The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

take. Garland-Thomson theorizes the range of distinct visual relationships that a spectator, the “starer,” may form with an unusually bodied person, the “staree.” The starer may reject the image of difference by looking away, or may simply remain transfixed, but he or she may also engage with the image as an opportunity for intellectual and ideological reflection. She describes the motive of engaged staring:

In other words, an engaged starer is open to learning from difference.

The idea that distorted and disconcerting images of the body can be ideologically productive comes to disability studies largely through the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. A staunch populist, Bakhtin argues for the dialogic nature of the novel in light of fiction's incorporation of a range of different voices. Meaning and ideology within the novel are not articulated in a unified authorial voice, but in the words and perspectives of its characters, emerging as a multi-vocal dialogue akin to the chatter in a crowded street. Even at the linguistic level, words get their meaning from layers of personal and historical usage that cannot be fully subordinated to the intentions of a single author. Bakhtin's attention to images of the body lies in his discussion of the grotesque aesthetic as it appeared in pre-modern folk carnivals, and gradually evolved as a literary genre. For Bakhtin, the grotesque promotes regenerative ideological exchange. In Rabelais and His World, a study of European folk cultures and of Renaissance novelist Françoise Rabelais, Bakhtin traces the ways in which values and ideals are redefined as they become the playthings of popular entertainment. For Bakhtin, the pre-modern carnival was an opportunity for collective cultural revision and regeneration: the laughter, feasting, and grotesque imagery of carnival lowered high culture