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Title
Media, performative identity, and the new American freak show / Jessica L. Williams.
ISBN
9783319664620 (electronic book)
331966462X (electronic book)
9783319664613
3319664611
Published
Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2017]
Copyright
©2017
Language
English
Description
1 online resource : illustrations
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1007/978-3-319-66462-0 doi
Call Number
GV1835.5
Dewey Decimal Classification
791.10973
Summary
This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates the freak show model into a "new American freak show." It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC's Push Girls (2012-present), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freak show but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory and cultural studies.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Vendor-supplied metadata.
Available in Other Form
Print version: 9783319664613
Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show; Acknowledgements; Contents; List of Figures; Chapter 1 Introduction; The Mediated Freak: Closeness and Farness; Freak as Performative Identity; Chapter Overviews; Chapter 2 A New American Freak Show; Bakhtin, Barnum, and the Exhibition of Human Oddities; The Decline of the Freak Show; Why We Look; How We Look; Chapter 3 Horror Movies, Horror Bodies: Blurring the Freak Body in Cinema; What We Fear in Freaks; Why Horror?; Human Monsters and the Feminization of Disability; Inspiration and Pity in the Disability Drama; Bringing Back Freaks; Chapter 4 Reality, Normality, Sexuality: "Authentic" Portrayals of the Freak; The Freak Body on TLC; Hypersexuality and Gender in Documentary; Murderball; Push Girls; Chapter 5 Freak Pornography and the Cultural Politics of Disabled Sexuality; Disability Pornography; Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist; Chapter 6 Born This Way? Pop Culture's Collision with the Freak of Nature; The Freak of Culture: An Act of Collision Within a Body; The Beautiful People, the Horrible People; "I'm a Freak Bitch, Baby": The Performative Body of Mother Monster; Conclusion: Spooky Kids & Little Monsters: Disseminating the Freak Show; Filmography; References.
