Freakery : cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body / edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson.

Date:
[1996], ©1996
  • Books

About this work

Publication/Creation

New York : New York University Press, [1996], ©1996.

Physical description

xviii, 400 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Contents

Introduction : From wonder to error--a genealogy of freak discourse in modernity / Rosemarie Garland Thomson -- The social construction of freaks / Robert Bogdan -- The "careers" of people exhibited in freak shows : the problem of volition and valorization / David A. Gerber -- Intolerable ambiguity : freaks as/at the limit / Elizabeth Grosz -- Monsters in the marketplace : the exhibition of human oddities in early modern England / Paul Semonin -- Death-defying/defining spectacles : Charles Willson Peale as early American freak showman / Edward L. Schwarzschild -- P.T. Barnum's theatrical selfhood and the nineteenth-century culture of exhibition / Eric Fretz -- Social order and psychological disorder : laughing gas demonstrations, 1800-1850 / Ellen Hickey Grayson -- Photography and persuasion : farm security administration photographs of circus and carnival sideshows, 1935-1942 / Ronald E. Ostman -- Of men, missing links, and nondescripts : the strange career of P.T. Barnum's "What is it?" exhibition / James W. Cook, Jr. -- Aztecs, aborigines, and ape-people : science and freaks in Germany, 1850-1900 / Nigel Rothfels -- The "exceptions that prove the rule" : Daisy and Violet Hilton, the "new woman," and the bonds of marriage / Allison Pingree -- Cuteness and commodity aesthetics : Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple / Lori Merish -- Ethnological show business : footlighting the dark continent / Bernth Lindfors -- Ogling igorots : the politics and commerce of exhibiting cultural otherness, 1898-1913 / Christopher A. Vaughan -- "What an object he would have made of me!" : tattooing and the racial freak in Melville's Typee / Leonard Cassuto -- The Circassian beauty and the Circassian slave : gender, imperialism, and American popular entertainment / Linda Frost -- "One of us" : Tod Browning's Freaks / Joan Hawkins -- An American tail : freaks, gender, and the incorporation of history in Katherine Dunn's Geek love / Rachel Adams -- Freaking feminism : The life and loves of a she-devil and Nights at the circus as narrative freak shows / Shirley Peterson -- Teaching freaks / Brian Rosenberg -- The dime museum freak show reconfigured as talk show / Andrea Stulman Dennett -- Freaks in space : "extraterrestrialism" and "deep-space multiculturalism" / Jeffrey A. Weinstock -- Being humaned : medical documentaries and the hyperrealization of conjoined twins / David L. Clark and Catherine Myser -- Bodybuilding : a postmodern freak show / Cecile Lindsey -- The celebrity freak : Michael Jackson's "grotesque glory" / David D. Yuan.

Bibliographic information

Includes index and bibliographies.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    DD /THO
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 0814782175
  • 0814782221