Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 1-11

3. A New American Freak Show

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 13-36

4. Horror Movies, Horror Bodies: Blurring the Freak Body in Cinema

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 37-77

5. Reality, Normality, Sexuality: “Authentic” Portrayals of the Freak

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 79-114

6. Freak Pornography and the Cultural Politics of Disabled Sexuality

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 115-136

7. Born This Way? Pop Culture’s Collision with the Freak of Nature

   • Jessica L. Williams

   Pages 137-165

8. Back Matter

   Pages 167-188

   PDF

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.

• Freakish Bodies
• American Freak Show
• Media Representation of Disability
• Spectatorship and Mass Media
• Freak Show Film
• disability on screen
• freakish music videos
• circus on screen
• body politics
• body modification
• Marilyn Manson
• Lady Gaga
• The Elephant Man
• critical race theory
• disability studies
• Performative identity
• the freak body in cinema
• Horror bodies
• Human Monsters
• Feminization of Disability

• Department of English, SUNY College at Old Westbury, Westbury, USA

  Jessica L. Williams

Jessica L. Williams is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at SUNY College at Old Westbury, USA.

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