The spectacle of deformity : freak shows and modern British culture / Nadja Durbach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Durbach, Nadja, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Abnormalities, Human--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Abnormalities, Human.

Freak shows--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Freak shows.

Human body--Social aspects--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Human body.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 273 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British-at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Exhibiting Freaks

1 / Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Reexamining "the Elephant Man"

2 / Two Bodies, Two Selves, Two Sexes: Conjoined Twins and "the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy"

3 / The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Evolution, Imperialism, and "Primitive" Sexuality

4 / Aztecs and Earthmen: Declining Civilizations and Dying Races

5 / "When the Cannibal King Began to Talk": Performing Race, Class, and Ethnicity

Conclusion / The Decline of the Freak Show

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612359972

9781282359970

1282359975

9780520944893

0520944895

OCLC:

503092483