Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (review)

Leonardo Reviews 233 his imagination if he is to continue writing on such complex topics. FREAKERY: CULTURAL SPECTACLES OF THE EXTRAORDINARY BODY edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York Univ. Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1996. 400 pp. Paperback , $24.95; trade, $65.00. Reviewed by Richard W. Mitchell, Department of English, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, P.O. Box 44691, Lafayette, LA 70504-4691, U.S.A. With the field of cultural studies continuing to make inroads through the once vigilantly controlled borders of such academic disciplines as theater, English and anthropology, more and more aspects of “low” culture are finding themselves caught in the gaze of the postmodern scholar’s microscope, and the results of such scrutiny are appearing with increasing regularity in cultural studies anthologies centered on a particular theme, or even on a general subcategory of cultural studies, such as performance studies. With the ability to apply skillfully a diverse array of theoretical tools, one can fruitfully study even the most marginalized texts while shedding new light not only on an area that had formerly been slighted, but also on history, ideology and everyday life. One particular type of text that remains ripe for study is the side show, or freak show, whose heyday in America was from the 1840s through 1940. As a recent anthology , Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, makes clear, the freak show is a productive area of study not only in itself, but also in relation to modernity , and as a model for examining freakish aspects of culture in the late twentieth century. While reading Freakery, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, one may be surprised to find that freak shows were not all that marginal , especially between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when hundreds of thousands of North Americans and Europeans flocked to examine individuals who were framed by their exhibitors as freaks. Indeed, Freakery suggests that the freak show, especially in America, may have been one of the most important and popular areas of performance during the second half of the nineteenth century. While the material covered in the volume is far-reaching, most of the anthology’s 27 contributors cite two of the main (and only) scholarly books focusing on freaks, Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self [1] and Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit [2], indicating not a lack of originality (the writers cite a variety of other texts, including Baudrillard and Foucault, as well as TV shows and the bizarre 1932 movie Freaks, and both Fiedler and Bogdan are contributors), but the fact that there has been scant scholarly attention paid to freaks. What makes Freakery’s contribution to cultural studies so important is not only its coverage of various types of freakiness—from anthropological exhibits to the commodification of cuteness to Michael Jackson —but its many essays that deconstruct the topics treated in more conventional (yet important) ways by Fiedler, a literary scholar, and Bogdan, a social scientist. In other words, much of Freakery is more conscious of issues raised by contemporary theory than the earlier writings on freaks, and it also covers some new descriptive ground. In the volume’s initial chapter, an essay by Thomson entitled “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” the editor persuasively places the wide-ranging topic of freakery within history by reaching all the way back to ancient times and quickly working her way up to the present in order to show “that the extraordinary body is fundamental to the narratives by which we make sense of ourselves and the world” (p. 1). Thomson adeptly makes connections between modernity and the West’s fascination with the exhibition of freaks, showing numerous examples of how “modernization reconstituted the human body” (p. 11) and led to a desire to examine the bodily “other.” The implications of freak shows within modernity are also examined—in various ways— within several other essays, including “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple.” In this excellent chapter, Lori Merish views America’s consumption of “cuteness” from an historical perspective—according to Merish, “cuteness” begins...