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Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Jessica L. Williams

    1. Department of English, SUNY College at Old Westbury, Westbury, USA

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  • Explores the history of the freak show and how it was transformed through the emergence of media and explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets, and appropriates the freak show model into a “new American freak show”
  • Focuses on what changes in viewing mean, and why and how the viewer stares at freakish bodies through specific media including film, television, and live performance
  • Examines such representations as 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
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  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
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Jessica L. Williams

About the author

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

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