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

texts and dominant ideology, one that has been explored by Marxist theory, structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, feminism, and queer studies. By offering a general overview of some of the theoretical frameworks from which disability studies draws its terminology and premises, this section positions disability studies as a recent development within a long tradition of critical examinations of the nature and mechanisms of ideology.

To Karl Marx, the dominant values of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie crystallized into ideology, a cultural foundation to secure the authority of the state within capitalism. The power of ideology over individual lives is emphasized in Antonio Gramsci's conception of cultural hegemony. Gramsci explains that states require a shared, culturally determined matrix of thought and values through which the capitalist power structure gains the consent of those it governs: hegemonic ideas seep into every aspect of human culture to create an intellectual framework that supports the values and power of the dominant class. ³ As applied in contemporary cultural studies, hegemony often refers to dominance of official, normative ideals within a subject's relation to the world and the resulting subjugation of individuality and difference. Marx's concept of reification helps illustrate how a hegemonic culture shapes perceptions of human identity, including the body. Gajo Petrović defines reification as the act “of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent…of man and govern his life,” such as in the Marxian commodity fetish, and also the “transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world” (411). Reification is a form of alienation of humans from aspects of human nature. This alienation, Marx says, is produced by the state's view of workers as human capital rather than autonomous beings and thus is endemic in capitalist society. The blurring of boundaries between thing and person enables the ideological appropriation of the human form, both for amusement and for use by dominant ideology. The transformation of Julia Pastrana's living, thinking, feeling body into a frozen object of spectacle literalizes