Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.)--Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996)

“‘Ugliness is a devil’s grin behind beauty’” (Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, quoted by Elizabeth Grosz)

This book is an edited collection of essays on the history of the freak—the exceptional, monstrous, deviant body—in America.  Its sections cover the cultural construction of freaks, the practices of enfreakment, exhibiting corporeal freaks, exhibiting cultural freaks, textual uses of freaks, and relocations of the freak show.  Thomson characterizes this history as “a movement from a narrative of this marvelous to a narrative of the deviant” (“Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity” 3).  Further, she notes that the “exceptional body betokens something else, becomes revelatory, sustains narrative, exists socially in a realm of hyper-representation” (“Introduction” 3).  Her description evokes Kristeva’s ideas of the abject, as she observes that “the monstrous emerges from culture-bound expectations even as it violates them” (“Introduction” 3). 

Thomson says that the freak show’s structure “fram[ed] and heighten[ed] their differences from viewers, who were rendered comfortably common and safely standard by the exchange” (“Introduction” 3).  Or, in other words, “Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commericialize” (“Introduction” 10).  And in Elizabeth Grosz’s chapter “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” she discusses “the psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human subjectivity, that is, what the nature and forms of subjectivity consist in and the degree to which social, political, and historical factors shape the forms of subjectivity with which we are familiar; and the degree to which these factors are able to tolerate anomalies, ambiguities, and borderline cases, marking the threshold, not of humanity in itself, but of acceptable, tolerable, knowable humanity” (55).   Here’s another result of intersubjective space—the freak acts as an abject, reinforcing the normal.

Jeffrey A Weinstock differentiates between the freak, who is “one of us,” and the monster, who “exists at more of a remove” (“Freaks in Space: ‘Extraterrestrialism’ and ‘Deep Space Multiculturalism’” 328).  Once again, demarcation and boundary reinforcement are highlighted by the freak and the monstrous.  While most of the collection is more ethnographic and sociological presentations of freak culture and the evolution from the carnival freak show to the television daytime talk show,

Debra Gimlin--Body Work: Beauty and Self Image in American Culture (2002)

In this text, Grimlin looks at the ways in which women participate in shaping their bodies in an attempt to meet cultural norms.  Acknowledging in the introduction that such norms are unachievable for most women, she claims that “Women’s bodies are, therefore, by definition, violations of cultural imperatives” (Location 58).  Focusing on four locations where women take active roles in their physical appearance—a beauty salon, an aerobics class, a plastic surgeon’s office, and a political/social organization for fat women—Grimlin claims that these women, rather than simply being “dupes” of cultural power, as she understands Foucault’s descriptions of power to indicate, are in fact consciously repositioning themselves with respect to (as well as resisting) these hegemonic cultural forces (Location 96).  In Gimlin’s sociological approach, she will focus on the significance of social structures such as “group forces, commercial interests, professional considerations, and the structures of communities” (Location 99) in the “body work” these women engage in and undergo.

Ultimately, Gimlin says that she “learned that arenas of body work provide women with the “socially approved vocabularies” that explain their failure to accomplish ideal beauty and thus serve to neutralize the flawed identity that an imperfect body implies in Western society” (Location 156).  Additionally, in all four locations she researched, she discovered that there was a process of either attachment, reattachment or detachment which took place between selfhood/identity and the body.  At the salon, the gym, and the plastic surgeon’s office, women strive to make their bodies match their identity.  Many of them feel as though their current bodies aren’t in alignment with who they “really” are, and use various strategies to correct what Gimlin identifies as “accidents.”  In this way, they learn to reattach their identities to their new bodies.  At NAAFA, on the other hand, they learn partly to detach their identities from their bodies—though their bodies might read as “lazy” or undisciplined, these women learn to accept who they “really are” apart from their bodies. This is ultimately not completely successful; as Gimlin points out, “Meanings of the stigmatized body are clearly difficult to displace because self and body, at least in mainstream American culture, are too closely linked” (Location 1285).

However, other branches of this group instead works to change the meaning of the “deviant” body; encouraging social events with men are sexually attracted to these women, there’s instead a reclaiming of the “sassy, impertinent, disobedient” female body (Location1291).  According to Gimlin, though, these attempts to defy norms are ultimately unsuccessful, and thus “provides empirical evidence for the limits of women’s capacity to negotiate nondeviant identities in light of deviant bodies” (Location 1370).