The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction
Powered By Xquantum

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

Chapter :  Introduction
Read
image Next

explains, “By its very presence, the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation. The unexpected body fires rich, if anxious, narratives and practices that probe the contours and boundaries of what we take to be human” (Freakery 1). Garland-Thomson builds upon the work of Leslie Fiedler and Robert Bogdan, whose writings of the 1970s and 1980s attend to the aesthetic and ideological nature of the freak show in Western culture and founded the line of inquiry Garland-Thomson refers to as freaks studies. She continues:

Although extraordinary bodily forms have always been acknowledged as atypical, the cultural resonances accorded them arise from the historical and intellectual moments in which these bodies are embedded. Because such bodies are rare, unique, material, and confounding of cultural categories, they function as magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment. Like the bodies of females and slaves, the monstrous body exists in societies to be exploited for someone else's purposes. Thus, singular bodies become politicized when culture maps its concerns upon them as meditations on individual as well as national values, identity, and direction. (Freakery 2)

By “mapping” its concerns onto the unusual body, a society strengthens its sense of control. The unusual body is defined by the ideology of its historical moment, but also serves as a tool in the definition of that ideology by facilitating discussion and negotiation of key ideological terms. While this appropriation of the body is certainly a form of exploitation, it also confers an important role for physical difference within normative culture itself.

Disability studies and “freaks studies” view imagery of physical difference as fundamentally embroiled in the ideological work of culture. Each cultural moment has its own ideals for the body that are illustrated through its portrayal of difference, but odd bodies are also defined by and carry implications for other ideological debates like social class and gender. Thus images of the unusual body in circulation within a culture, like any form of text, can be read for their role in these ideological negotiations. This premise depends on a theoretical relationship between cultural