125010 PS Proseminar Cultural and Media Studies (2012W)

In this course, we will have a look at the American “Freak Show” tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Freak Shows have a long and rich tradition in the U.S.; the exhibition of “abnormal” and disfigured bodies in “human museums,” dime shows, circuses, and amusement parks was a flourishing business and constituted a central aspect of the popular amusement and entertainment industry. Focusing on representation of ambiguous and disfigured bodies in American literature, film, and photography, we will investigate the cultural work “freaks” perform as metaphors for estrangement, alienation, and sexual deviance. Freak shows, it is generally argued, provided a safe encounter with the Other, as they established a clear distance between audience and spectacle through the exposure of the freak to the audience’s objectifying gaze. The freakish body, it has often been suggested, serves as a trope for racial otherness, sexual deviance, gender ambiguity, or physical disability, allowing the audience to cope with pervasive fears and anxieties about race, sexuality, or disfigurement.
Focusing on ambiguous genders and queer sexualities, we will investigate embodied deviance and analyze how and why certain bodies were seen as threatening to modern American society. Our primary material includes the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) by Carson McCullers, the short story "Good Country People" (1955) by Flannery O'Connor, the film Freaks (1932) by Tod Browning, and late 19th century lithography and photography (Currier and Ives, Charles Eisenmann, Mathew Brady et al.). The discussion of the primary material will be preceded by an introduction to body and gender theories and a discussion of the cultural history of the "freak," which will provide us with the tools to critically analyze the visual representation of embodied deviance.