Description
The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of people that scientific and social-scientific discourses increasingly described - and sometimes still describe - as biologically inferior. Although much work has emerged recently about the history of eugenics, this collection highlights the specific ways that modes of exaggerated commercial popular performances create a public conversation that mirrors pathological narratives of human difference that are now firmly established as the categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, beneficial and harmful. This connection between narratives of freakery and normalcy gesture towards a fuller understanding of how eugenic thinking has re-emerged strongly as a force in medical science and cultural thinking aimed at producing the supposed “best” and “most useful” kinds of people.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen INTRODUCTION: “Step Right Up! A New Introduction to the Old Freak Show” by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Michael Mark Chemers, and Analola SantanaI. STAGING1. “Abject Bodies in Performance Art” by Josefina Alcazar. Translated by Analola Santana2. “The Normativity of the Extraordinary: Musical Theatre on the Page and on the Stage” by Stacy Wolf & Ryan Donovan3. “Performance, Pleasure, and Profit at the Victorian Freak Show” by Nadya Durbach4. “Chick Webb's Extraordinary Body of Music” by Meisha Rosenberg5. “The Enfreakment of the Premature Infant: incubator baby shows in the United States” by Susan KattwinkelII. HYBRIDITY 6. “The Tragic Journey of a Mexican Savage to the Civilized World” by Roger Bartra. Translated by Analola Santana7. “Rest in Peace, Charles Byrne?: The Last Testament and Enduring Legacy of the 18th Century 'Irish Giant'” by David A. Gerber8. “Chin Up: Befriending the Bearded Ladies” by Lilian Craton9. “Spectacles of Prognosis: El Niño Fidencio in the 21st Century” by Susan AntebiIII. MONSTROSITY10. “Monstrous Births and the Religious Imagination” by Devan Stahl11. “Human or Alien: Tracing Enfreaked Subjects in the 20th and 21st Century Theatre of Disability” by Danielle Bainbridge12. “The Mortification of Harvey Leach” by Michael Mark ChemersIV. UNSETTLING13. “Freakish Fecundity: Birth and Baby Reality Television as Eugenicist Discourse” by Katya Vrtis14. “Alexandrine: A German Princess with Down Syndrome who Survived the Holocaust” by Robert Bogdan15. “Dead Weight: Exhibiting Fatness Postmortem” by Joyce Huff16. “Disornamentation: An Optic for Reading Depictions of Disabled, Asian Women” by Jenna Gerdsen17. “Sex Mad: Gender and Disability in the Art of Eudora Welty and Reginald Marsh” Keri WatsonV. LEARNING18. “The Pedagogical Utility of Early Freak Show Scholarship” by Cynthia Wu19. “Teaching the Extraordinary Body: A Generation of Freaks and Monsters in the Classroom” by Leonard Cassuto
