Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (review)

At a typical sideshow, barkers offered the "ten in one" that provided ten extraordinary attractions for the price of one ticket. Following this tradition, Rachel Adams offers an analogous way into the sideshow phenomenon. The reader is met with such disparate figures as "the wild man," Toni Morrison's ghostly incarnate "Beloved," and the eroticized and exoticized subjects captured through the photographic lens of Diane Arbus. Sideshow U.S.A. argues the importance of the "freak" in America's cultural imagination and material reality, and its author recognizes that "freak is not an inherent quality but an identity realized through gesture, costume, and staging" (6). By reclaiming "freak" as a performative identity vis-à-vis Judith Butler's seminal notion of iteration and repetition, Adams lifts the figure of the freak out of the ghettoized history of popular entertainment culture to invest it with social, aesthetic, and political implications.

Adams honors the sideshow history by first establishing its entertainment and social value in American culture. She employs the history of the sideshow to demonstrate the location of the freak's origins in popular culture as well as to provide an understanding of the performative dynamic between performer and spectator. Adams posits that the insights into structure, reception, and performance of the freak within the sideshow are most productively understood when "supplemented by information about what it meant to audiences and the performers themselves" (4). This attention to the relationship fostered between spectator and performer allows Adams to depart from a linear, historical agenda and to engage with a variety of provocative issues that thread their way through the ensuing chapters.

For example, Adams uses two different chapters to set up a discussion of racial performance located in and circulated through the body of the freak. In "Freaks of Culture: Institutions, Publics, and the Subjects of Ethnographic Knowledge," she looks beyond the dramatic (re)presentation of race to take into account the presence of the scientific community that created its own frame around the racialized freak. Here Adams effectively demonstrates how the authorial specter of anthropology, medicine, and museum studies capitalized on America's desire to legitimate racial deviance while the sideshow simultaneously offered an illusion of proximity and fantastic "knowledge" of this threatening body. This relationship is revisited and further complicated in a later chapter that examines "wildness" and race in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Similarly, Adams unearths a correlation between the freak and a queer identity in Carson McCullers's fiction. These connections are expanded upon in a section that discusses the reclamation of the term freak as a subversive signifier by way of the 1960s counterculture. What this strategy affords Adams is an opportunity to manufacture various theoretical and conceptual throughlines emanating from the iconic status of the freak. Adams liberates this figure from its confinement as a nostalgic product of an entertainment tradition to prove its cultural importance as contributing to a more sophisticated and innovative understanding of various personal, social, and political identities.

Though each chapter has the strength to stand independently and contribute significant insights across a number of disciplines, the work that addresses film and performance is particularly valuable for scholars of dramatic and performance studies. Because the freak was created out of a dramatic/popular entertainment medium, it is crucial to understand the performative aspects of this identity that have allowed its resilience in American culture. Adams successfully connects this figure across varied cultural and historical contexts while emphasizing its construction born of costume and staging. She succinctly demonstrates the process inherent in theatre that creates the possibility for a fluid identity prone to performative alterations.

The issue of performance and dramatic conventions is addressed in the chapter entitled "Sideshow Cinema" where Adams focuses her discussion on Tod Browning's film Freaks. Departing slightly from other theorists who have given attention to the portrayal and representation of freaks...