Rosemarie Garland Thomson is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University.
Summary
Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled.
The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only
commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows
offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common
American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal.
Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's
essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum;
the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and
theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations
of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie
Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant
Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak
show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such
exhibits.
Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture
