Strange company: Women, freaks, and others in twentieth-century America.

摘要

Strange Company examines the proliferation of freaks--hybrid beings whose bodies confound meaning and defy categorization--in American literary and visual representations of the twentieth century. Between 1840 and 1940, the "freak" was popularized by carnival sideshows where science and entertainment converged to translate deviant bodies into spectacles for the amusement and education of a paying audience. While the figure of the freak has remained constant, the persons who either adopt or are consigned to this category change along with shifting ideas about national boundaries, gender, race, and physical disability. Contrary to more conventional readings of these bodies as objects of pity or disdain, Strange Company focuses on moments when they allow authors and artists to imagine alternatives to unsatisfying social realities. While most studies of the sideshow and the popular culture it inspired understand the freak as a figure of constraint, held captive by the authoritative explanations of scientists and showmen and objectified by the audience's unfeeling gaze, the literature and visual art considered in this project demonstrates that this was not always the case, for the sideshow often became site of an active exchange that was profoundly transformative for both audience and freak. Each of the artists discussed at length in this study is a woman, for the ongoing objectification of the female body in American culture has made the freak show a meaningful point of identification for women who seek to describe and protest their experiences of gendered inequalities. Readings of the work of Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Diane Arbus, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn highlight moments when freaks new ways of understanding difference and accommodating forms of human variation that extend the more familiar categories of race and gender.