what they become, whether we understand or identify with them or not. This book addresses such resistance as much as it does this containment."
